Sunday Stupor

Mark and I just binged The Good Fight, five in a row, brilliant! We have been waiting to watch this show and it was well worth the wait. And tonight is sandwiches from last night’s dinner polished off with our first wine purchase (well, second but I didn’t like that one so it doesn’t count).

It’s the house wine from the little restaurant where we ate our first meal here. We ate there again last night after finding a little outside table on one side with no reserved sign – valuable lesson, make reservations before trying to eat out in Cascais on a Saturday night!

The weather has become very warm again so I’m back to my vampire ways. We worked up quite the appetite last night finding a place with a breeze – the warren of tiny streets tends to block the wind but last night was the first time it mattered. Happily we ended up back at our first and across from the best chicken on earth, no lie, I tell you. River is becoming a good under the table dog or maybe I should say making progress in this new world of chair legs and crooked tile pavements.

So life is lazy. Tomorrow we sign our lease and I think we’re both getting the itch to move in but leaving here early seems crazy…

On Friday we had a taxi drop us off at the closest Lidl grocery store to our new villa in a neighbourhood full of restaurants and stores. We found an organic market which had everything we could possibly want in the fruit/veggie/nut description and the prices were excellent. It was far more Portuguese than where we are now and for the first time it was agreed by the shopkeeper and me that I needed to learn Portuguese, lol! There was a butcher, a florist, a bakery and many other storefronts we could not readily recognize, names now on the list of words to learn. I also have to admit that we are solidly in the camp of wanting to live like the middle class Portuguese…there is no air conditioning in sight, terrifying, and things are topsy turvy on top of each other in a not so charming way if you’re the one living in it. Lovely to look at though. I’m a bit ashamed. There is no option of my being native here so I guess this is just another step into accepting my needs, wants and realities.

Anyway back to the exploration. For reasons unknown, we decided to hike it to our actual new neighbourhood, in the heat of the day, on slender higgledy piggledy sidewalks or on tarmac dodging cars. You do not want to dodge cars here. At some point in this trek, we realized the heat was back. We were dying, both of us and the dog, not just me. Mark checked his phone and gargled ‘it’s 88 degrees…’, stricken with disbelief. We had just walked well over a mile at one o’clock and there was no relief in sight. Really, it’s just around this bend we kept thinking. Our bedraggled threesome finally arrived at the local bakery where we collapsed theatrically begging for water – okay not quite but almost. That last quarter mile was a bitch, as they say. We didn’t leave Casa Vela the next day.