Protests

I caught the train back to Lisbon where I had found some vaguely affordable lodgings close to the gritty and centrally located Praça Martim Moniz. Lisbon has undergone a tourist boom in the last several years, and today there were demonstrations about the soaring cost of living and rents in Lisbon. I read that around half of Portuguese earn no more than 1,000 Euros per month. This makes living in central Lisbon virtually impossible. The protests are entirely justified based on the gulf between costs in the city and what the average person can afford. As a contributor to the tourist economy, I watched from the sidelines as the protest passed by.