Refried Neurons

Let’s start with London. It’s Saturday morning, and we were supposed to pack the night before, but instead, we ended up watching Grand Tour Special from Mongolia. Now, we’re running around like headless chickens trying to pack!

Getting to Heathrow from our flat usually takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes by tube, or 40 minutes by car. Laziness won, so we opted for a cab—only to find out it was International Car-Free Day, and major roads like the A406 were shut! As a result, we spent 1 hour and 10 minutes stuck in traffic on the jammed M25.

I was so grateful the flight was delayed when we finally got to the airport—it meant we didn’t have to rush and even had time for breakfast.

Here’s a tip: if you want your order quickly at Giraffe, order online. But if you don’t leave a tip, you’re guaranteed rude service! Yes, I didn’t leave a tip because after waiting 15 minutes, no one bothered to take our order. When I asked if we should order online or if they had table service, I was told they do table service, but no one took the order, and we were running out of time.

British Airways! You hear all the horror stories about budget airlines being short on staff and making a mess of things, but here we were, boarding BA plane, only to be told we were missing a co-pilot 😅.

The pilot apologized and said something along the lines of, “Sorry I boarded you. I know you could have been sitting at the bar, but I didn’t know we wouldn’t have a co-pilot. BA has no idea when one will show up. I’ve even checked their website, and it doesn’t say anything.”

After 30 minutes, the co-pilot finally arrived to a lot of cheers 😁. But then, we were told we’d missed our takeoff slot, and because of that, we needed a new crew, which meant waiting even longer. I mean, WTF?

With a two-hour delay, we finally took off—it wasn’t that bad in the end.

Something that’s never happened to me before, probably because I usually fly economy, is that the pilot came out during the flight to chat with everyone and check how we were handling the delay. Maybe this only happens in business?
One of my friends once flew business class because she’d racked up enough miles from work, but she’s probably not the best example. After boarding, she called to say she was completely hammered or maybe already hungover—and wearing two different shoes. I tried to cheer her up by saying this probably made her fit right in with those anonymous rich people who have dinner at the Ritz in their pajamas.

Anyway, chatting with the pilot was nice. We even asked if the co-pilot was safely in the cockpit—just in case.

We landed after 5 p.m. local time, and after standing in the wrong queue for 15 minutes (because the queue next to you is always faster), we were finally out and looking for our car rental company.

Here’s another tip: when you rent a car, always check if the rental office is at the airport or just near it. It’s not the first time this has happened to us, but I constantly forget that sometimes these cheap rental places are far from the actual airport.

This time wasn’t too bad, though. After 10 minutes of searching for the representative, asking the clueless guy at the information desk, and calling their office, we bumped into him in the car park. Another 30 minutes later, we were on our way in a lovely Fiat 500 to the city center!

We’d never stayed on a houseboat before, though I’d seen them before—but for the life of me, I can’t remember where. What a brilliant idea! Whoever came up with it deserves a big bonus at work. And no, they don’t pay me to say that—this is only my second blog post, so no chance of that.

The whole experience was great. They were well-prepared. Starting with the message I received before we arrived. Since I run a rental business myself, I seriously want to know how they did it! All I manage is a simple text message, but they had pictures, videos, and the whole shebang. Okay, maybe they overdid it with the amount of messages on WhatsApp, but the video showing how to get the keys and access the car park was super helpful.

Oh, and the boat comes with a parking space in the underground car park, right at the entrance to the marina!

The boat is theoretically for four people, but… I can imagine being there with kids for a few nights—not two couples. Mostly because to fit two people in the ‘bedroom,’ you have to pull out the bed, which takes up the entire room. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the bathroom is accessed through that tiny bedroom. Once the bed is out, you have to walk over it to get to the bathroom.

Also, the bathroom door doesn’t close 😅. So, even if you’re close with the other couple, you’d better be really close to manage without a bathroom door at night and them walking over you to get there in a first place.

On the first night, we tried to close it, and all we achieved was scratching the door and bending the bed knobs. Truthfully, no idea if it was us or pretty much everyone before us. Why don’t they use recessed knobs? It would be so much easier! No one would have to wake me up in the middle of the night because they got stuck in the bathroom…

One more issue—and I do mean literally shitty issue. In many southern countries, you can’t flush toilet paper; you have to throw it in the bin. That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse if you can’t close the bathroom door at night! In some places, like the Arab world, they have a douche so you can wash instead of wiping, but this is Portugal—not the Emirates—so they didn’t think it through. Thank God the place was so small that the showerhead reached the toilet! I know that might sound even more revolting to some 😅.

Don’t we all end up talking about poo at some point at parties? This is my moment.

Except for the toilet situation, it was great! We even slept with the rear door open so we could stare at the marina. Thanks to some lovely fisherman, I saw the sunrise, although I can think of a better way to wake up than to the sounds of an old boat engine On another occasion, we watched a proper storm from bed while being just 30 cm from the water!

Yes, the bed got a little wet since it’s literally at the terrace door.

Everything on the boat was IKEA-made, and honestly, I didn’t mind. Not every place needs to be designer.

Naturally, the first thing we did after dropping our bags was grab a beer from the fridge, and like cheerful 5-year-olds “with alcohol,” we rushed to the rooftop terrace to catch the last rays of sun and a bit of sunset.

To finish the day, we hit Pingo Doce (‘Sweet Drop’), a supermarket that in Portugal is a bit nicer, like Waitrose compared to Aldi. The same company owns Biedronka (‘Ladybird’) in Poland, which is more like Aldi or even worse—always with pallets blocking the aisles, and more expensive wine!

I did my Erasmus in Faro, Portugal, and tasted plenty of wines under €5. I concluded that the good Portuguese wines are the ones where you can slide the plastic off the cork easily. If you can’t, don’t bother buying it. Also Portuguese people are crazy about lupin beans, and you’ll find them everywhere as a snack 😋. So if you want to try a local beer snack, get those.

We spent the rest of the evening on the roof, snacking on cheese and beans. We only looked one way, though. Ok, I’m not an architect, never was, and never will be, but I work with them quite a lot, and in my own head, this gives me the right to complain about architecture and urban planning!

The reason we only looked one way is simple: half of the town is made up of pretty old buildings, while the other half is just ugly grey blocks of flats and hotels that have seen better days. It’s like urban planning existed until WWII and then suddenly didn’t. Unfortunately, this isn’t just Portugal’s issue.

So yeah, sunset—nice. Sunrise—not so much.