Tagus Park

During our stay in Lisbon we visited a science and technology park named Tagus Park. Tagus Park has a wide variety of businesses, ranging from start-up businesses to the Portugal headquarters of Microsoft. During our tour of Microsoft we visited the language department, which is not translating between languages like I first thought, but working with computers to make them recognize language and be able to interact with the user. One example of this that they showed us was interactive email where you could take to the computer and tell them who you wished to send the email to and could even speak the content of the message to the computer. It was all new to us but they said that they have been using it in the Microsoft for years (although it is not yet on the market) and it is considered old to them now.

Later that night a group of us went out to a place in Lison known as "Bairro Alto". This translates to "High Bar". We soon learned why it was called that when we found ourselves climbing up probably 20 flights of stairs just to get to the top where the area of bars is. Once there though it was completely different from what we experience in the United States. People were drinking on the streets, dancing, and there were kids there who looked like they were 12. It was a lot of fun though and we went bar hopping at first and then found one bar we liked where I told the DJ that if he kept playing American music we would stay so we stayed there for the duration of the night. It was a fun night.