July 30. The Music is Gone but Sangria Remains

Today for lunch I ran around hardware stores in Alfama looking for a replacement part of a piece of hardware kids had a bit too much fun with. The first store owner sent me to the second store. In the second store, a group of four men reached the consensus of sending me to Fernando in Lago de Mar. They spoke with someone on the phone to confirm and gave a piece of paper with that information. It was a bit vague, so I stopped by in the first store and asked the guy for more detail. He walked me outside and described where to go accompanying his words with some hand directions. And so I went through the maze of the streets and staircases.

Cute name if transliterated to

Russian

Surprisingly I got very close at one point. There was an artist studio and the girl inside told me to go next door. As I thanked her and started leaving she said that they are closed anyway. Great! So who did the second store guys speak with? I continued walking around, spiraled down to lower level of the street until stopping at a grocery shop with two old ladies inside and showing them the paper. They started to explain something, and then the girl from upstairs showed up and started a screaming match with them. When they were done, the girl demanded to know who send me here. I told her that some men called someone. She said to go back and ask them to call again and figure out where that Fernando is because he moved out months ago. The funny thing is that all the dialogues were in Portuguese on the part of the locals and in bad Spanish body language on my part. Eventually Dan devised a brilliant workaround and we were good.

Before dinner we headed back to Alfama to do some souvenir shopping. Did not find anything in the reasonable price range. But really enjoyed walking around narrow alleyways and staircases and seeing the mixture of beautiful dilapidated buildings with clothes lines and grape wines. Kids listened to some Fado on the way. 

Later in the evening Dan and I came out and found that there were no street performances taking place. Do musicians take a day off on Mondays? The large outdoor performance space that was set up near our house was taken apart as well. The music festival was over. It was strange coming outside and not seeing a crowd of people gathered around the railing. The streets looked deserted. Maybe it is a sign that our stay here is approaching the end as well.

That being said, the two restaurants we wanted to check out were full. We looked inside an Indian restaurant but decided that cooking will take too long, sat down for a moment at creperie enticed by curry smell but it turned out that it was coming from Indian, since they all they had were combinations of cheese and ham with crepes. Finally we stopped over at Restaurante 560. What a great call!

From gazpacho resembling an orange lake with floating crouton islands, to grilled rabbit marinated in lemon juice with spices atop crispy grilled bread, to two more equally enticing appetizers and desert, not to cause any unnecessary suffering to the readers whose imagination is running wild right now. White wine Sangria sweetened with apples, and enriched with mint, lemons and limes was a great accompaniment. Five stars! In all the excitement we found ourselves following the pub crawl crowd afterwards. Fortunately we decided to head home before any damage was done.