Jacques and Rollande: October 25, 2023. First day in Lisbon

We are finally in Lisbon after leaving yesterday morning for Halifax. This is an organized tour which is something that we don't normally do.

So far everything is great from our first flight from Halifax to Toronto where we had the pleasure of having no one in our 3 seat row besides us. It gave us especially Jacques some extra leg and arm room. Just out of curiosity I timed how long it took us from the time that the plane touched down on the runway to the time that it took us to reach our next departure gate. 45 minutes. So an hour between flights does not leave for much leeway.

Our next nice surprise was on our overseas flight which was only 3\4 full. So we again had plenty of room.

Not certain what the captain was doing but I have never seen a landing pattern like this.

We landed at close to 11 and easily found our group rep. We had to wait about half an hour for 2 more couples. We spent most of the time talking with another couple from Vancouver who were on the same flight from Toronto and who are part of our group.

Since our rooms were not ready yet we stored our luggage in a room provided by the hotel and off we went to find a Vodaphone store so that Jacques could get some data for his lab caches. 10 euros for 5 gigs. Much cheaper than Italy since there was no installation fee.

By then we were hungry so we stopped at a small place for the menu of the day. Jacques had bacalhau (cod) with cream on a bed of salad, a small beer, coffee and a lemon custard all for 10.90 euros. For the same price I had salad topped with half a sausage, a small beef steak and a piece of chicken served with rice plus the beer, coffee and lemon custard.

We made a quick stop at our hotel to get our room and luggage and headed to the train station where we took the metro to go to Baixa Chiado. We saw some nice buildings, with lots of different architecture. We even made it to the beach where there was a very large plaza. If you know us you know that we were geocaching while exploring the area. We found 12 so pretty good for a few hours.

While we were in Baixa it started to rain. Jacques had his jacket with him but mine was back in our hotel room. We quickly fixed the problem by stopping for a beer . By the time we finished our beer we were rested and it had stopped raining. Tomorrow I will have my jacket with me.

We came back early for a much needed shower and an early night.

Here are some sculptures and graffiti from the Metro.