And now, a break from nautical. How about Portugal?

It’s Thursday morning and Brenda and I are here in Lisbon where we will be exploring Portugal for the next month.  For now you will have indulge me with a smattering of nautical posts but mostly writing about this trip.  I hope it’s fun for you as I am pretty confident that it will be fun for us.  Who knows, perhaps Pandora will be here in a few years.

Anyway, enough dreaming for now.  Back to here and now.  

When we flew over here yesterday I have to say that I discovered that I am not quite the world traveler that some of my friends are.  Actually, perhaps I am a really good traveler as it seems that I didn’t want to miss a single minute on the 300 hour flight so I stayed awake the ENTIRE TIME…

As you can imagine, I was POOPED when we got to our apartment in the old quarter, perhaps one of many old quarters in Lisbon, here yesterday. We had big ideas of taking a nap and then going out to eat a fashionably late dinner.  HA!

Yes, Brenda took a nap but I wasn’t quite ready to sleep so I did a bit of exploring of the neighborhood.  Actually, I went out looking for wine and cheese.  Success! And, imagine this, each of the shopkeepers spoke English.  That’s good.  Can you say “local wine” in Portuguese?  I can’t.

Next step, wake Brenda up from her nap and have some wine and cheese as an appetizer.  Now wait, after NO SLEEP for the last 24 hours…   Here’s an idea…  Let’s call wine and cheese dinner and then SLEEEEP…

Well, now it’s 08:00 and the sun is up with broken clouds and it’s a beautiful day!

Today?  Well, I don’t know as Brenda’s in charge and she’s still in the shower.  I don’t know what her plans are except that we will be here in Lisbon in this apartment for about 4 days and then we will take a train to well, somewhere else.

For now, perhaps I’ll put a few photos of our “neighborhood” here.  What a beautiful place.  The airport is very modern but oddly, the signs are all in Portuguese.  I thought that everyone put signs up in English and Spanish, just like in the US.  Well, you learn something new every day.  Here, the signs are first in Portuguese and THEN in English.

Our apartment is a very cute little, with the emphasis on LITTLE, efficiency apartment.  Well, it’s so efficient that you have to walk out into the kitchen to make it from one side of the bed to the other.  I will say that in spite of the fact that the buildings in the neighborhood are hundreds of years old, the inside of the apartment is very modern and quite European chic.  Little, but chic.

Here’s a view of the front of our apartment from out on the patio, yes the patio…  Very nice.The patio also has a view of a beautiful cathedral nearby.  It’s absolutely enormous.  Notice the wine and cheese in the foreground.  No, make that our dinner!  Remember, tired…?The streets are impossibly narrow.  This is a view of the end of the street leading to the two stories of steps up to our apartment.  I wonder how you reserve a parking spot?  Answer…You don’t!The buildings and the nearby streets are very beautiful and really steep.  Ever heard of Portuguese masons?  I hadn’t thought about it but I guess that they are pretty good at what they do.  Some of the buildings are completely faced with glazed tiles.  Amazing. As I write this I am sitting at a little table here on the patio and about the only sound I hear is the conversation of others in their apartments surrounding the courtyard and the fluttering of flocks of pigeons flying from terracotta rooftop to rooftop.  Don’t worry about me eavesdropping as my hearing is terrible and I DON’T SPEAK PORTUGUESE.  Very peaceful.  

However, enough of peaceful, I WANT BREAKFAST.  What do the Portuguese eat for breakfast? I believe that coffee is part of that.  Yes, a cup of coffee will set the day straight.

More to come…