Well, certainly not the striking air traffic controllers. I lost my whole day of sightseeing today thanks to them. But Lisbon is in Portugal… Except you have to fly over the whole of France to get here. And when their ATC’ers are striking that means that you have a traffic jam in the sky that takes incredibly long. We had a three plus hour delay leaving Amsterdam. I got to know my seat very well and listened to a lot of music.

I am disappointed because I specifically planned this trip to have to today to see things I didn’t see last time and to sit in the sun 🙂 While I won’t hold this against France forever, I imagine that I won’t be so susceptible to those marketing emails that come with 29 euro fares to Paris and Lille from Thalys. 😉

My seatmates were Americans. I did my best to not have any contact because the Mrs (in the middle) was a champion complainer and her husband kept his nose buried in his book the whole entire time. I imagine this is probably what their home life looks like too 😉

And of course, this morning, while I was doing the last of the laundry, the drain that the washer hose goes into flooded the floor. OY. So, that’s on my list of things to fix when I get home. I think it is a design flaw. And since I don’t know how successful I will be enlarging the drain, I’ll probably have to make some trips to the hardware store and ask for some help. Or I could just stop washing clothes and always buy new ones…

I like Lisbon very much. I caught the metro to downtown, where our office is. I love how the names of all of the Metro stations sound like expressions. I feel like there should be exclaimation points behind their names as if they were ready to pop! It all sounds very dramatic in Portguese. Some things I can easily figure out, involving names of saints and what not, but then there are other words that are not so easy. The Metro is clean and cheap so I got my reloadable card and will use it to get back to the airport on Wednesday.

While we were waiting to leave, I got a long email from my dad. Apparently, it was inspired by the Kanban training he had to sit through this week. Heh, there’s your tax dollars at work. I’ll write him back but I need to do some thinking about what I want to say first. Like with conversations, he can handle exactly 8 minutes. After that, no more. So, I switched to paper letters instead – doing my part to keep various postal agencies in business. And we’re not close, which also makes it a challenge to figure out how much does he actually really want to know about me? I am never really certain.

For sure though, dinner is required before tackling that response 😉