A week in Lisbon area – Summer holiday

It has been two weeks since I was back in Portugal, but guess what? I am flying back tomorrow again!! haha More about that in a future post.
For today’s, I wanted to share with you what I did during my week in the Lisbon area.
It was a well-spent week and I’m super glad to share with you all the ins and outs of this trip.

After saying goodbye to our brownie-boy (aka Cooper), we started our drive to Brussels; of course, this didn’t go without a nice traffic jam (and detour) of about 30 minutes.

Luckily, we left well in advance, because, in Belgium, you just simply never know…

By the time we got to the terminal, we had some lunch (at the usual Italian) and soon enough we boarded our TAP flight, which wasn’t as full as I’d expected! YAY!!

For the first time, in a long while, I finally arrived in Lisbon without a major delay! The trip had officially started positively.

This week was filled with many great meetups, from family dinners to friends reunions, fun moments, a few beach visits, and obviously, delicious food and drinks!

Let me try to summarize as well as I can, or else this post will be gigantic!

We started our holiday, on Tuesday (Monday was a travel day, so it doesn’t count), and on the menu, we had planned a visit to a great beach, which I guess it was a first time for me (as well as for Mr.A).

Later in the week, we returned one more time, because we simply loved it!

Which beach am I talking about? COMPORTA!!

It really looks like paradise, doesn’t it? And I even saw dolphins swimming by. Beautiful!

On a future post, I’ll write more and give you more information about this beach, I promise.

This day didn’t end without us going for some good Caracois; a Summer and very Portuguese snack option. Most foreigners wouldn’t even dare to eat snails, but let me tell you: Portuguese love them!

The next day, it was time to meet some good friends of ours for lunch; no beach today.

Our meeting point was at Docas (Docs in English), where we had a marvelous fish for lunch. Sorry, no photos of the food because as you know, I suck at food blogging! haha

It was just too good to let it wait.

Totally recommend this area in Lisbon if you are looking for fish dedicated restaurants.

From there, and after strolling a bit through the overcrowded downtown of Lisbon, we decided to take a break at one of the many rooftop options in Lisbon.

This time, we went to check out the newly Rossio Gastrobar, located on the 7th floor of Hotel Altis Avenida, right in the heart of Lisbon. I drank a tasty Raspberry cocktail; so good!

What a lovely view, right?

The third day in Portugal and on our plan it was a visit to my beloved Sesimbra.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, this name comes as no surprise.

One of my favorite beaches, even though the water is ice cold. Not much swimming for me; instead, I read and enjoyed the Sun as much as I could.

Later on the day, we had a lovely family dinner with most of my cousins.

It was so nice to see some faces I haven’t seen a while; some even many years!

The evening flew by and many new nice memories are now registered in our minds.

On the next day, we returned to Comporta where we had once again a great sunny day. At this point, Comporta had become our favorite beach. No surprise!

With heavy hearts, we had to leave earlier since we had scheduled a nice dinner with my friends which turned out to be a fun night, with lovely chats, great laughs, and promises of a future meetup in the near future!

Fifth, and technically, our last day in Portugal, had a major twist to it since our beach visit got canceled due to some family affairs.

So make it up, I went for an earlier hairdresser visit and once I was ready we headed to Lisbon downtown, with no much in mind except enjoy the views and go rooftop hopping.

I don’t know about you, but this is already very exciting to me.

 

With the time, I realized, I became one of those people who just enjoy sitting on a nice terrace table, with a tasty cocktail and nice lounge music background and simply relax…

So this time, we visit two rooftops:
The first stop was at the Chiado Hotel Rooftop bar, followed by a second visit to Rossio Gastrobar.

Once our bellies started to demand food, we visited a traditional Portuguese restaurant called Pinoquio, known for its great seafood dishes and the house specialty: Pica-pau.

Pica-pau consists of small chunks of beef cooked in a garlic, butter and bay leaves sauce and served with fries.

It may not sound much, but if you are ever in Lisbon, go and taste it! It’s delicious!!!

Since we had an early flight to catch, there was not much for us to do later that evening than pack our bags and catch some sleep.

– – – –

And that was it, for this first week of my Summer vacation. I’m really glad that I had the chance to visit mostly new places and I hope you enjoy and find this post somehow interesting.

I will try to remember to take photos of the meals, in the future! *pinky promise*

Oh, BTW: how do you like these non-edited photos?? Straight out of my phone!!

I’m happy they turned out good; it makes the whole blogging on the go concept much more achievable for me. hahaha

See you soon!

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