Perplexing Portugal Surprise!

“During my senior year of college, I spent my fall semester abroad in the United Kingdom. We had a ten day break in late October, so a friend and I got super cheap round-trip tickets to Portugal, and we headed there on a shoestring budget. And I’m not kidding about the shoestring part of it. We probably spent barely $12–15 per day there on average, and that was including transportation and lodging. Mind you, this was 1991, so I don’t think you can get by so cheap in Portugal now! So here we are, a pair of tall, reasonably attractive 21-year-olds, going off to spend ten days in a country where neither of us spoke the language. Now at the time, it didn’t seem like many Portuguese spoke English. We spent our first full day in Lisbon exploring the old part of the city, I wanted to go see the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (the Monument of the Explorers) and perhaps some of the sites around it. It was too far for us to walk, so we finally found somebody who explained to us we could get a trolley from the Cais do Sodré to the monument. When we arrived, there were several merchants set up in the area. We weren’t sure if it was a farmer’s market or what exactly, but we wandered around as we waited for our departure time. At one point, I turned around and came face to face with a grizzly, nearly toothless old man. He waved a balloon on a leash at my face, startling me, and before I could recover, that when things got really weird. He reached up, pulled my face close to his, and he gave me a huge kiss on the cheek. He jumped away laughing, and an older lady that I assume was his wife started yelling at him. My travel mate was dying laughing and I was just stunned. There’s lots I still remember from that trip, but that moment was unforgettable.”