City Life

The draw of the city lights proved too much, so we headed off to Lisbon at the end of January to catch a film festival.

Our friend Miguel invited us to come, stay and see some of the documentaries in the Panorama festival. Since his film Documente Boxe (about Portuguese professional boxers) was being shown, we even got free tickets.

Aside from seeing a handful of documentaries, we had quite a fun-filled weekend. For a start, it snowed on Sunday morning. Not that exciting -- just a few flakes, really. But it turned out to be the first snow in Lisbon for 52 years. So in a way our trip away from Tabua to the supposed warmth of Lisbon turned out to be a wild goose chase. But it was also a food chase; we found a Chinese supermarket that stocked quite a lot of Japanese food items and carried our rucksacks back full! In our area, the most we can find is soy sauce and perhaps, in Coimbra, a few things like tofu and nori.

Finally, we went out on Saturday night for what Miguel told us was the best 'baccalhau com natas' in Portugal. We found this quite a claim, especially as Megumi has become quite an adept at this particular dish, even making it a few times in Tokyo before we came over here. (Baccalhau is Portugal's national ingredient -- salted cod. It's an interesting story in itself, but I'll leave that for another time. Suffice to say that the dish would probably be called something like 'salted cod in cream' in English.) We headed off to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in one of the back streets not far from Miguel's place in Anjos. It's the kind of place that we'd be very unlikely to stumble across in the normal course of things, and even if we did we'd probably not go in because it would look so empty. (We were the only customers the whole time we were there and got the impression the place was only open because Miguel had called....)

As with most Portuguese restaurants we've experienced, the place didn't have a huge amount of character. Flourescent lights, TV, plain decor. But it was pleasant enough. And the amazing thing was, the food was excellent. I'd say it's perhaps the best baccalhau com natas in the country.... Certainly it's the best we've had, and we consider ourselves something of experts already.

Tram in a Lisbon street after the snow turned to rain...