Peri Peri

My mother has diagnosed our rat (Baylee) with Cancer. A couple of phone calls ago our Japanese fighting fish (Kyzer) was ‘not looking so good.’ I’m beginning to think I left my poor boys in the wrong hands. Ky is over 2 years old so it is to be expected that he may ‘not be looking so good.’ But my wee Bay-Bay is barely 18 months old, I gave strict instructions for Bay-Bay to be taken to the vet (the one where he has a file, he got the sniffles before we left and needed antibiotics from a tiny syringe for a couple of weeks). I hope they are both there when we get home... mother dearest.

We have just spent three nights in Portugal. On arriving in Portugal we had another one of those moments when we’ve realised that neither of us really wanted to come to Portugal, neither of us had a clue about what we were doing to do with our time in Lisbon. So Ri pulled out the trusty lonely planet and found a castle, a museum, a gallery and a couple of recommended restaurants. We ended up eating a Nood (an Asian fusion restaurant) twice because they made the YUMMIEST vegetarian ramen noodles. We had a brilliant time in Lisbon! The castle was interesting and fun to walk around and the museum was a bit different. The most surprising bit for me was the modern art gallery, after the Guggenheim in NYC I thought that I hated modern art galleries. Turns out I only like the good modern art galleries with well thought out/ clever themes and pieces of art! Which were both lacking at the Guggenheim. Who knew that modern art wasn’t just for toss pots? I’d say it surprised us both.

On the most part the people here in Portugal have been really lovely to us, the old ladies seem to yell at us a bit, but from what we can tell they seem to be yelling advice at us, so even they appear to mean well. Taxi drivers here is Lisbon have been awesome. We took a taxi home from the museum and it looked like the driver was doing the dance we knew so well from Italy (where the metre runs while he locates the hotel in a map after trying the gps and a couple of other methods that fail) but after the dance the Portuguese taxi driver reset the metre telling us that he’s never charge us for that sort of thing immediately ranking him as *hero* in Ri’s books.

We can’t seem to be able to remember any Portuguese, we have tried to memorise thank you so many times but it just will NOT stick. It doesn’t help that there is a male and a female thank you. Sorry Portugal.

Our last day in Dublin was a good one! We went to the Guinness Storehouse at St James’s gate Brewery, and it was a surprisingly good day out. I don’t like beer very much, but Guinness is alright. We learned all about how you make beer, then went to the (free) tasting room, then learnt about how to cooper a barrel, then learnt how to pour (free) Guinness (while Ri was pouring his the guy who had provided the instructions on how to pour a Guinness pointed to Ri and said “that is how you’ll see the professionals doing it up stairs”.... argh he just has to do everything right doesn’t he!), then we looked at some ads for Guinness, then went up for a free Guinness at the Gravity bars with a view of Dublin.



We only have one week left in Europe before we are off to Thailand. I have love, love, loved every minute of this leg of our journey. I don’t think I would change a thing.