A Beautiful Day of Discovery....

This afternoon Axel dropped the boys and me off on the main square of Central Lisbon.  And two minutes later I realised that I had left my mobile phone (with Lisa and Axel's phone number) in the centre console of his car.  Oops.

It was hot.  It was extremely hot.  And still.  And hot (oops, did I say that already?).  So the boys and I set off to find an internet cafe.  My inability to understand the most basic of Portugese really emphasises to me how much of the French language I could speak and understand.  Here, I feel much the same as I did in China.  It's almost impossible to guess words and phrases and equally impossible to make myself understood.

We found an internet cafe and looked up Lisa's phone number (inaccurate as it turned out) and street address.  Crisis one averted.

And then the boys lost it. Too hot. Too spoiled by lazy days of Playstation 3 and late afternoon swims and a complete rest from being a "tourist". And so I lost it too. And so, in that mood, we set off to climb up to the Castle.

The view from the top was as spectacular as it was when I was last here..... 17 or so years ago.  The rest of the city has changed phenomenally.  It is barely recognisable.  Gone is the sleepy, elegant city of my memory.... gone are the old men playing chess in the midday shade (of course they might still exist a few streets away from where we walked.  I hope.).  It has been replaced with hustle and bustle and noise and pollution and commercialism.  This is understandable and to be expected, but still it saddened me.

Still, it is a beautiful city.... and we rode on a trolley car for 45 minutes..... up and down hills and jerkily around sharp corners ..... soaking in the sunshine and the scenery ...... before catching a taxi back to the city centre for a late lunch.

Travelling back to Lisa and Axel's home was a challenge.  Finding the train station was not so difficult, but finding the correct train and tickets proved to be a challenge.  Finding a working public telephone booth tested my patience to its' utmost limits and then finding a completely unmarked taxi rank almost pushed me over the edge.

Still, we did it!  And 8 hours after we were dropped off over an hour's drive away, we rang the doorbell and returned to our wonderful sanctuary.  Where we swam and relaxed and enjoyed a leisurely late evening meal before falling into our soft pillows and dreaming of all our adventures so far.