Back in Lisbon
We doubled back to Lisbon on the next, a relatively pleasant, uneventful day. Several things actually went as planned. We drove more or less directly to the airport. We found a reasonably nice room right nearby. We drove down to the shopping district and looked around. We began enjoying and liking Lisbon.
We had a great dinner, the best of the trip and one of the cheapest. There we discovered Portuguese olive oil and had our only (provocative!) taste of Spanish rice. A great meal, in a fine little place whose menu was not in four languages and whose floors and walls were pink marble. Craig had a great flan and I had a wonderful sweet flat rice pudding. We were delighted.
The weather was good, and we walked by the Tagus and decided the city was really very attractive, and had distinct advantages over the bigger European capitals we'd seen. We saw wonderful expensive clothes, including a fine green suede jacket with a paisley pattern etched into it for $1000, too much for me, but beautiful enough to make me think it would be nice to be rich.
We picked out a mixed case of wine to ship home, and lugged it to our room with assorted other groceries (including fish paste and olive oil to take home and a pig's face, yes, to eat in the room), and turned in early, thinking well of Lisbon.
