How to spend a week in Portugal: Day 1

We didn't have many of the intertubes available at our various lodgings, so I'm just going to post one of my journal entries per day for the next week in something of a recreation of the adventure. So here's what we have for Day (night) 1:

Saturday, 23 April, 2011: Amsterdam to Lisbon

I’m currently writing from the Hotel Fenix in Lisbon, Portugal. We just checked in for the night about an hour ago after taking a short cab ride from the Lisbon airport. We’re taking a week-long holiday around this little country, stopping in several cities between Lisbon and Porto.

Since our fight didn’t get into Lisbon until after 9pm local time, by the time we got to the hotel and settled in, it was basically too late to go out and do any exploring – that’ll happen tomorrow. We’re spending most of the day either in down town Lisbon or the nearby area Belem, before picking up a rental car in the evening and driving north to Obidos.

We’re basically following a truncated version of Rick Steves’ recommendations for a two-week Portugal trip. We’ve each read (or mostly read) his guide book for the country already, but I think the plan is to reread sections in the car on the way to each new destination and pick out landmarks, restaurants and ‘walks’ to do and see on the fly.

Definitely haven’t seen much of the city of Lisbon so far, but here’s what I’ve learned about Portuguese: ‘thank you’ is ‘obrigado’ (literally, I’m obliged, I believe); and the language sounds almost Slavic because pretty much any time there’s an ‘s’ in a word, it’s pronounced as ‘sh’, making the language very, well, mushy-sounding.

The hotel is nice enough. We didn’t pay a ton for our first-floor room, which we only booked about a week ago, so it is what it is. The stay we’re really looking forward to is further north; we’ve booked a night in a ‘traditional’ Portuguese farmhouse B&B, where we’re doing dinner as well. Should be really cool. I don’t know any more details, but my plan is to do a little light journaling each night. And hopefully it will be a little more interesting, informed and insightful than this entry.