Lisboa

It's Monday morning and after 4 wonderful days we are leaving Madrid. We flew out of Portugal Thursday afternoon, we'd spent the last few days with a really wonderful couple, Hugo and Manuela, who live in Lisbon. Hugo is a chef and a photographer and Manuela is a fashion editor/stylist for a magazine in Lisbon. Hugo owns a cooking school which is attached to their beautiful home, right at the start of barrio alto in Lisbon. We spent 3 days with them and it was so nice. They are both big into food, so Erik and I learned A LOT. They are also well traveled and gave us all sorts of tips about our trip! One night Erik went to one of Hugo's classes (this one was featuring a well known chef from Alentejo) and I went with
Manuela to a fashion-y exhibition. It was for a new tailoring company based out of Porto. Their thing is high quality custom hand made suits. Everything they make they make for that client, there is no basic suit that gets altered. Pretty interesting stuff. They had little booklets of fabric laid out on the table to show examples of what type of suit you could make. Lots of cashmere and animal pelt (which was sad). Interesting though. There was champagne and a dj but it was still pretty mellow.

The rest of the time Erik and I walked around Lisbon and checked out the sights. Lots of castles and old architecture. Lisbon I really like. I wasn't too thrilled about Portugal at first, but I would like to check it out again-in the summer.