Getting into the apartment

We finally find wifi and John is able to message Madalena who we

 are renting from and we meet her and her son at the apartment to be given the keys, a tour of the house, a lot of information about the area and a quick tour in her car of restaurants, market, etc that are near.  It’s hysterical that Oscar is getting to be in my arms again for a drive and I think that he is now getting spoiled by it, because he doesn’t want to be in the carseat anymore.  In America, he had one way to travel.  In the carseat, in

can't really see the purple tree very well

  Europe he can ride in my arms, he can walk up and down stairs on the train, he can sit in his own seat on the bus, or stand up in the metro and hold onto a bar. The carseat has to be pretty boring after all this stuff and we hear it when we put him back there now.  The apartment is amazing, but in the time that we took our tour, the parking area has filled up with cars and now we have to park close to the apartment and it’s going to require finesse.  We do go down to grab food and I sit in a parking lot waiting for John to come out and then fire across the square to get him while ducking in and out of bus lanes.  It’s insane and there  

view out the front window of our Air bnb

are intersections without stop signs.  How do they do this?  I have already almost run over a pedestrian because I’m not used to giving them the right of way, I have to watch for zippy little motorcycles that come around me without warning.  It’s not a good start to the stay in Lisbon and it starts to rain as John comes out with food.  After stressful parking and then eating, we are starting to calm down about the situation.  The condo that we are in is amazing and we have the most spectacular view out the 

view out the kitchen window of our air bnb

window of the Puente de 25 of Abril (the Golden Gate looking bridge) and Christ the redeemer like in Brazil.  The condo has all the amenities we could ever want and we’re able to start a load of wash in a washing machine that beats mine at home a hundred times over.  We’re too mentally exhausted to wait for them to finish and hang them up that night though, but for the first time in a long time, John and I get a room to ourselves and Oscar has his own room.  This seems to make for happier sleeping all the way around because I wake up the next morning like I have come out of a coma.  Mainly because of the awesome pillows.  In Italy, and this is always the case in Italy and even on Italian cruise ships, the pillows were flat as pancakes and useless.  In France, they were fluffy, but made up of down that runs away from your head and then you have nothing under your head again.  In Madrid, we were in the hostel which I don’t even want to think about anymore and the pillows at Madalena’s were like heaven had happened.  John and I wake up before Oscar and we all have a leisurely cup of milk, tea, coffee before getting dressed and heading out into the Belem area of Lisbon.