Big City Life

Photos: Steps along the wall of Castelo de São Jorge, Igreja do Carmo, and my wonderful tour guide in Praça do Rossio.

Sat after the beach, we drove to Christoph's aunt and uncle whom I had met briefly in Germany last Jan. We had dinner and hung out for a bit before heading back to the beach apt. Earlier in the day Christoph couldn't remember where the house key was at. We had been crossing our fingers that he forgot it in the door. We weren't so lucky to find it sitting and waiting for us. After looking every possible place, we had to drive back to his Uncle's new house and sleep up in the attic. It was at least 2am before we finally got to sleep. What an adventurous first 2 days!


On Sun I met most of the rest of Christoph's family when we had lunch at his grandparents' house. Very nice family. I felt right at home. Lots of food on the table, everyone talking and laughing (mostly in Portugese)--felt just like I was visiting my relatives in Hungary. I have adapted to the lack of language ability by understanding the general idea of what is being said. If it is a specific situation that I have some previous knowledge about, I can usually get an idea of what is being said. Very helpful when people forget that I don't speak Portugese, but difficult to say anything in return. Unfortunately I only know a little Spanish, but I don't want to offend them by assuming they understand.

Yesterday Chris had Uni in the morning, so I wandered around Lisbon by myself for a while. Found a nice park and sat there watching people and the ducks in the pond. From my viewpoint I could only see one edge of the water where ducks were just hanging out in the grass. Another group was casually swimming around on the other side of the wall from me. Suddenly all the ducks on the other side jumped up and swam as fast as they could to the side near me. For a minute it looked like there would be some sort of duck fight, but as it turned out someone had dropped a couple bread pieces in the water to the ducklings. Yes, that was my exciting morning. The afternoon was packed with tourist stuff in some very interesting areas of the city. It was an afternoon full of old houses with traditional tiled walls, a medieval castle, narrow cobblestone streets with wash hung out to dry above the street, and a church skeleton--the only part of it left after the big earthquake of 1755. I learned much about the history of Lisbon and saw some spectacular views.