Its been awhile!  Mainly because Friday was a crazy day up until leaving for Portugal for the weekend...also the last weekend before I need to move out of my apartment :(   So on Friday I got up early to stop at the office here for a bit, then I attempted to find the place where Frank wanted me to pick up some brochures.  Since I had to be in La plaza de España to meet for our trip departure at 1:45, I was a little worried about not making it back in time!  It turned out taking metro to the place was wayyyy simpler and quicker, so thats what I went for.  Also, this place was definitely in the ghettos of Madrid...haha.  But once I got everything, I headed off to the metro to go back with the box of brochures (which turned out to be an outrageosuly gigantic box...haha) and carried it around the metro while trying to avoid the strange looks people were giving me for lugging a random box onto the train...this box is currently sitting in my apartment, because I didn't have time to drop it off at forocio....still haven't decide how I'm bringing it to the office because there's no way I'm carrying the thing for 10 minutes straight in my walk from the apartment to work, so now I just have a rando oversized box sitting on my desk...FAIL.   Fortunately I had packed my suitcase in advance, so I made a quick lunch, grabbed my things and headed off to La Plaza de España to meet with the group to head to Lisbon!  We made two stops (one for 30 minutes and one for 45 minutes) in our 6 hour trip...Spaniards like their rest...haha....and got to Lisbon around 10 at night.  The three of us Forocio workers were originially supposed to have a separate hostel because they overbooked the trip by 3 people, but we got lucky and got a room for three people at the same exact hostel!  At night, we went further into the city center, which was absolutely beautiful, and by the end of the night we ended up in a McDonalds at 1 am because we were dying of hunger!   On Saturday, we got up bright and early and then had a tour of Lisbon at 10am which lasted four hours!  With the heat, we were definitely ready to get back to the hostel when the tour was over.  We ended up sleeping until we left for the beach about an hour later (another place I wish I had taken more pictures of!) The temperature there was perfect, and it was really nice to get a break from the heat.  We headed back to the hostel around 8, and left to get dinner at 10...afterwards we headed to a discoteca, and got the taxi (CRAZY taxi driver) back later that night.   On Sunday, we packed our bags in the bus at morning and headed off to another area of Lisbon...it was interesting to see, but at this point we were all quite tired!  We ended up asking our guide, David, if we could leave an hour earlier, which we did, and pretty much everyone crashed on the bus ride back.  Traffic was a little crowded on the way back getting into Madrid, so we didn't arrive back until a little after 11pm, but it was definitely earlier than we expected!  It felt really good to get a good night of sleep last night   Now I've got less than a week left in Madrid, and I don't feel anywhere near ready to leave!  I'm also starting to realize that the fact I'm surrounded by so many people that speak broken English is really starting to affect the quality of the English I speak...pretty sure I mentioned that in the blog last time, but now that I'm especially tired from the weekend, I'm really noticing it!!! ahhhhh...NO BUENO