Arrival in Belem, Lisbon

Hang on to your magic carpet! We're heading off on another adventure to Portugal. This time we're going for two months. Can you imagine that? Two months. That seems both incredibly long and much too short. This time we're staying the entire time, almost, in Lisbon. We want to get to know two totally different neighborhoods in Lisbon. I chose Belem and Avenidas Novas. Belem is a riverfront neighborhood. It's famous for its pastries and its fancy homes. We rented a house on the river overlooking a big park for one month. On Feb 13th we'll transfer ourselves to a community up in the hills north of the city center… Avenidas Novas—the New Avenues. It was built recently, like a hundred years ago. This is where we stayed last time, and we loved it. There's tons of parks and cafes. We are staying with a couple of guys who rent out a room to Airbnb. They're both really in to working out, so Joe's hopeful to go to a gym with them.

Our goal this trip is to see if this is someplace we could live. We are going to find a pool to swim laps and a church in each neighborhood. We've got a couple of places picked out, so we'll see. We're going to go on two mini vacations while we're there. The first month we are going over to Cascais—about a thirty-minute train ride west from Belem. Cascais is very popular with the ex-pat crowd. We thought we should go see what that's like. The next mini vacation is Setubal. That's about an hour south of Lisbon. Setubal is a large fishing city. It's very popular with Portuguese vacationers.

Right now we're somewhere over America I think. Flying TapAir is its own kind of adventure. We've learned to bring food because they don't feed you much. I froze a couple of baggies of turkey and threw them in my carry-on. Good thing because my meal was perfect for a carb lover. I did get some beef, mashed potatoes, and string-beans. Joe ate my bread and dessert for me… so sacrificial. I also learned from our last flight on TapAir that they don't serve wine between the meals (dinner and breakfast for a 10.5 hour flight). This time I asked for a second glass of wine and just let it sit there until I felt like drinking it… pretty smart huh? 

Breakfast was this big roll loaded with meat and cheese;) Another thing I find incredibly odd is this plane doesn't have personal fans above the seats. The air seems to be moving in general, but I tend to run pretty warm and keep my fan directly on me the entire flight. I brought a hand-held fan this time, thank goodness. I have to admit that I don't feel as dried out as usual though.

Two months is too long to leave our cat to my neighbors care, so we have someone staying at our house this time to pet and feed Loca. I'm sure she will be completely spoiled by the time we get home and probably weigh twice as much! Oh well, at least she'll be happy.

Good morning peeps, we dragged our butts through yesterday. Not sure why, but neither of us slept on the plane—at all. The first thing we did when we got through customs (short and sweet this time) was get coffees and split a tiny pastry. Lisbon has a pretty snazzy airport. Anyway, we went downstairs to fetch my suitcase and walked out to the taxi stand. A good-looking young man drove us to Belem and gave us a rundown on everything including his career plans to be a personal trainer. When he stopped in front of our home, after twenty-minutes, he showed us the charge… 21.75 Euros. But then he says, "Twenty is enough." We argued with him and he ended up accepting 21 E. Not an argument we normally have with a cab driver!

Our place is on the third and fourth floors facing a cobblestone alley going to the park, which faces the river. An adorable elderly lady came downstairs from her apartment and waved us up the steep steps. She's our neighbor. Our first plan of action was getting groceries. Easier said than done. The actual grocery store is uphill and we were exhausted, plus it was sprinkling. We got our stuff back to the house and forced ourselves to go out. I was afraid I'd take a nap and not wake up until one in the morning.

The big park in front of our place is separated from the river's edge by a huge fence and a train track. The beautiful Belem monument was tantalizingly close. We finally found a tunnel going to the riverside. We wandered along the riverfront for a couple of hours and found an amazing castle. It was so beautiful and unexpected.

We stopped to have a glass of wine and a beer because my legs were getting wobbly with fatigue. Joe said it was the first time he'd ever seen me falling asleep at a restaurant! We finished the night with burgers and fries and slept like babies until about four in the morning. Not a bad first day.