The day before, we’d agreed that my son would not have to come up the hill to the castle because we thought he’d have to walk the whole way, and he can’t do that without pain. However, once we found out about the train-car, we had to drag him up there.

Actually, I dragged him up there while his mom and her sister brought their sketch pads to the local gardens (which turned out to be more park than garden, but whatever). With the boy, I found parts of the castle that I’d missed the previous trip, but things were also cut short due to pain. I don’t have many pictures today, because the boy was reluctant. I do have a photo of the train-car, though.

Food-wise, the day was better. The less expensive Italian place was open, and the boy got the pizza he’d been wanting. After that, my wife and her sister wandered the town with their sketch books, while I kicked back on my computer, mostly writing these blog posts. We wrapped up the day by playing a round of iota, a card game so small that it fits into a tiny bandaid-sized tin, and is perfect for travel.

It was sorta sad that we’ve had two meals out that we really enjoyed, and both were in Italian restaurants.

There are, in fact, two walking tours to take in Tomar, Portugal. One goes through the historic part of town, and the other trudges up the hill to the castle and convento.

The boy has issues with foot pain, so he only had to do one, and naturally he chose the one on flat ground. The tour of Tomar was enjoyable enough. We saw a beautiful old church with a relic inside, and very modern river walks, and the oldest synagogue in Portugal, which was shut down in the 1500s sometime due to forced conversion. We also saw that a bunch of the restaurants in town were closed and that the beautiful old churches were holding mass. Hello, Sunday.

After an unsatisfying lunch (the boy had already eaten from a Grab n Go automat-type thing) we started toward the long uphill trek to the castle. My feet already hurt. My wife’s knee was aching (she hadn’t taped it correctly, somehow) and my sister-in-law’s foot and ankle were sore, but we were determined.

And what did we see but a little train-car parked in the Praça da República, ready to take us up to the castle? By “train-car”, I mean that it was a four-wheeled car with a chassis like a steam train, and three passenger cars that it towed along behind. So we didn’t have to walk up the hill after all.

The castle was a castle. If you’ve been to Europe you’ve probably seen a bunch, but this was my first trip and I’d never walked along a castle wall before, or looked through the archery slits, or stared up at the gates, imagining myself storming the place. It was pretty cool.

The Convento de Christo was even cooler, full of multiple levels and one cloister after another. I would have been lost in that place in flash, if I’d ever been a novitiate.

Of course there are pictures.

We caught the last train-car back, then hunted everywhere for good food. We failed to find it, but we did get some calories. But no meal, no matter how disappointing, could darken the day we had.

For the fourth day, the boy stayed home while I accompanied my wife and sister-in-law on a shopping trip. When we do our shopping in Seattle, we go to the local supermarket, get everything we need, then haul it home. In Lisboa, there were vegetable stalls in the church parking lot, a butcher shop, then a big market building that held a number of different sellers displaying fish, meat, veg, the whole deal. We even ordered a turkey from yet another butcher shop. After that, it was the health food store so my wife could have some gluten-free foods.

It felt very European, which means we walked around a lot.

After, we dropped by my sister-in-law’s health club for an afternoon drink at an outside table.

This is what everyone imagines themselves doing in Europe, right? You sit outside with a little coffee or a whatever, enjoy beautiful weather, chat, and people-watch.

I won’t lie. It’s pretty great.

Sadly, it doesn’t take long for me to start feeling antsy. I should be writing. I could be reading. I could be jotting down one of these posts. Taking it easy is hard.

Then, in the afternoon, we caught the subway to Gare do Oriente, their big train station, and then took a two-hour local train to Tomar. You pronounce the name of the town Too-MARR. If you raised your hand in a flourish with that last syllable, you’d get the spirit of the thing.

My brother-in-law was about to record an album, and he needed the apartment space to put up the musicians who were coming into town to play. So this was our first big tour of the country, and it was coming quickly.

Tomar was founded by a Templar, and there’s a castle (a castle in Europe? No way!) but the Convento De Christo is supposed to be the real reason to visit. It’s supposed to be unique and amazing.

We made our way to the guest house my sister-in-law had reserved, which sounds like we had our own little house, doesn’t it? Nope, it was a funky old hotel called Residencial Uniao Take a look. Or: https://goo.gl/maps/ztQxQp7hchu

If you back up that street view, you’ll see the Praça da República and the statue of the Templar who founded the town. But we have pictures, too.

Still, it was too late to do anything but eat, and since the tourist season was closing, it was tough to find a place. Luckily, we came across an Italian restaurant with wisteria growing along the patio. I had chicken with blood sauce, which tasted a lot like blood sausage. The boy, sadly, ordered more shrimp, and was disappointed when they arrived with the heads still on. He’s going to give up on shrimp for the rest of our trip.

