5th November- This time it’s Lisbon Portugal

We were looking forward to visiting Lisbon, as according to reports, its one of the ‘greatest Cities in the World’. We are not sure who wrote that but they must have been on drugs or at least a bottle of good whisky every hour of the day.

As the passengers alighted from the ship they were greeted by, of all things, a red duck type bird played by a Christian Ronaldo look alike. When you have 2000 passengers arriving in a country which is known to have some minor financial difficulties you would think that the Mayor or somebody would come to entice the passengers to spend their US Dollars in his town, but no.

We decided not to take the hop on and off bus today for a change as we wanted to walk to the centre of town so as to get the feel of the place. And did we get the feel of the place, this City has serious problems of graffiti everywhere, dirty streets, very old unkempt housing and in the main areas too many beggars and people trying to sell you sun glasses and watches, to you cheap ay?.

There were so many police around you had to guess why as in the Starbucks Loo

is this large sign saying watch your bags etc,

Why Starbucks you say, quite frankly most of the cafes and so called restaurants looked dirty and they lined the street with cars and buses rushing past and kicking up dust. We thought that the pavements in Weybridge were bad but these were terrible and most of the time you had to walk looking down to avoid tripping over or falling down a big hole. Ian Lake would love this place.

Anyway we toured around for quite a while and both formed the opinion that it’s not a nice place to visit. It could be if the Government and the people had pride in their city and at least kept it clean. They are poor neighbours to Spain who have similar financial difficulties but it did not show in any of the cities visited so far. Both Malaga and Cadiz where very clean no sign of beggars or for that matter Police.

The sun was shining and the temperature was about 23 degrees and by 2pm we had seen enough and headed back to the Ship. This time along the waterfront where there does appear to be some new development and also there were a couple of nice restaurants where you feel you could eat but by this time it was to late. Our walk today must have been almost 7 miles and it was good to stretch the ‘old’ muscles.

We arrived back at the ship around 3.15 pm and went straight upstairs for some iced tea and eventually a beer before dinner.

At dinner they had a large roasted pig, which unfortunately took up quite a bit of space on our table but was very enjoyable indeed. We went up to the Star Bar to listen to the classical string quartet which we now think are Russian, possibly spies we also think, but they played well and with a varied repertoire of music.

During the last few days we have noticed that people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at the bar and we hate to think what their bar bills might be. A glass of wine is USD 6.25 plus 15% service and a reasonable bottle of red is somewhere between USD 26/28 plus 15% whilst the cost of whisky and brandy etc is not cheap at all. I am not sure if their liver suffers more than their wallet?

We are now on the open sea going to the Azores which is a group of islands owned by the Portuguese and tomorrow we just sail all day and arrive there on Sunday morning around 10.00 I think.

One last comment about Lisbon, I have just read the blurb about the City and it would appear that even the Portuguese Royal Family don’t like it here as they live some miles away in a town called Sintra. That tells you something doesn’t it.