We are spending the weekend with our friend Maria (she spent 3 weeks at Chitengo in Gorongosa National Park last summer and became good friends with many of the staff there, including my boss Vasco). She is a very warm and generous person and we are enjoying staying at her home in the country outside of Lisbon. And, she has wireless internet! so it is a chance for a little bit of catching up for us. Plus today is rainy and cool so we have a good excuse to be inside catching up on emails.Ian had the morning of his life, getting a full personal tour of the fire station of the local town. maria's ex-husband is the volunteer fire department manager for that town, so we had an "in" for a tour by the weekend fire chief himself! You can imagine how seriously Ian took this tour - he was so excited he could hardly stand it. he got to climb on the fire trucks and see inside each of them, try on the helmets of the firemen, and see all the rooms where they live in the firehouse. wow. what a day. we will show him lions, elephants, and all kinds of other exciting animals and sights in Africa, and just you wait, he will remember this fire house tour as more important. :-)
We are one week into our one-month adventure in Portugal. I still can barely speak but my understanding is improving. nothing like one-on-one classes to move one along with language skills. The groups with whom we have our lessons specilizes in preparing people to go to do development work in former portuguese colonies, so it's a great way to work with a lot of good leftists :-) Everytime I go to speak Portuguese, turkish comes out, but I am working on that :-)
We had a lovely morning yesterday, taking the train from downtown Lisbon to a neighborhood just a few minutes down the river (Belem) where we toured the beautiful famous "Torre de Belem" (tower of Belem) and ate the best pastries and coffee beside the river. yum.
Next weekend we will spend with our friends Manuel Dematos and his wife Viviene and their daughter Alice. Our IES friends may remember Manuel, who started in Land Resources at the same time as me. Manuel is from Lisbon and now lives in Brussels working for the EU, but they are coming for a vacation in Portugal and will spend some if it with us! We are very happy about that. They met us in Amsterday when we were en route to Mozambique last fall... Good friends. And finally we will have a bit of Portuguese to speak with them!
