After the previous bad story, I thought i’d share something more light hearted.

We’ve been staying at fully furnished rental apartments, which has been working out great for us.  Having a washer is a very convenient thing when you are traveling.  To be able to do laundry on the road is like… heaven. 

We soon realized in our 2^nd floor apartment we had a washer but no dryer.  After having walked around Lisbon for a bit, we noticed people hang their clothes, sheets, you name it, right outside their front window.   So one day, eug was nice enough to do our laundry.  When he opened our front window and started hanging our clothes I heard him saying ‘this is so GHETTO’.  Turned out he was complaining about the ghetto clothes hanging clips on the railing which he thought wouldn’t hold.

That evening I thought I’d check on our clothes outside.  It happened to be a particularly windy night.  I opened the window and saw three shirts.  I was like eug, how many shirts did you hang?  I only see three.  He’s like ‘what?!’.   We then looked down on the street and his green beer chang shirt was lying on the curb!  He ran downstairs to pick it up and found the rest of our clothes along the street, and one of my t-shirts was hanging on our 1^st floor neighbour’s window which he had to jump up to grab.  I guess he decided to not use any ghetto clips at all!

Sometimes maybe the ghetto way just works.  Trust it once in awhile.    

It’s amazing what 8 glasses of port and a mild state of inebriation can do to your spirits.  We spent today checking out the port-wine lodges in the town of Porto.  Porto is basically the centre of the port wine universe.  For those who don’t know, port wine is “fortified”, which basically means brandy is added to it.  Unlike Napa Valley or the Okanagan where you have to drive from winery to winery to do the tastings, here all the port wineries have lodges in Porto where they blend, age and process the wine.  The best thing is that they’re basically next door to each other.  You can also head to the wineries to do the tastings but they’re about 100 kms outta town.  We might have done that if we had time, but since we have to be back to Lisbon tomorrow, drinking at the lodges it was.  We started at the Taylor winery because it was the farthest up the hill.  No one likes walking uphill, especially buzzed.  They gave us a good intro into port and then it was onto drinking.  It just so happened they had a highly rated restaurant, Barao Fladgate, with an expansive view of Porto as well.  Though the food was underwhelming, the port was awesome.  Try a bottle of the Taylor late bottled vintage if you have the chance.  We then went off to the Caves Ramos Pinto lodge (owned by French champagne company Roederer), and finished at Sandeman’s (owned by Canadian company Seagrams).  We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the labyrinth of steep streets and alleyways which was pretty fun.  For dinner tonight I had a Francesinha while Di stuck with a tuna baguette (not because she wanted a tuna baguette but because it was the only thing she understood on the menu).  The Francesinha is a Porto specialty sandwhich that consists of bread, cheese, an egg, and a stack of mystery meats.  After that it’s soaked in a tomato/beer gravy.  Yes it’s disgusting and yes my stomach also disagreed.  I wasn’t drunk enough to enjoy a nasty gravy-soaked-soggy sandwhich with equally soaked soggy fries.  We’re headed back to Lisbon tomorrow on the first train to try to rectify the passport situation as soon as possible.  Needless to say, I will not be picking up anyone’s change this time.

So it only took 5 days of our year long vacation to get robbed.  Our passports, Di’s wallet and cards are now in the hands of some teenage jerk.  We had a great time in Lisbon so far but decided to head north for a few days to Porto to drink some port and check out the city.  We were on the train, unfortunately at the last seats by the door.  Our train was departing at 9:30 am, and at 9:29 this kid dropped his coins right by us.  Being nice idiots we helped him pick them up (though he didn’t get down and help…wonder why), and by then the train had started moving.  As I returned the coins to him and smiled he quickly hopped off before the train had gathered too much momentum.  About one minute later as the train was at full speed Di looks at me and says “where’s my bag?”.  We have 5 bags with us (2 big backpacks, 2 small backpacks and a camera bag) and he took off with the most important one.  After a crappy 3 hour train ride we arrived in Porto and went to the police station.  They were extremely helpful with aiding us, but it still sucked bigtime.  Now we gotta go back to Lisbon and re-issue new passports at about 230 bucks a piece (including the emergency one).  Plus we lost our visas for other countries so we gotta figure out how to re-issue them without being in Canada.  We called the bank, and that kid had tried to use the debit and credit cards multiple times already.  Oh well, at least people have been extremely helpful during this time as well (bank, police, embassy, train conductor and neighbours on the train).  2 American student girls sitting in front of us offered to give us money which was extremely generous and nice.  Hopefully tomorrow we’ll become port experts and the tawny flavours can wash the sour taste out of our mouths.  

We managed to find a bar in Lisbon where we could watch the gold medal hockey game!  We found it via good old trusty tripadvisor.com thinking we’d be the only two people watching it.  But it turned out there were other fellow Canadian travelers in Lisbon too!  We had some boys from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kamloops there.  There were two Americans as well, and they were gracious enough to take our victory pics when all was said and done.  Thanks to Hennessy’s Irish Pub, we had the upstairs section blocked off for us, while the rest of the bar was all cheering for a local soccer game at the same time that evening.  It did get a bit confusing when everyone else was cheering while the commercial was on.  But it all worked out quite well.  After the game, the Toronto boys started singing O Canada, and was later echoed by the live band with bryan adams and celine dion songs.  Needless to say we left after that and headed up to Bairro Alto to grab another drink before calling it a night.  Go Canada Go!