Our last day in Portugal. My second trip to Portugal..Sintra will have to wait until my third.

Yesterday was by far the best food day (no, not the morning pastry). We had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant which turned out to be right next to the very bad, awful, terrible Mexican restaurant of the day before. This one has plain walls and delicious food. I had a chickpea burger served with an olive tempenade and other things I have already forgot. The restaurant is called Manjelica, which someone who speaks no Portuguese told me means “basil”. Maybe so.

Dinner was just Edie and me. We stumbled on a very unprepossessing looking restaurant near our neighborhood tram 28 stop. Called Cicero, it had some free outside seats and a unique menu which we didn’t quite understand but looked interesting and we weren’t that hungry and….why not?

We each had two starters and we split a desert. The owner of the restaurant was from Recife, Brazil (we had a long talk with him) and the server (we had a long talk with him) was Portuguese, as was the chef (who must have been too busy to have a long talk with). Edie’s starters were a sardine/roasted peppers (red, green, yellow) combination, and mine was a combination of gravalox and strawberries on crisp and thin rye toast with a thin black olive spread. It was adorned by large capers and (naturally) topped by a square of bitter chocolate. Then, Edie had a stew of black mushrooms and hearts of palm slices (both cooked) in a delicious vegetarian sauce and served with rice, while I had a very tasty sea bass soup. Our shared desert was a thick flan served with tangerine (yes, tangerine) ice cream and chopped pecans (she says walnuts, I say pecans). Our conversations had to do with food in Portugal, politics in Brazil and the U.S. (Trump and Bolsinaro), and what New York would have been like if the Jews could have stayed in Recife in 1654. Did you know that Recife, when under the Dutch had the first synagogue in the western hemisphere?

Our daytime activities included a morning laying low and, after lunch, a Hannah led venture to find vintage shops. Three of the four of us soon tired of this in 100 degree weather, and jumped ship. We hailed a tuk tuk (one of those little open golf cart like tourist wagons) and spent a lot of money being shown the town – various neighborhoods, super views from atop and so forth (so forth being largely the Church of St. This and the Church of St. That). Our tuk tuk driver was from Nepal. He lived in Norway before coming here.

We were left off at the top of the funicular which has been transporting folks up and down for over a century, went into a friendly place for a cold drink, went into an antiquarian book store, and Ubered home. Our very friendly Uber driver was Pakistani. He’s been in Lisbon for several years (he also came here from Norway), praised the reception that Portugal gives immigrants to the skies. I thought Portugal should hire him as an emissary until he talked about how great opportunities were for immigrants since the Portuguese themselves were so lazy.

Maybe he was right. After all, shops seem to be opened at owner’s whims, irrespective of what the posted hours are. And stores and restaurants simply close for vacation for periods of up to a month.

By the way, a shout out to Uber. How easy it makes getting around a European city.

Finally, an almost tragic adventure. We returned from our tuk tuk about 6 p.m. to find we had no air conditioning in the 100 degree heat. While trying to see if there was anything we could do and communicating with our host back in Washington, all the power in the building went out. Details not important, but it was back on as if nothing happened within an hour. We don’t know how extensive the outage was – building? block? neighborhood?

But the power company came to the rescue in record time Must be manned by immigrants.