Afternoon walking

Teaching for three hours a day is a small price to pay to have the rest of the day free in Lisbon! I started walking before 2:00 and got back to my hotel just after it got dark, around 6, having walked about ten miles (with a lot of stops). Sunny and cool, it was perfect. I was surprised by the number of tourists, after all it’s mid November, and was also surprised to see how many places I remember that had closed with new businesses in their place. And this was just since last year. I know change is inevitable, but one really made me sad — the Adega São Roque, where Joe and I, and my girlfriends and I, have had many excellent seafood cataplanas. It is now a modern jazzy little place serving exotic drinks. The place had been closed for years, but now another business has opened there.

Christmas decorations are going up (many will be turned on this Saturday, so I’ll be sure to head out after dark next week) and Christmas markets are opening. I went to one of my favorite miradouros (look out spots) and walked through some of my favorite squares. It feels good to be here. I’ve FaceTimed Joe while walking, so he has seen some of our old hangouts.

I did a couple of my essential, every year, shopping errands. First, to Pedemeia, believe it or not, a sock store. Katy swears that these all-cotton Portuguese socks are the best in the universe. I was able to Facetime with her so she could pick out some favorite designs. Then over to the Conserveira de Lisboa, the authentic old sardine place, not the glitzy “Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine,” where you can get a can of sardines with the year of your birth on the wrapper, or take your picture next to a merry-go-round, or enjoy any of the other circus-like decorations. But my Lisbon friends tell me the sardines are bad and more expensive, but that since the shops have so much going on, the tourists just flock there. Don’t go there! Go to the Conserveira de Lisboa, where they still wrap their cans of sardines in brown paper.

One last stop on the way back was Leonidas, the Belgian chocolate shop. I’m going to some friends’ for dinner this week, and they are real wine experts, so chocolate is a much safer bet for me.

Dinner tonight in a popular local place, Lucimar, where I was happy to find my favorite soup, caldo verde, followed by a yummy vegetable version of Bachalau à Bras, a typical way of preparing dried cod.Read more