My Portugal Experience As A Canadian
My (50m) partner (52F) and I traveled to Portugal from Halifax NS last week for a (too short) 5 night, 6 day getaway. I'm going to try and summarize some tips to help future travelers.
- when arriving at the airport it's a bit chaotic, and the electronic passport scanner might "crash" and reboot. In all though, getting through that line and security to the luggage carousel only took about 15 minutes. We arrived direct at 9:50pm.
- we booked an Uber to bring us to our AirBnB and the rideshare pickup location is absolute chaos as well. Take a breath, because it looks overwhelming. Your Uber/Bolt driver will tell which space they're parked in. If you're facing the outside of the airport when exiting security, the rideshare pickup location is all the way to the left.
- we stayed at an AirBnB at Rua de S. Paulo 55, literally steps away from pink street. This location was very clutch as we were within walking distance of all the action. If you're noise adverse, I'd recommend staying a bit further out. Pink Street parties until 5-6am in the morning.... everyday.
- be prepared to be offered every drug possible, nearly everywhere that you go. If that's your thing, just be careful. Not our thing and saying no, the dealers move on. I did not feel unsafe at any point, but I'm a fairly big guy lol.
- we pre-booked a 90 minute Tuk-Tuk tour for our first day and a 2 hour sunset boat cruise later that same day. Our thinking was that it would give a good lay of the land for the few days. The TukTuk tour was great and he stopped to let us take some really nice photos and gave great explanations. The Wine Boat Cruise was was also nice, mostly because it was free wine for 2 hours hahaha.
- the Food in Portugal is great (in my opinion) and restaurant prices are cheaper than here in Canada. You'll quickly lose that benefit based on the Euro exchange rate. Here's a Pro-tip to save a bit of money. Never tap your card on the portable machine brought to your table. This defaults to charging you in CAD and does the conversion locally. Insert your card and choose "pay in Euros". This forces your canadian bank (or credit card) to do the conversion which is typically 2-3% lower. A typical supper for 2 with a bottle of wine cost us about $75, which is approximately $125CAD. We did choose some much cheaper options at times, but Vacation meals tend to be a bit free-spirted lol. One more thing, when you're walking through a row of restaurants, their servers will try their best to get you eat there. They'll have their menus in hand, somewhat forcing you to view their options. It's not aggressive, but slightly annoying. Especially if you've just eaten out not hungry at all.
- we took a 2 night, 2 days trip down to Albufeira and I highly recommend exploring outside of Lisbon's core. Albufeira is absolutely stunning. On our last full day, we also took the train from Lisbon to Cascais, which is also incredibly beautiful. Public transportation is very efficient and safe. We also took a bus ride at one point. Bus have credit card "tap", trains you have to purchase a ticket at the station. The bus was about 2€ and the 40 minute train ride was 3.40€.
- I only brought 50€ in cash with me, for small purchases and to hassle for souvenirs. In hindsight, I wish I would've brought around 150€. Pretty much everywhere takes card, but cash for tips, and some small meals/snacks comes in handy. There are ATMs literally everywhere. Millineum BCP is the ATM I trusted he most.
I'm sure there's more, but this is a lot to read if you've made it this far lol. I would absolutely go back to Portugal. The only thing I'd do different is that I'd stay in Lisbon for the day in and the day out. In between, I'd travel around to different areas.
In terms of the experience at the airport when leaving, here's my post on that experience.