Cascais, Caparica, Coaches, and Quakes

It's been a busy week. We were in Cascais and decided to head back down to the waterfront. There was certainly nothing to do anywhere around our Airbnb. We arrived to a big ceremony at the main square. A bunch of police cars were lined up with these gorgeous policemen (I think it's a job requirement in Portugal for police officers to be extremely good looking). 

A group of well dressed people, and a large group of military and policemen in splendid uniforms, stood around a distinguished looking man in a suit wearing a red tie. He must be the president of Portugal! Nope. He was the mayor. I snuck through the crowd to get a look at what was going to be presented. It looked like awards of some sort. I got a picture and zoomed it only to find it was car keys to the five new cop cars. Pomp and Circumstance.

Cascais loves their pets. I'll have to do a blog just on all the pets here. It's a parade of dogs down along the beach promenade. We enjoyed sitting at one of the many cafes to watch. 

You remember me telling you how the Portuguese follow the rules and are polite? We stopped at a public bathroom down by the beach. Usually you have to pay to use those bathrooms. This one had the employee table in front, but no employee. I noticed that people went up to the table and laid down the fee on the table! There was a little pile of coins sitting there… can you imagine? I felt very patriotic as I put our coins in the pile.

Joe would've taken pictures too, but for some reason his phone locked him out and wanted his sim card PIN, which was back in Belem. He wasn't happy. When we got back, I sent the PIN to our text and to our emails, so now we have the numbers available from multiple places.

So, we came back from Cascais last weekend. This time I got pinched in the train doors. Naturally Joe was on the inside watching as I battled to get my backpack though the doors. I couldn't reach the button to open the door at first, but I finally got it to open. I staggered in and glared at Joe, who was cracking up. We got back to Belem to find a protest in the park next to our Airbnb. The park was absolutely packed. From what I could translate, the signs implied some sort of educator's protest. The thing that caught my attention was no one was on the grass. They all stayed on the many pathways and the center part where the fountain is. So polite.

Sunday we went to church again—St. Andrews Church of Scotland. We already fit in there. The people are so nice, but there's only about 25-30 of us. During the service I noticed Pastor Norman suddenly had his hand to his throat. I watched carefully. I realized he was fiddling with his white collar… you know, that white thing that goes around their necks where a tie would be. I could see skin. Afterwards, when we came out, he was trying to fix it in the foyer. Apparently the top button had popped off during the sermon! We all trooped down the yard steps to the garden and rec room for our snacks.

A boy came directly up to us and said, "Hi, I'm Steven from Lebanon." A girl skipped up to his side and said, "I'm Favor. I'm from Peru." Then they dashed off to play with the newest toy—a stand-up punching bag. Steven's older sister ended up being chased around by Steven as he whacked her with the detached punching bag. Favor had on the punching gloves so she followed to try and rescue the sister. A man standing near me said, "They come from a country in a civil-war. Maybe they're just acting it out." The Peruvian grandmother sat against the wall in her traditional outfit and watched. I went to her side (with my cup of box wine). It seemed safer.

Back in Belem we got off the tram by our place to see the park was full of families. One of the things I love the most about Portuguese is their family values. Here it was; cold, windy, and getting dark and the playground was packed. The little ones were all bundled up like the little boy on A Christmas Story.

We decided we must go to one of the million museums in Belem/Lisbon. I narrowed it down to the Coches Museum. This place has a huge collection of horse-drawn carriages. It was interesting to see the progression of style over time. I was most interested in the wall of paintings of every king dating back to 1143. There was a description of each epoch written in snarky humor… I loved it!

I've started another novel, which is why I haven't written my blog as much. This novel starts in the mid 1700's and ends up in Portugal, of course. I needed to have a catalytic event, so I chose the Great Earthquake of 1755. As I was researching this quake, I stumbled across the Quake Museum. It's only a five minute walk from our place. We went last night and, wow! It's a completely interactive museum and the room where you sit in the church pews (the quake took place at nine in the morning on November first—All Saints Day) is set up for the 9.0 shake. It starts with the calm Catholic service and then suddenly all hell breaks loose. The pews we were in shook hard! The walls came tumbling down around us (a video playing on the walls). Talk about an adrenaline rush. The cool thing was they had these stations throughout the museum where you could hold your electronic bracelet to have more information sent to your email address to peruse later in more detail whatever it was that interested you. (That was a long sentence.)

We took the ferry over to Costa da Caparica again. This time it was sunny. I'd been doing a lot of basic searches for condos to rent for long-term. This area is inexpensive and has beaches stretching as far as the eye can see. It's definitely pretty. We loved the surfer-vibe, but… I don't know… it just didn't seem like enough of the culture we're wanting to be part of. We still like Carcavelos.

We head up to Lisbon's Alameda Park area on Monday for our last month here. During that time we'll head over to another beach town called Setubal for a weekend. I'm going to miss our pool. I'd just started to be a familiar face to the ladies in the locker room. Hopefully we'll be able to find another pool by our next place. It'll be strange to be staying with a couple in their house. I don't know if it'll be good or bad. Shrug.