3rd Leg Completed!

BA lounge, robot cappuccino, Schweppes Bitter Lemon, biscuits, savory dishes, view of planes.

Yesterday in Lisbon was a good transition day--insane numbers of people, but the native language was still Portuguese. We stayed in a mod hotel in Baixa, close to the train, the center of town, restaurants, and two tile stores that we visited.

We took the train to Cascaís, the end of the line, to do some recon for Mom and Marsh, who are going to be staying there for several weeks at the end the summer (they'll love it; I'm not sure they'll come back), stopping in Belém for our breakfast pastéis, and eating lunch (the plate of the day, which included green pea soup, delicious braised pork loin, and a miniature mousse) on a romantic arched balcony overlooking the beach in the small cove.

We were dizzy and goofy with exhaustion by this time, and back at our hotel found that our room was ready and our bags had been carried up for us. I was particularly grateful for this because they are quite heavy (lots of grogue), and utterly filthy. I hadn't realized what vagrants we looked like until we had hauled ourselves into the dim, tony interior of the hotel lobby that morning. We laughed with the tiny young woman behind the desk about moving our belongings--the hotel is not large, and does not seem have a cart. Our room did end up being the absolute closest one to the elevator, however ;-).

After coma-like naps, we hauled ourselves back out into the teeming rush-hour streets of Lisbon to shop for tiles for our upcoming Orcas home, thus transitioning a little more into real life. We didn't buy any, but we chose an option we like a lot, and I'll buy the appropriate number when I go to visit Mom and Marsh in September.

We ate dinner--choriço grilled in a clay brazier over an exuberant grain-alcohol flame; olives; grilled goat-cheese sandwiches drizzled with honey; open-faced prosciutto (it was a very porky day) and cheese toasts; and cold draught beer served in terra cotta tumblers beaded with condensation--sitting in an open window on a narrow street near our hotel. It was a lot of salt, meat, and cheese, and it was delicious.

Glasses of port back in the hotel finished us for the night. We slept, arose, and got back on a plane.

Next stop: HOME.

one-fingered on my phone