Portugal, 2025 v1

Oddly, we will be in Portugal twice this year. We are here now for Marnie’s birthday, and will be in the Azores over Thanksgiving for Luke’s 50th. The two trips will be wildly different.

We left Boston at 10:45 at night and landed just before 9am in Lisbon. Subtract a 5 hour time difference and 60-90 minutes from each end of the flight for meal service (who needs or expects dinner on a flight departing at 10:45 at night?!) and you will have not nearly enough time leftover for sleep.

Two sleep-deprived individuals successfully navigated the airport, subway, and train to make the journey from Lisbon to Coimbra.

Coimbra is cute. Hilly, of course, but cute. Several pedestrian-only streets, lots of pretty buildings, and stairs. So many stairs. Walking around here is a phenomenal workout. We spent the first afternoon mostly walking around to stay awake, pausing for a snack in an outdoor cafe.

Portugal has a musical tradition called fado, which is vocal music, usually somber or melancholic, accompanied by guitar (traditional and Portuguese). Coimbra has their own style of fado, exclusively performed by men. Think of the ballad Romeo might have sung to Juliet in her balcony and you get the idea. We went to a performance by local fado artists. It was quite nice, but sooo hard to stay awake (we were tired, warm, and listening to music…a recipe for sleepiness).

Luke found a fancy restaurant for dinner that is adjacent to a pottery factory (in fact, half of the factory was turned into a restaurant, so there are fires and kilns all over). Luke had duck, and I had barley in a herbed cheese sauce with mushrooms. It was all excellent, and the space was super cool.

Coimbra is a university town, so nearly everybody speaks English. We’ve learned how to say “thank you” (obrigada for me, obrigado for Luke), and that’s pretty much all we need. It is remarkably comfortable here. Maybe not quite big enough to be entertaining for the long haul (its 2021 population was 140,000), but certainly enjoyable enough for 4 days.