26.2.15

Travel Diary // Palacio de Seteais - Hotel Tivoli


Wow.

Those are the only words that I have for this hotel. It was a five star, beautiful and authentic palace. Brent mini surprised me with this overnight stay and boy am I glad he did. 


The palace was built in 1783 and 1787 for a Dutch consul. It was filled with elegance and class and I have to admit I felt a little out of place. I always feel like because we're so young, we aren't entitled to the goodness of these delights. It's silly I know but as outgoing and loud as I may be, in certain situations I can feel so quiet and small, haha hopefully a habit I lose with time. 


Walking around the beautiful grounds we found an amazing view of the serra (the mountains) and found a pretty cool maze made of shrubs. Inside, there were paintings and gold covered things everywhere. The walls had all sorts of painting of mythical creatures and exotic plants. It looked like tacky wallpaper but not tacky, if that makes any sense? Knowing that it was painted way back when, by some French artist was pretty neat. Brent and I are pretty geeky when it comes to this stuff. We just love the history that all of these places hold, we geek out hard. If we could have a super power every time we come to Europe, it would be the ability to touch something and see its history. How cool would that be? Like hey, lets touch this wall and BOOM you see a king and queen in that room doing things that kings and queens do. Ha! I'm inappropriate. 



// our view //


Guys, our room was something else holy crap. We had a beautiful queen sized bed with our windows facing the view of the Palacio da Pena and Castelo dos Mouros high up on the mountain and we even had our own TERRACE! I swear we had the best room in the whole palace, we were so spoiled. 


We had dinner in town though because with a five star hotel comes a five star restaurant and we are not fancy 28 euros Duck eaters lol so instead we found a really cute indian/italian (don't ask) restaurant where we had pizza and delicious butter chicken for dinner. Our waiter was so friendly and kind, I spent most of the time talking to him since Brent has the whole speaking portuguese problem and at the end of the night our waiter gave us a free desert. It was a traditional indian treat, we kindly took a bite but it just wasn't our cup of tea... so we hid it in my take out bag haha. At least we tried right? 


Breakfast came included and god, it was unreal. In Canada and the US, we're used to those crappy continental breakfasts... OH NO, not here. We had a huge buffet of fancy foods. We had all different kinds of cheeses and cold cuts, a huge variety of fruits, cereals and yogurts and an UNREAL spread of pastries. Brent and I did not hold back, we stuffed our faces and loved it.


All in all our trip to Sintra and our stay at the Palace was a success. It was beautiful, relaxing and exactly what we needed. In the future we will definitely go back! 

xo  



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