Wednesday, the day after the Oporto trip, Lisbon had a general transportation strike. We could never figure out the reason behind the strike, but I guess strikes are common enough that the locals didn't really seemed fazed by it. The strike came at a good time for us. We didn't really have anything planned for that day, and our flight from Lisbon was on Friday, when things would be back to normal. We spent the day just wandering around on foot, exploring some of the places we hadn't touched yet.
We did have something going on that night, however. The conference my dad had attended was having a dinner that night, and attendees could bring a guest. We had to walk to conference hotel, where a bus would take the whole crowd to a restaurant downtown, in the Alfama neighborhood. Now, this is a just a big crowd of computer scientists and engineers, people who, in my mind, are probably amongst the worst conversationalists on the planet. I knew I had a night of awkwardness ahead of me.
The crowded everyone (easily over 100 people) into this restaurant which was tucked away in Alfama's cobbled streets. It looked like it might be promising at first but, it wasn't. The food sucked and the conversation (as I predicted) was even worse. My dad and I didn't really know anyone, and the conversation with others didn't go beyond "could you pass the water"? One thing that was interesting was about halfway through the meal a singer and two guitar players hit the stage. I was hoping for some sexy Portuguese babe, but it was just some of old bat. She was pretty good though.
We ended up leaving early, so as to put me out of my misery. Instead of going straight back we took a cab to a bar near our hotel that we had heard about. It was called the Bar Chines (The Chinese Bar). It was pretty wild. The owner was obviously a collector of the most random stuff ever. He then put all that junk in his bar. Mainly random toys, but also paintings and photographs. It was a pretty fascinating place, and the guys working the bar didn't mind us looking around and taking photos (well, my dad did the photo taking, I didn't bring my camera, thinking the dinner with engineers wouldn't be photo worthy). If you are wondering why it was called the Chinese Bar, I don't either. The name really didn't make any sense.
We also ended up spending Thanksgiving in Lisbon. No turkey dinner unfortunately, but our room did have a kitchenette which we used to make chicken soup and salami sandwiches, with some chips to top it off. The pilgrims couldn't have done better than that.
An overall good time in Portugal. The last leg of the trip, Egypt, was coming up. I first had business to attend to in Madrid.
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