Lisbon, Portugal

Myself and 4 other wine people flew from SFO to New Jersey to Lisbon earlier this month.  The trip was sponsored by our cork supplier to educate us about the cork we are purchasing.  We left Saturday morning and arrived in Lisbon Sunday morning at 9am.  Even though we were all tired, we began sightseeing in Lisbon.  This gorgeous piece of architecture is The Jeronimos Monastery.

I appreciate that the trip planners didn't have us go straight to the cork forest or the factories on the first day.  My mental abilities after flying all night were very poor.  Looking at pretty buildings was about all I could handle.  It's funny because the flight from New Jersey to Portugal is only 6 hours, but it's an international flight so they have to feed you.  We boarded the plane, two hours later they served dinner, then turned the cabin lights off for 3 hours and then woke everyone to feed us breakfast before landing.

It looks like a normal size door for me!  I guess most Portuguese people are short.  My fellow traveler Matt shows that it is in fact a tiny door.

 Next we went to the Belem Tower.  Very beautiful fortress, with cannons!  There is a tiny spiral staircase, not recommended for claustrophobics.   The same staircase is used for going up and down at the same time, I don't recommend it.

 But if you do make it to the top, you get to see this view.  And the bridge, looks just like the golden gate bridge, it's red and  everything.

To me this looks like San Francisco was photoshopped out.  And they put the giant Jesus statue from Rio De Janeiro there instead. 

 And then it was lunch time.  The Portuguese really impressed me with their hospitality and appetites. But I had a hard time with the schedule,  I like to eat dinner at 6pm and be in bed by 9pm.  Here we didn't start eating 'til 9pm and didn't get back to the hotel until after midnight.  The first few nights I wanted to fall asleep in my fish.

What cracked me up is that even though to me we were eating absurdly late, we were ALWAYS the first ones at every restaurant we went to.  This must have been the first among many give aways that we were an American group.

I was expecting to eat a lot of fish in Portugal but I was not expecting barnacles.  They look like sloth claws.  They didn't taste much better either.  But I can cross "eating barnacles" off the bucket list.

The following day, Monday, we drove to the forest.

 They harvest the raw material from May to late August, so we didn't get to see anything being harvested from the tree.  We did see the piles and piles of raw material.

 After the cork is harvested, they pile it up to "season" for a minimum of 6 months.  They leave it exposed to the elements, mainly to get the humidity levels to equilibrate.  

Then they boil the planks (to get them flat and workable), sort the pieces by size and ship it to the north to be punched.

More on boiling next week!

-L