Today was Sunday.

By this point, my legs were aching to a degree that I can’t readily dismiss as simple soreness. Shit was painful. I did my best to take time off, but it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

No pix today, obviously.

On this day we went to Sintra—which is just a short distance north of Lisboa, and very near the coast—to see the Moorish castle there. It’s what my sister-in-law referred to often as the “storybook castle” because it looks like something out of a fairy tale.

That was a deliberate choice, as it turns out. King Ferdinand II decided to have the castle restored in keeping with the Portuguese version of Victorian aesthetics. Gardens, moss, and crooked trees were all mixed with the beautifully ruined walls and buildings.

Storybook. Unfortunately, it was more elaborate art installation than useful reference material, so I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures (to my wife’s annoyance). Also, it sat atop a tall mountain, so not only did I have my usual twinges of anxiety from the height of a wall, there was the long, long cliff faces on the other side. Yeah, the view was panoramic, when I could pry my clutching fingers from the stonework and lift my head to take a look.

It didn’t help that I was primed for anxiety by the ride up the mountainside. We rode—standing room only—on a full-sized bus that swung through switchback after switchback. Fast, too: the driver knew the route well and he was rushing up paying tourists up and down the slopes.

Which meant I had to hold on for deal life while looking down through the windows at the slopes we were zooming past.

I didn’t get too many pictures, and everyone was a little too burned out to make the trip to the other hill and see the Palace, so home we went for quiet time and a chance to catch up with old friends.

When I dragged my kid to the castle in Tomar, I said: When are we going to get another chance to see a castle?

Well, derr on me, there’s a castle right within Lisboa city limits. Of course there is. My wife’s Italian friends are historians, so we thought it would be educational to see a castle with them.

But first! A church. Churches and castles, man. That’s what Europe’s all about.

The church was actually the Lisboa Cathedral, and it was cooler than the castle, but only once you paid to see the treasury and the cloisters. The paid parts contained an archaeological dig that revealed Roman roads and sewers, Moorish homes, and a bunch of Christian sepulchers. Have some pics below.

The castle was pretty crowded, as you’d expect, and it was full of money-making opportunities for the city. There was a fee to enter and lots of opportunities to buy souvenirs and espresso. It was still pretty cool, but a little Disney-fied.

By then my feet were hurting like whoa, because the public transportation to those sites is packed. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant, where the waiter talked us out of the meal we wanted to order into the house special. It turned out to be, once again, meat w/ two carbs, no veg. I’m pretty much over Portuguese food.

Today was Thanksgiving in Portugal (almost two months early) for my wife’s American friends who have been living in Italy.

There’s not much to tell, so I won’t. I cooked a lot. It went over well. I met one of my sister-in-law’s Portuguese friends and my wife’s friend’s partner from Italy. Both tried to greet me with kisses on the cheek, but I out-awkwarded them. I did not go on vacation to kiss people I don’t know, and if that’s a requirement I should have been warned ahead of time.

So, instead of talking about the nice time we had, I’m going to talk about a few other things. Just a quick summing up of some of the fun things that have been going on:

1. Portuguese sidewalks are made of calçada[1] which is really just a whole lot of similar, mostly square, stones laid out in a grid. Many of the websites that talk about it address the art/mosaic qualities it sometimes has: In downtown Lisboa, the sidewalks have all sorts of designs. In Tomar, they were Templar crosses. But those are in the historic districts, not the regular neighborhoods. In the rest of the country, it’s just plain yellow stones. Here’s a pic.

Yeah, it’s not flat. I’m sure it’s super-sturdy and resilient, but man is it unfriendly to feet and bicycle tires.

2. Here’s how you order coffee in Lisboa:
Bom dia. Queria um cafe, fazh favor.
Pronounced: “Bohn DEEya. Keh-REE-ya oon caff-ay, fazh fav-or”
Translated: Good day. I would like one coffee, please.

If you want two coffees, you say “doysh” cafe. For three, “traysh” cafe. “Doysh” has become my new favorite word.

The “cafe” you get is a straight espresso shot in a tiny cup, with a packet of sugar on the side. To get other kinds of coffee, check this out: http://americaninportugaltours.com/how-to-order-savor-coffee-in-portugal/

3. If it’s after noon, you can switch out “cafe” for “imperial” (imp-ear-ee-AHL), which is a schooner of beer. The house beer is generally a light bock. If you want a full pint, you order something else, which I don’t remember because I’ve never ordered one.

But that’s only in the southern part of the country. In the north, it’s something else.

4. It seems to me that Portuguese sounds like a mix of Spanish and Russian.

5. Lisboa has pushed my tolerance for funny waiters who do intrusive comedy routines into the red zone. Let’s consider this an opportunity for my personal growth.

6. Portugal, Brazil, and several other Portuguese-speaking countries recently enacted an agreement that would bring their different versions of the language into one. A number of changes and simplifications have been made with regards to the way people spell certain vowel sounds, and with the elimination of silent letters in words. However, the weirdest thing is that Portuguese now includes letters it didn’t have before: K, W, and Y.

Looking around at all the Portuguese signs on stores and on book covers, I have never seen those letters used, ever. The only place I’ve seen them is in English language text and in graffiti. Google tells me that “GWK”, which is all over the place here, stands for “Graffiti Word Krew.”

7. Portugal has a lot of graffiti.

[1] pronounced “cal-SAH-da” I believe. In Portuguese, the “C” always makes a “K” sound when the vowel that follows it is an “A”, “O”, or “U”. If the vowels that follow it are an “E” or “I”, it makes an “S” sound.

But what if you want an “S” sound in the middle of a word with a following “A”, “O”, or “U”? Then, you change the “C” to an “Ç”. That’s a “cedilla” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ç

It’s always challenging to cook in someone else’s kitchen, right? Well, I impressed myself with today’s pepperoni frittata. Let’s pretend you tasted it and were impressed, too.

Today was a prep day. My wife and her sister have a friend flying in from Italy—a friend they haven’t seen in years and years, but have kept in touch with—and they’ve decided to surprise him with a traditional American Thanksgiving meal: roast turkey, sausage stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, apple pie, the whole deal.

But first, supplies: I was excited to go to the old bull-fighting ring with my son. There was a food court where he and I could sit with our laptops and while away a few hours, and there was shopping to be done.

Unfortunately, the bull-fighting ring was mostly a shopping mall, and the food court was cramped and noisy as hell. To me, it was just an indistinguishable clamor, but it really bothered my son. We tried to slip away to a quieter place, but their internet wasn’t working. In the end, we just went back to the apartment and did a little work. Too bad. I would have liked to have pretended part of my new book was written in a bull-fighting ring, even if no one knew the truth.

Oh, and there was a bookstore but nothing I could read, of course.

Lots of quiet and lots of cooking today.

You know what’s nice? Taking it easy. I’m not a kid anymore and we’re in Portugal for a full month. I don’t need to rush every day. In fact, a little downtime to get some writing done is just the thing.

I spent the morning working quietly in the lobby of the Residencial Uniao, our “guest house.” The chairs were very comfortable, and for once I didn’t just nod off in one of them. Then we caught a train back to Lisboa, carried all our stuff into my sister-in-law’s apartment, and I fell over into a deep sleep for several hours.

That eventing we had leftovers from the fridge: chili, octopus and rice, good bread…

Actually, have I talked about the bread in Portugal? The local word is pão.

It’s incredible. As troublesome as we sometimes find the food here, the bread is always first-rate.

Anyway, we played another game of iota, then had quiet time. A day off. It was nice.

Here’s a picture of an old building. If you like decayed places, Portugal is the place for you.