Bill and Maria To Portugal 2019

3 April Someone asked Laurie the other night if she wanted any wine and Jason, who has done the majority of driving on this trip, blurted out “Don’t give her any wine, she’s the back seat driver!”    Very, very funny.   Jason and I later agreed that would be a perfect New Yorker cartoon. Two things about this trip: First, over the course of the trip we’ve strolled down any number of extremely narrow streets in old towns and it struck me that the typical wall-to-wall houses had one door and one window on the second floor.   I imagine that these places, although charming from the outside, must be relatively dark and claustrophobic with next to no air flow.     But I guess back in the day just being inside the town walls and the protection it afforded overrode all else.    Houses on narrow streets   Also, we’ve gone up and down any number of medieval steps to enter cathedrals and palaces and I’ve noticed that back in their heyday, these places didn’t bother to de

March 31 Continued Had dinner 4 miles up the hill from our hotel at Veranda da Estrela.   Our very cute waitress Johana, who spoke perfect English, turned out to be a fantastic standup comic and we all had a lot of fun working through the menu and the ups and downs of being Portuguese or American.   Once Johana found out Jason and Laurie were from Florida, she started scheming to get them to smuggle her there.   I guess I was not surprised she was a character since I had our hotel book this restaurant for dinner and the concierge was laughing her butt off on the phone trying to book us.    This reminded us that a number of the wait staff we’ve encountered on this trip have been very funny comedians.       This is definitely a contrast to some of the older Portuguese we see walking through towns who seem somewhat very dour and probably worn out from years of medieval Christianity.     Johana’s fellow waiter also spoke excellent English and while the two of them teased each other n