Four times a year, for three days only, the Museum of Lisboa opens the city’s Roman galleries to the public, and since the fall dates were perfectly timed with our visit, my sister-in-law arranged for us to go.

One problem: the Galerias Romanas were on the Rua de Prata (the street of silver, because that was once the street all the silver smiths were on) but there was no further detail. It was somewhere on that street, which is about 8 blocks long. We were told that people would need to arrive at the meeting place 30 minutes early, and that we couldn’t leave bags near the monument, but there was no address included with the reservation confirmation. What monument? What meeting place? An email sent to the museum asking for an address was never answered.

And this is something my brother- and sister-in-law explained about Portugal: as cultures go, it’s very non-confrontational. Passive, even. People drive like crazy, but they rarely honk. People are routinely late, only to find the person still there waiting for them, an hour past the time they agreed to meet, and no mention of the delay will ever be made. People will lie to your face to avoid saying something that might upset you.

So you end up with things being done in a half-assed way, because there’s no strong/systemic correction. A major city museum will tell people to be at the meeting place a half hour early but never specify where the meeting place is.

This sort of thing will come up again during our trip.

Anyway, we walked down the Rua da Prata and, a block from the end, I saw a cordoned off side street, a hole in the asphalt, and a woman in street clothes being helped down.

“There it is,” my wife said immediately, and she was right. It was right there in the middle of the street, and that street was not the Rua da Prata. It was near the intersection with Rua da Prata, but it was not the street itself.

The galleries themselves were pretty cool, but not extensive. I have pictures, naturally, and the tour guide explained that they’ve been rediscovered several times over the centuries, often so that shop owners could use them as free storage. In fact, that was probably what they were built for originally.

Also, GMs: you are not getting the smell of your dungeons right.

Sadly, they’re prone to flooding, and one shop-owner’s brilliant idea to store sacks of cement down there has severely damaged one section. Also, they were blocked off in the 1800’s. The only evidence that there are more galleries are the drawings made years and years ago; the only way modern archaeologists will get access to the hidden galleries will be if a shop owner digs down and uncovers them. Unfortunately, shop owners know the galleries are there and they won’t do that, because they would have to notify archaeologists and it would be a mess. It will probably take another massive earthquake to open them up for study.

Some pics:

Afterwards, my son was a little freaked out by the smell, how dirty they were, and how dirty he’d gotten down there. (It didn’t help that the tour guide talked about sewage floods in the distant past.) I took him back to the apartment while my wife and her sister hit the town. They had a great time and saw amazing things. We slipped out to a restaurant where no one spoke English, ordered skewers of bacon-wrapped beef.

Inedible. The beef still had the silverskin attached, so it was impossible to cut the pieces small enough to eat using the dull knives we’d been given. It wasn’t all that easy to chew, either. The bacon was undercooked, so it was all soft and squishy. It also had tiny bones in it. Bones in bacon? I didn’t even realize that was possible, but there were tiny round chips in there.

You know how American food is sometimes derided as meat, carb, and two veg? (As thought that’s boring?) Well, Portuguese food is meat, two carbs, and no veg at all. The menu item will only list the meat; it’s assumed you’ll want a plate of fries and a plate of rice with it. I ate a bit for politeness’s sake, then we got out of there.

So far, Portuguese cuisine isn’t winning me over, and the boy has been decidedly uncomfortable with it.

For the first full day in Lisboa, my sister-in-law arranged a tour by tuk-tuk.

Curious what I’m talking about? They’re motorized tricycles with a limited number of seats, and they look like this (scroll down to the gallery) http://www.tuk-tuk-lisboa.pt

Ours wasn’t quite like those. It was an electric vehicle, it seated six (including the driver) and it had four wheels. It also had no doors at all, was very narrow, and had a top speed of, like, 25 mph.

And man, did we go up and down hills and through alleyways while the driver told us about the history of the city.

Our first stop was the location of a large, incredibly important peaceful revolution that took place in my lifetime that I personally knew nothing about. Like, zero. I kept nodding while the guide spoke, as though of course the history of his country was crucial knowledge for an educated American, but I felt distinctly like a student faced with a pop quiz after a long night of partying. Then we moved on to more distant past, and phew for that.

It seemed that Lisboa was originally built by Arabs, and the streets were narrow and twisting. A massive earthquake in 1755 destroyed the old city and killed about 10-15% of its inhabitants. When the city was rebuilt, the mayor of Lisboa defied the power structure and had the city constructed with wider, straighter avenues.

According to our guide, at least. Wikipedia tells its own story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

He took us to beautiful views of the city, ancient downtown buildings, and the Praça do Comércio, which he assured us is the largest public square in Europe (although Wikipedia says it’s not even the largest square in Portugal). After, we went to Docas for a late lunch. I had a Prego, which is a traditional sandwich (ingredients: a roll, some beef, some garlic, that’s it).

