Portugal: Day Ten (decimo dia)

Sunday. Domingo. John has no game and we have no plans. We bought some instant espresso (Nestle brand, of course) the other day and tried to make coffee at home. It is decent, but nothing compares to the galaos and capuchinos they make at Pic-Nic.

After we made coffee, we went for a long walk, sans Romeo. Originally we went to watch a futsol (read: soccer on basketball courts with a denser ball) tournament, but it was over by the time we got to the gymnasium. Instead, we walked along the harbor, checked out a market we hadn’t been to yet (lots of frozen meat but no fruta or pao (fruit or bread), and sat down for a galao and my first Portuguese pastry which was a chocolate croissant. Croissant de chocolate.

After we were finished at Pic-Nic, we went for a stroll through the Park Zoo, Parque Zoologico. They mostly have bunnies and birds, but they also have two different types of monkeys. One is a spider-monkey (we guess, because there are no signs, not even Portuguese ones), and the other is some type of baboon. I say that because after a minute or so of talking to the two of them through their fenced cage, one of them turned around and showed us his bulbous and red-raw ass. We promptly moved on.

They also had some peacocks, chickens, turkeys, ducks, coy fish, and one turtle. For a free park zoo, it was surprisingly clean. We headed home—John had made plans with some of his team and the junior team to go play soccer in a field up one of the lombas. I took this time to go for my fourth Azorean run. Lina had told me one of the lombas is not so bad to run on. It starts after you cross the river, and goes up over the big beach. I have learned that taking Romeo on runs is not fun for either of us. This is one of his favorite positions:

While Romeo has been known to hit this pose and many similar to it all over New England, this was taken in our apartment in Povoacao.

So, I took him for two laps around the villa and then dropped him back off at 2.4 miles. I decided to try going up the other lomba that Lina said was run-able. I went .75 miles up and back down. From the top, you can see the whole villa. The ascent began very slowly but got increasingly more intense. I was in the zone, so I didn’t take any pictures but I will, so check back. I ended up doing another lap around the villa after I finished the lomba for a total of 6.0 miles: my longest run in Povoacao yet.

Turns out John was playing a little further up the same lomba I had tried to run up. I say tried because apparently if you keep going eventually you come back down into the villa somewhere else. I haven’t made it that far up yet.

Something else we learned since being here is that we’re good at nothing. Not that we aren’t good at anything, but we’ve gotten exceptionally good at doing nothing. When we lived in the states, I was up by 5:15am everyday and John by 6:00am usually and we would both work until at least 7:00 or 8:00pm (and then sometimes John would play soccer after all this). I worked with my girl Joan in the mornings before heading to FH to watch my babies or coach, and John would coach all day.

This is me & Joan on one of our last mornings together before I moved. You can tell she’s totally upset about it.

This is from one of my last days in my office. Sawyer and Drew are helping me get everything finished. #drewby #soysoy #love

We’d have our personal training clients, and in between it all we would vacuum, and email, and phone call, and make sure everything was stocked and clean. We would do this 6 if not 7 days a week. And we loved it. All that seems eons ago now that we’re living on island time; we sleep in, we work out, we take time to cook and eat meals, we drink galaos and capuchinos and these things somehow take allllllll day. Even when John trains the juniors and has practice, he is only gone from 6:30-10:30pm. On Monday I start teaching at ALKE Fitness, so maybe I’ll become a productive human being again. Maybe.