Where To Begin?

So much to write about, I am not at all sure where to begin. I suppose I will go chronologically- so off to Portugal I went. We had to catch the butt-early Stanstead Express from Liverpool Station. Thought we were being all good by calling the minicab for a 4am pickup. The guy came to get us and is like, 'Oh, you can't drive to the station, the road is closed' and then tries to charge us crazy money to drive us to Stanstead. SH starts freaking out but I was like, 'Dude, how close can you get us then, we can walk.' So he ended up dropping us off at the road that leads to Spittlefields. Not that far a walk, and way too much headache and panic at 4am. But we got our tickets and we were off to the plane.

At Stanstead, SH got pulled out of line because her bag was too heavy to be a carry-on and they made her check it. This pissed her off no end so after crazy cabby, the day was developing in an unfortunate fashion. Then, every Portuguese and their twelve children seemed to be on our flight. I don't blame them seeing as how it only cost £3.15 before tax (have I mentioned that our roudtrip airfare to and from Porto was only £38 each including taxes?). So we were in the second RyanAir boarding group. SH gets agitated that we won't get good seats but I say we can rush the next group and skip a bunch of people. And as it turned out, our seats were fine.

The flight was generally uneventful. I panicked a little bit, but SH talked to me and it was only two hours and then over. We pick up her bag no problem (mine was okay as a carry-on) and try to find information so we can figure out how to get to the train to Lisbon. Eventually we find someone who says the best way is a taxi, so we tell him the train station we want, and off we go. We ended up at a train station that seemed as though it was in the middle of no-where, and an extremely unhelpful woman who only spoke Portuguese and didn't seem at all interested in finding out what exactly we wanted. We finally managed to get her attention enough to book our tickets and after a less than thrilling snack, we were on the train and headed to Lisbon. It was over a three hour train ride, but the seats were generally comfortable. Of course our spirits sank as we passed through areas of snow. The Portuguese didn't know what to make of the snow and were exclaiming excitedly and snapping pictures on their camara phones. Meanwhile we were less than thrilled, having expected the weather to be warmer than London, not fucking snowing!!

We got into Lisbon and got a taxi to our hotel which was pretty much a pit. Feeling somewhat disgruntled with the travel and stress and weather, we decided to go to the tile museum. Which was good. And then we looked at a couple of churches, which turned out okay. And then we had a fantastic dinner around the corner from our hotel, so all in all, the trip may have started rocky, but was on it's way up.

The next day the sun was shining and we were all over Lisbon like chocolate pudding on a toddler. Highlights of our trip started to form. Continual infatuation and amusement that Portuguese sounds an awful lot like some Eastern European backwater language led to us coming up with every Russian word we could think of and saying 'Da' all the time. And secondly, our ongoing fascination with 'dropping the brown kids off at the pool' or the lack of our ability to drop any brown kids off at the pool became a common topic of discussion.

That night, I had one of the top five meals of my life at this restaurant called Oliviers. It was so amazing I could bore you to tears by describing each one of the ten courses, but I won't. Suffice to say, if anyone ever goes to Lisbon and doesn't eat at Oliviers, then you have simply wasted your entire trip.

So Lisbon was good. And then we picked up the car. But that will have to be the next installment. For now I leave you with a picture from the Elevador something or other towards the Castello, in Lisbon.