First Entry from Cascais

We are here! I have so much to tell you and I doubt I can write it all in one cohesive entry so this entry is going to be as if I were talking to a girlfriend on the phone....think rambling!

Bom dia! It is 12:45pm and Graham and I just woke up, we are still adjusting to the 5 hour time difference. The sun is out and it is a beautiful day! Let me start from the beginning.....

Ok, so yesterday was our first day here and we packed in a lot. but let's go back to the day we left Alexandria. I was a mess, so nervous I thought I was going to throw up, more because I am afraid to fly, not because of coming to Portugal. I cried saying goodbye to my family at the airport (not surprising for anyone who truly knows me, remember the week of crying when I first got to virginia tech??) Graham was very good with me, very patient. We board the flight and 3 ativan and 3 glasses of wine later, I pass out. The next flight from heathrow to Lisbon was a piece of cake.

Here we are, in Lisbon, it's 6pm and we are freaking out. we find a tourist desk and the guy there spoke english and directed us to the taxi line. After a 30 minute taxi ride at 140 km/hour (oh about 80 mph) in rush hour (yea, scary) we arrive to Sam's apt. We love it! So we unpacked everything and went out to wander around at around 9pm. We found a bar right across the street and got 2 beers, and a large plate of french fries for 4,50 euro, very cheap! There was a very nice lady that worked there named Bella who said she would help us with our portuguese.

That brings us to day 1 here in Cascais. As we are leaving our apt we run into our new neighbor, Jack Cling who is 90 years old and from Detroit. Yay, he speaks english and portuguese! He is so sweet, so we went down to Cafe Nikola which is on the first floor of our apt building and had um cafe come leite with him. Then we went to Pingo Doce, our local grocery store, which was an adventure. Whoever said lots of people here speak english were lying, b/c it seems as though we are the only people, other than Jack and Bella who speak english.

Since we are car-less, we then walked to downtown Cascais, about a 15 minute walk. We went to the mall and went to the food court and studied all the menus trying to figure out the english translation (people looked at us like we were crazy). Ok, so then we just walked around, went to the pier, to boca de inferno (mouth of the devil, i'll let graham explain that in another entry), the municipal park which was beautiful, and finally to the Jumbo mart (think walmart). All in all we walked probably 5 miles! It was wonderful.

A few things of note, people here love to smoke and they have to do it outside so that's kind of annoying. There is also a good amount of grafitti on most buildings. It is very green here, lots of beautiful landscape. Everyone drinks espresso at all times of the day. People drive like maniacs and pedestrians do not have the right of way. All sidewalks are hand-laid tile but be careful to watch out for dog poop.

I probably know about 30 words of portuguese now and am dying to learn more! Graham said "gracias" to the mailman, so he has a little work to do, haha! Ok that's it for me now, I'll let Graham say a few words. Miss you all! Pictures to come, internet is s-l-o-w.....