Cruise Disembarkation - Lisbon

Sadly, we had to leave the ship today. It was a lovely cruise. Very different from our previous cruise experiences.

1. MSC is an Italian company so are very good about keeping all announcements multilingual - Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and English are their standard languages but sometimes they throw in some others. I like that, it felt like the Camino. And it was so impressive to listen to the staff use many languages. But I did hear some people who would have been happy with just English.

2. Related to #1, the guests also spoke many languages. Not a surprise as most guests were from all over Europe, with only a few from North America, South Africa, or Asia. Again, like pilgrim life.

3. MSC Cruises (at least this one) is a bit like a hop on hop off bus. You can embark at most of the ports we visited, and then would disembark at that same port 10 days later. I am sure there are benefits and drawbacks to this, but I think the process for boarding and disembarking was quite smooth, perhaps due to only a fraction of the passengers starting their cruise at each port.

Overall I would recommend MSC Cruises Line. We had a great time and saw a lot of amazing locations.

But today we ended that experience, and checked into a small guest house in central Lisbon. After checking in we went for a long walk.

We checked some shops, some restaurants, some churches. We also went to a Flea Market which was very interesting, and did a port tasting at Taylor-Fladgate. And we stopped at the Pilgrim Office so I could add to my sello collection.

The temperature was high today (high of 31C) so we took it easy and made sure to rehydrate often.Read more