Today is our last full day in Lisbon and Portugal – tomorrow afternoon we head to the airport for the trip home. Our activity for the day was simple – get driven out to the country to have lunch with a local family. Although we obviously agreed to this as part of our trip planning, we both were a bit nervous about having to spend hours with some strangers.
Our hosts, Veronica and her husband, periodically invite foreign visitors into their home for some food, wine and conversation. They live in an old house originally built by Veronica’s grandfather and which they have occupied for twelve years now. It’s a charming mix of old and new, and we sat on a lovely patio under a shady tree while we enjoyed the dishes she prepared, and talked for hours.
The food was all prepared from scratch using fresh ingredients and recipes that Veronica likes to experiment with. All of it was delicious.
This sort of thing can go south in so many ways, both for the host and the guest. We were fortunate: we found them both to be intelligent, well spoken (in English!) and extremely pleasant to spend an afternoon with. We can only hope that they felt the same way. Our conversation ranged from parents to children, to home owning, to jobs and work, and even to politics.
So this was a highly successful way to spend the last day of vacation. This evening, we need to organize and start packing, and tomorrow we’ll have a little time to relax before we head home.
After I finished writing the first part of this post, we decided to go out for a bite. On our way out, we went downstairs to the courtyard patio near the hotel restaurants, as we had received a letter under our door the day before inviting us to a “10 year anniversary party” for the hotel, We didn’t really think that it would amount to much, just a few guests hanging around. But maybe we could get a free drink out of it.
Well, we were wrong. As we got out of the elevator, we heard loud music and it became obvious that there was a party going on! Lots of people, lots of drinks, lots of hors d’oeuvres. A DJ pumping the tunes, an acrobatic dancer spinning in an elevated hoop. So we went in and grabbed some giant blue-colored G&Ts, and stood around watching the crowd.
Most of the guests were dressed for a cocktail party – long dresses for the women, sport jackets and slacks for the men (we were most definitely not). A few of the party goers were dressed more like us. I finally flagged down the restaurant maitre de and asked who all the guests were. He said they were the hotel’s best customers from over the years.
So we enjoyed the scene for a while, finished our drinks then walked out to find the bite we were planning an hour earlier.
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