Lisbon in the rain!

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Today has been a long day already and it's only 6pm. Our alarms went off at 3am, so we were up and ready for the taxi at 3.15am. We checked out the hotel fine and got the taxi across to Terminal 2. When we arrived we found that our flight was one of three leaving at 6am which were the first of the day. We had already checked in on our phones and queued up waiting for the bag drop to open. We dropped our bags off then queued up waiting for security to actually open! It's a standing joke that one of us normally gets searched, the last few times it's been me although nothing can be as bad as the incident at Gatwick when going through to New Zealand. My bag got swiped with the pad thing which normally tests for drugs but when it went in the machine all the alarms went off, the manager got called and I was informed in front of all the other waiting passengers my bag had tested positive for explosives! I was mortified and seriously thought I was going to be walked off for a strip search but luckily after a load of questions I was allowed through fine. Turns it after some research it was probably something to do with the bottle of sunscreen spray that had leaked all over it the year before! However this time neither of us got searched and we went through fine, after being held up by the usual people who deny all knowledge of the liquids in their bag or start searching right at the last minute holding everyone up.



All the shops were shut the other side of security apart from a coffee shop which is where Steph had her first breakfast of the day! I wasn't hungry, was too tired and in my usual stressed self at the airport! We then went through to the gate and waited for boarding, where upon the check in guy announcing the plane was ready to board Steph shot up and bolted to the queue leaving me behind which she didn't notice until about ten mins later when I wasn't behind her. The plane wasn't full as we sat in a row of three for just the two of us, there was also loads of leg room as we were in the emergency exit aisle. We also got woken up to be given a free breakfast of activia, a cheese sandwich and some cute plane shaped jelly sweets which was a nice surprise as being on the cheapo ticket we thought we had no food included. The plane landed on time and we got the airport shuttle to the closest stop to our hotel. The shuttle bus even had sub charging points available throughout which was impressive! Once we got to the hotel we managed to blag an early checkin at the hotel at 10.30 which I think is a record! It was nice to dump the bags off and get rid of the weight! Never mind training for the trek I should have been doing some weight lifting in advance of carrying my bloody backpack!



We headed out of the hotel and walked to the centre of Lisbon and spent the next few hours walking around. We got the tram to Belem to buy some of the famous Pasteils which are a Portuguese custard tart. They were very yummy especially when warm. We saw the replica Golden Gate Bridge which they have in Lisbon and their version of Christ The Redeemer which is small and called Christ The King. We had lunch at a cafe where Steph ordered what she thought was a cheese toastie! It turned out it was crostini with some sort of smelly dairylea type gooey cold cheese. Her face was a picture when they brought it out! I had bruschetta with sardines which was yummy! We then went to visit the famous Santa Justa lift (yeah we hadn't heard of it either but stumbled across it!). It looked pretty cool and was built in the early 1900's to enable people to get up to another higher area of the city. I thought it would be a good test for my fear of heights as there is a viewing platform, however when we were in the queue it started really heavily raining and we were getting soaked. The queue wasn't moving so in the end we jumped out of the queue and into an Uber instead back to the hotel. The Uber driver spoke good English and was chatting to us about his time living in London and then started asking us about Brexit. Steph was very diplomatic and then he started saying he disagreed and that we were letting too many immigrants in and Londoners were always protesting about it when he lived there! At this point we changed the subject and he started telling us to be very careful In Rio saying it was crime ridden and loads of people get mugged. We've heard about the dangers so will be very careful but the more you hear it the more scary it seems!



By the time we got back to the hotel it was still pretty early about 4pm but we were getting really tired by this point so decided to have a bit of a rest before deciding what to do for the rest of the night. After baths to soothe our aching shoulder and back muscles (I swear I'm hurting in muscles I never knew existed!), we couldn't pass up on the 6pm-8pm happy hour at the bar and headed off down to check it out. Two cocktails and two beers later plus some food which turned out a bit of a bargain we headed back to the room where I'm finishing typing this up. Poor Steph had another meal disaster with her vegetarian lasagne which was cold in the middle and looked a bit sloppy on the plate! We've got a taxi booked for 7.15am to get us to the airport hopefully in plenty of time for our flight at 10.30 to Rio. Tomorrows flight is a long one - 11 hours which will take us all day. We are due to land at 5.35pm Rio time.

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