I dunno, I welcome all suggestions. That’s what we felt like this morning. Halfway back from zombification.
We managed to clear the cobwebs and were ready to forage for some caloric and caffeine input by 10am. The coffee kiosk across the street was just opening. Our timing was spot on. But first, we walked at least 15 feet to the mini Mercado to buy rolls, bananas and freshly squeezed orange juice. Then 10 feet to the coffee kiosk for coffee ( oh my god, so smooth and full of flavor). At the last second I ordered one of the famous pastel de natas, a flakey tartlet filled with creamy custard. Back at the apartment, we munched on our rolls slathered with the homemade jam our host had provided and sipped the coffee. And oh that nata was scrumptious.
By 11:30 (no slouches we) we were out the door for the day’s venture.. The weather forecast called for a cloudy day but no rain with a high of 62 degrees. Another good day for being outside. We thought we’d head in the general direction of the Castelo de São Jorge and the Alfama area. About a 40 minute walk according to google maps, which also described the route as “mostly flat”. Nowhere in Lisbon is “mostly flat”. Whoever supplied that piece of code sure wasn’t thinking.
I will leave the description of the Castelo to Grubb. Suffice it to say I enjoyed the journey more than the destination. Although you couldn’t beat the views from the top.
On the way back, we zigged and zagged trying to find the tunnel where a painted mural illustrated the history of Lisbon in comic strip format. I had imagined it to be a long corridor. Turns out it was a mere 6 feet long with a public WC built into the middle. Opposite of the WC, half the mural was covered with graffiti.
But the highlight for me was…you guessed it…ice cream! I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall ice cream shop and had a cup of Vinho Porto com Figos (Porto wine with figs) soft ice cream. Ahhhhh.
Continuing our new tradition of one big meal a day in the late afternoon, we stopped at a restaurant in a pedestrian-only alley. The starter was fresh sourdough bread (or maybe it was leftover from someone’s pandemic bake fest) with sardine patè and slices of soft cheese.
For the main dish, I went with Cod in Oven. I assumed it would be baked. When it came, I realized the name must have been a mistranslation. The top had been seared to a crispy finish covered by a mellow tomato-based sauce nestled on more sourdough bread, hemmed in by a sea of stubby french fried potatoes. Grubb opted for the Grilled Cod with Potatoes. Covered with caramelized onions, accompanied by 2 small baked potatoes and a huge nugget of broccoli. All succulent. No rubber fish here.
At the end, we were offered a shot of a dark, liqueur. Sort of a thick, fruity port based thing. I happily downed it. And lived merrily forever more, or at least the next hour or two.
About that “mostly flat” thing that Google does. We found that it almost always says that unless the walk is quite long, no matter how hilly the walk actually is. It became on joke with us, I would reassure Wynette that the next mile was “mostly flat”. For long walks they actually do have little up and down icons to show how many meters gain and loss you’ll have. And it changed some distances to metric and not others.
Menu translation: we found language translation does a terrible job at it. Wynette had a brilliant idea though, she looked up the menu item name in google.es and it returns photos of the item that people have put in. It worked great for us, the photos were usually exactly what we got when we ordered it. The power of crowd-sourcing and big data.
Great idea. In this case,though, the wait person handed us a secondary menu full of glossy, color photos of every dish.
I think the website to do image searches in Portugal would be google.pt. I got the idea from a book about learning languages without thinking in English (Fluent Forever). It suggested to use photos to learn the names for things. They suggested doing image searches on Google using the Google site for a country that speaks the language.
Great tip, thanks. I’ve been using Mondly to “learn” some Portuguese and it uses pictures a lot. Does help!
Congrats on remembering to take food photo before digging in too deep. That was quite a challenge for us to remember to do that. The food looks amazing. Cod is great stuff. I’ve seldom been disappointed in a cod dish. But, as Charlie said, we didn’t try it for a long time since it wasn’t fresh and there was so much fresh fish available. All good. Well, except I don’t like rubbery fish either. Pulpo (octopus) is very big in Spain and we never found any that didn’t taste rubbery. For that reason I don’t like monkfish either.
Well “half-zombie” works. It describes how I’ve felt the past 3 days since we got back from Spain. I have a REALLY hard time flying east to west.
🙃 I know exactly what you mean.