Portugal here we come

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We arrive in Lisbon at just before 8am. Lisbon is the capital city of Portugal, it is also the westernmost large city in Europe. Lisbon is one of the oldest cities in the world, predating London, Paris and Rome.

A traditional form of transport in Lisbon is the tram, they were introduced in the 19th century and imported from the USA. The distinctive yellow trams are one of the tourist icons of modern Lisbon. They are well suited to the steep hills and narrow streets.



We are going on an organised trip to Obidos a picturesque village about 90 minutes away. We board the coach and make our way there. The guide tells us that she will be taking us to a little shop where we will be given a cherry liqueur in a chocolate cup. Unfortunately Ian doesn’t drink alcohol so I have to force my self to have his! But he wants the chocolate cup! It’s delicious.



We wander down the narrow cobbled street, the houses are white with either blue, gold or red edges. We are told that if you wanted good health you would paint the edges blue, gold for wealth and red for love.

Most of them were blue or gold only one was red. What does that say about the people of Obidos? (Ian - A slight problem is that the coloured paints are water soluble, wet your finger and lo you have a finger tip with coloured paint on it which you can then use to daub on the white walls. The result? 6 - 8’ up the white walls there are varying amounts of graffiti, mainly the deepest thoughts of clearly young people along the lines of ‘F luvs S’ it is inspiring.)



We walk up to the castle because as most of you will know Ian loves a castle! (Ian - who doesn’t.) We look at the city walls and Ian talks to me about the merits of them as fortifications. To be honest with you when you see one wall you pretty much have seen them all.



We stop at a coffee shop where we sample the custard tarts a well known Portuguese delicacy, again delicious.



On returning to the ship Ian changes and goes for a run around the harbour, I go to the gym as I’m afraid with all the tasty food I’m eating they will need to take me off the ship in Southampton with a crane.

We also take part in 3 quizzes, we lose one in a tiebreak, come second in the movies quiz and win the Disney and musicals quiz in a tie break. For those interested, the tie break question we won was “how many official Disney Princesses are there?” We’ll let you ponder that one and give you the answer on our next posting. We got it exactly right by pretty much sheer chance.



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Unfortunately the Wi-Fi isn’t strong enough to download photos so I will add them when we have stronger internet

Now we have 4 sea days before we arrive at Heraklion

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