Day 10 - Lisbon

On day 10 we docked at Lisbon, which is the capital of Portugal. When we got off the ship, we found a taxi that could take seven people. The reason that Portuguese is a lot different than Spanish is because the Portugal was settled by people from Tyre. The first stop was a palace, which was the King and Queen's vacation home when it was built. After we went through that, we stopped at another palace, which was the main palace at one time. After we had gone through that I was tired of palaces, and we went to a Moorish Castle. We had to wait for our taxi driver, because he was having lunch. All of the other taxi drivers said that he was a bad taxi driver.

The Moorish Castle was built on a steep hill, so even though the taxi took us most of the way there was still a hike up, so our Grandparents stayed behind (they had also seen it before.) The Castle was very strong, and since it was on a hill could not easily be surprised by any large number of men. This was one of the first castles that the Portuguese drove the Moors out of. It's walls were not very high from the inside but since it was on a cliff, the walls were high from the outside. After we went through the castle we asked the driver to take us to a place where we could go shopping. He did, and we looked around there for about ten or twenty minutes. After that we came back to the cruise ship. In the port, the taxi driver showed us some monuments at which he stopped to let us take pictures. When we got back to the ship, and Daddy was paying the taxi driver, the taxi driver hid one of the bills and pretended like Daddy had not given him enough. Daddy had seen him do it so he did not give him another one. Here are some pictures:

An aqueduct built in the 18-century that the driver said the Romans built (but they did not)

Looking down the wall (you can see the ocean far out there)

Me standing next to the wall

The Castle from the bottom of the hill


The steep castle wall

Daddy talking about the castle

The Castle walls from inside the Castle

One of the Bastions

Some of the ramparts

The Effects of Sin

Last Friday we had something unusual happen to our car at Daddy's office building. Joshua had been sent down to get something out of the car and when he was looking at the ground he saw glass. He thought that someone had broken a bottle, but when he looked up it was our car window! It was the front passenger window on the Volvo. They used a tool that made a scratch in the paint that went down to the metal. The glass was all over the car when we saw it. They had broken in to look for a laptop in Stephen's briefcase, but there was not one so they stole our radio. Too bad they didn't take Stephen's school books (ha! ha!)

The window cost $77 but the radio cost $99! The worst part of it all was that they did not eject the CD (ha! ha! ha!) The CD was the easiest to replace because we just had to burn a new CD from Audible (it was The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Vol. Set) by Shelby Foote). It was very providential that there was not a laptop in the bag or we wouldn't just be spending $176! We did not even bother calling the police because they would of just done a report and nothing else. And guess who gets to pay for replacing the window, but not the radio? You guessed it - the one who left his briefcase in the car.

These are some pictures we took:

This is where the radio used to be

This is where we put plastic over the window

This is the glass on the floor and the book that they left