My son had shrimp, which were served with the heads on. He ate none of those, although our tuk tuk driver assured him many times that it was no big deal and that he should just pull the heads off and suck out the brains because they were so tasty.

Guess how well that worked.

The driver was an interesting guy. We couldn’t trust half of what he said on his tour. He drove us through those “Arabic” streets that were so narrow my wife and I could have held hands and touched the walls on either side without fully extending them. He stopped in at a little tchotchke store where the owner gave us each a shot of ginjinha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginjinha a sour cherry liqueur, and of course we bought a couple of things (that we wanted anyway).

But he also brushed off any talk of Portuguese colonization as nothing more than a search for trade and women. He dropped the “n” word a few times, informed us (with a touch of pride) that his people invented the term mulatto, talked about the Porsches and BMWs he saw on the road, and elbowed my ribs when he saw a beautiful woman on the street. Like a lot of places, Portugal is full of beautiful women.

I don’t often meet guys like that. Basically, friendly, toxic bros who know less than they think but who are completely charming otherwise. Plus, it was a gorgeous city, and he was so proud of it.

Overall, a weird day, but a great day. Have some pictures.

Click the pic for more images. Can’t see it? A link.

The first day of any vacation is the actual traveling. I don’t much like flying, and I certainly don’t like waiting around with luggage piled beside me. This trip we did a lot of both.

We flew British Air, which was a pretty good choice, and we arranged our travel so there would be several hours between our non-stop from Seattle to Heathrow and Heathrow to Lisboa. Turns out, that was a good idea.

The first leg was yet another red-eye, which is a habit we just can’t seem to break. However we were smart enough to upgrade ourselves to rows with a little extra space. I don’t even remember what we paid, but I’m glad we paid it. We had extra leg room, space to stand and move around, and TV screens inset on the seats in front of us so we could entertain ourselves with some video on demand during the flight.

I watched KINGSMAN, which wasn’t nearly as cute as it thought it was, then TERMINATOR: GENISYS, which was way too far up its own ass. After that, I was tempted by RUN ALL NIGHT, but after flying all night, I was really tired, so I went with a comfort viewing of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, which I liked more the second time than the first.

Unfortunately, my 13yo son, traveling with us, came down with a serious cold just before we left. He went through five travel packs of tissues on the first leg, and that’s only because the Nyquil hit him hard and he slept most of the way. Me, I can’t sleep on planes.

We landed at Heathrow on time, which was great. But the tunnel wouldn’t connect to the plane, so they had to drive in a set of stairs. That’s half an hour, for some reason. Then the guy driving the stairs got into a collision, so we needed another one. The flight was over 9 hours, and we spent an extra 45 minutes cooling our heels on the plane.

Then we had to get from terminal 5 to terminal 3. The envelope our boarding tickets came in said this took NINETY MINUTES, but I thought that was nuts. It wasn’t.

First you walk all over hell’s creation. Then you get into a bus. The bus goes to terminal 3, but don’t get off the bus here, this is the part of terminal 3 where they pick up more people who need to get to terminal 3. Then we rode the bus all over the goddam airport, for at least 20 minutes. Once they dropped us off, we still had to walk down endless corridors, up stairways, down stairways… It was ridiculous. I’d like to see a map showing the path we had to walk, because that was some bullshit. There has to be a better way.

At least we got there with just barely enough time to eat a meal, buy more tissues and run for the connecting flight… which was also delayed. Once we were loaded aboard, the pilot announced that another plane had spilled jet fuel all over the runway. We sat for 30 minutes while they cleaned it up.

The flight from Heathrow to Lisboa was cramped and unhappy, except for the view out the window. This was my first trip to Europe, and I enjoyed seeing the countryside, the coastlines, the mountains, and of course, Lisboa, as we circled the city. It was beautiful.

My sister- and brother-in-law have a great apartment in the city. She’s an artist. He’s a musician. As you would expect, their home’s beautiful and funky and extremely comfortable. I’m glad my wife and her sister are close, because we get to stay with them and ruthlessly exploit them as tour guides.

Also they had a little cafe on the corner of the block. That’s where we learned that when you want coffee in Portugal, you get espresso. No drip, just espresso, maybe with some milk added or something.

Plus, the pastries are very very sweet.

And Portugal, we’re going to have to talk about your electrical outlets.

Click the photo to see two more. Pic not showing up? A link.

I feel bad about being so behind on everything, so here’s a Halloween preview of the Portugal blog posts to come:

In Evora (that first “E” is supposed to have an accent above it but life is short), they just reopened the Capela dos Osso after spending a fortune refurbishing it. That is, obviously, the chapel of bones, a largish room where the bones of the fully decomposed dead were put on display, to remind us all of our mortality.

Sometimes I think that’s the real value of Halloween: not the scares, not the candy, not using the costumes to pretend to be someone else. It’s the reminder that one day, we all must end.