Ericeira 1 November 2023

Starting November Correctly

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   We started the morning with a great breakfast in our hotel.  Our previous hotel delivered freah bread and Pasteis de Nata to the room and we had eggs and cheese in our fridge, but the hotel in Ericeira has a small dining room with eggs, bread, cheese, fruit, coffee, and cereal.
. After breakfast, Cindy and I walked along a path that followed the cliff's edge all the way to the northern part of town.  We saw several surf schools and people on the beach all enjoying the beautiful weather.  Meanwhile, Cindy carried a bag of stale bread to feed the birds.  Spoiler alert - she forgot to feed the birds so she still has bread in her purse.
  We found a real "supermercado" that closely resembled a grocery store in the United States, so Cindy was able to feed her addiction to Coca Cola products by buying a 12-pack.  
   We stopped at a nice restaurant (Pedra Dura) a few blocks from the beach for a late lunch where Cindy enjoyed a nice steak and I had octopus and sautéed vegetables.  Very tasty! 🐙
   In the process of searching for lunch we discovered the price for a meal in inversely proportional to the restaurant's proximity to the ocean.  For example, one restaurant prices its meal by the kilogram, so if you want grouper, you buy the ENTIRE grouper and pay for it by weight.  At €40/kg, that would have been an expensive meal.
   Our evening was spent enjoying a beer at a local cafe people watching and searching for a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine in our room.  Of course, our evening would not be complete without a trip to the geladaria next door to the hotel! I was once again able to practice more Portuguese and we chatted about all the flavors they sell as well as talking about the translator-induced terror alert in Lisbon last week.  If you didn't hear, a tourist walked into a restaurant and wanted pomegranate juice, but his translator app said "grenade".  Cue up the police sirens and terror alerts!  🍎💥
​   Thursday is expected to be a windy and wet day, so we will probably spend most of the day inside.