It seems like I’ve been gone a long time. I left three weeks ago today and won’t be back to snowy Montana until almost two weeks from now. That said, it has been an extremely rewarding and educational trip. Even though Portugal is a small country (you can drive top to bottom in 7 hours and across it in three hours or less) there is a lot to see and do.
Since I am here solo now that Barb had to fly back to Phoenix for work, I’m just exploring a little and enjoying just sitting on the balcony listening to the ocean. This morning I decided to seek out a large parking garage that I had read about on the edge of Old Town Lagos. I found it without much trouble and was amazed to see how large it was. It is a two story underground garage and it was huge. Had I found it earlier, we could have saved a bunch of Bolt (Uber) rides which is how we normally went to Old Town. The parking is incredibly cheap. I was there for maybe an hour and a half and it cost about $1.30. Another lesson learned.
The garage is right across from the marina and the promenade that runs along the coast so I went over there and strolled along the promenade. I walked up to the marina which has a pedestrian drawbridge that must be raised for sailboats to enter and exit. It was pretty cool to watch.
As I continued my walk, I came across the public market which is similar to the one we saw in Tavira. The first floor is fresh fish. The second floor is produce and the top floor houses a restaurant that looks out over the marina! I wish we would have found this sooner as well.
I’m now back at the condo and the weather is looking a bit ‘iffy’. I’m not sure if it will rain or not but its pretty gray out. I’ll see what other discoveries I can make this afternoon and in the next couple of days before I leave.
One of the fascinating things about spending time in a different country is to just see how they do things. I’ve talked about the roundabouts here. There are very few stop lights or stop signs. It’s primarily roundabouts and yield signs. The traffic flows pretty well and there seem to be very few accidents – at least less than you would expect. And here in Lagos, and most of the towns we’ve been in, there is no such thing as a straight street. An aerial view of most of these cities would look like a plate of spaghetti! Thank goodness for GPS and Google maps!!
The parking spaces in garages are SMALL and there is often a lot of tight maneuvering. In fact, the garage at our hotel in Coimbra had a turn at the entrance that literally required a three point turn to navigate, even with our compact SUV. It’s also interesting here how people will just stop in the middle of the street if they need to let someone in or out. In the US, you would hear a cacophony of horns honking but here its just accepted. I have rarely heard a horn here. And people here stop for people in crosswalks!!! If someone is on the side of the road at a crosswalk, traffic stops to let them cross. Even in Bozeman, if you step into a crosswalk you are sometimes taking your life in your hands.
It’s also fun to walk through the grocery stores. Peanut butter is very hard to find here – it’s not a big seller in Portugal (or Europe in general for that matter). Fresh fish, on the other hand, of almost any kind, is all over the place! Shopping carts like we normally use at the store are chained together and you have to use a 1 Euro coin to release one. When you return it, you can get your 1 Euro coin back. That said, most markets have little plastic carts that you can use for free – they are totally impractical for anything other than dragging groceries around the store.
The adventure continues.