Cascais
5th June in Cascais (pronounced Cashcysh)
Cascais is a suburb of Lisbon and has the best beach in the area. It is also the only anchorage to the west of Lisbon.
We tidied up and went to the beach at lunchtime, as we had promised it to Dan. We quickly made friends with a girl Jacqueline (Jack) and her son Tom, Jack is Portuguese nationality but her family is English and she went to the international school in Lisbon. We also got talking with the guys running the watersports on the beach. We had lunch and tea at John Davids bar which offered English papers to read! And called into town to quickly check our email. We invited the guys from the watersports and the girls from the bar to our boat after they finished work at about 8 o’clock, and demolished several bottles of red wine with
them! This was followed by the invitation from some of them to go to their apartment the following evening (6th) for a meal and to stay over. The three who lived in the apartment were all Brazilians, a couple Ana and Dalgas (pronounced Daugas), and Dawdson (pronounced Dautzung). They had worked in Portugal for a couple of years to save up some money, they come from São Paulo. However their employer had them on long hours, very low wages and no employment contracts, apparently although illegal this is common. Also Brazilians living in Portugal are regarded by most Portuguese as second class, although the employment situation they face over here is common with many Portuguese.
7th June we returned on the train to Cascais and did some shopping in the hypermarket near the station, and found Dijon mustard which I had been afraid we would never find! Bought Dan a fishing net and a fishing rod (which we’ll save until his birthday next month), we had also been looking for ages for these.
Spent the rest of the day at the beach and in town. The guys at the beach are great with Dan, they even look after him for short periods of time for us.
8th June we intended to go to the nearby town of Sintra, but we ended up doing various jobs on the boat.
9th June we got up fairly early but still got delayed by the arrival of an American on the boat, whose yacht was anchored near ours, and wanted to have a chat! Eventually at midday we arrived at the bus station and found our bus before long.