In Portugal

11:58 PM

I flew to Portugal with my parents this morning. It was pretty uneventful, other than I had around 1 hour of sleep only. I couldn't fall asleep until like 1:30 AM, and my dad set up an alarm to wake us up at 3 AM. Getting packed was tiring.

The experience of writing about this morning actually feels a bit unreal, because it feels like it happened years ago, but that I somehow still remember the events vividly. So yeah, this morning happened this morning, not years ago. We packed up, got everything ready, and then headed out before 4 AM. There was a taxi we scheduled ahead of time waiting for us. It dropped us off at the airport pretty early, we got our tickets, checked in our bags, and then headed to the gate for our next flight.

Our gate was a bit special, we had to take a bus that took us to an entirely separate building, and in this building there were other gates A through E (from what I remember). So this one gate had at least 5 other sub-gates. The coolest part is that there were these large "windowsill" areas next to the windows. The windows, which are gigantic by the way and span from floor to ceiling, were designed in such a way that the windowsill was like a bench. Except it was very long, probably 2 meters long, and .75 meters wide. Most people can lie down there fully, and there were a bunch of these. Some people were sleeping in them, others were just sitting in them, so I claimed the one next to where my parents were sitting and I fully laid down there, I took a nap there for like 20 minutes.

Then to board the plane, we actually had to head outside and walk to the plane. This is kind of where I felt like everyone seemed like an NPC. It was freezing cold outside. My mom and I were freezing and shivering. To get on the plane, you had to stand in line for a while, probably 2-3 minutes of standing outside in the cold, with the cold wind blowing heavily. I was totally freezing. You know what? No one else was. No one made any comments on how cold it was, only my mom and I, and we were speaking in English since we speak English out in public.

When we got in our seats, we sat down near the front, the 6th row. So I could see literally everyone standing outside in the cold for 2-3 minutes at a time. Some people were wearing minimal jackets, there wasn't anyone who wore shorts or a shirt, but there were people who had their thin jackets unzipped and wore a thin V-Neck shirt underneath it, and they still weren't shivering or anything. There wasn't any "WHEW" sighs of relief when getting on the plane. I think I made such a sound when I got on and could finally stop shivering.

It was insane to me observing people in this line outside, climbing up the staircase, and just standing there for a few minutes, and none of them were shivering. They were all just standing there as if it were another summer's day.

The plane ride itself felt instant. I put on a sleeping mask and I fell asleep for basically the entirety of the 3 hour flight. My only memories are brief and feel like they were less than 10 minutes in total.

What's surreal too is that I had this meta concept about dreaming, that my soul temporarily leaves the body during sleep. We all just lose our consciousness when we fall asleep. It's like we are turned off, a gap of time where nothing happens or we hallucinate a "dream", and then we are turned on again.

After landing in Portugal, we went through the whole ordeal of walking around to get through customs, and then going to the baggage claim area and claiming our baggage. I actually think we were one of the first people in our group to go through customs and get our baggage. Of course I'm not confident we were, but it sure felt that way. When we first arrived at the customs part for example, there was no line for any of the machines. After we finished and looked back, the line was massive, like it would take 10-20 minutes of waiting.

Same for every other step, we were pretty much the only ones there at that step, and there was no line that we went through. I can imagine there having been a line after us though.

After that, again we went through the steps of getting an Uber and then being dropped off at our hotel. We made some commentary on things as we passed by them in the car. We rode a Tesla for our Uber. After that, we checked in the hotel, and went to our rooms. We relaxed there for around an hour or two, just relaxing, some of us took a nap. I went down to the gym to check it out, the gym was super nice, and there was an attractive young woman exercising, doing yoga or something in the corner.

After that I went back to our room, and napped or browsed the Internet or something. Then we headed out to eat, we decided to walk to this vegan restaurant that was 30 minutes away. My mom got tired after like 10 minutes of walking, saying she didn't eat anything the whole day and was getting tired, so we went to this other nearby vegan restaurant that was 18 minutes away instead of 30.

It's actually a law in Portugal for every restaurant to have vegetarian options, which is awesome. Most of them also have vegan options, some even have just vegan options since it also encompasses vegetarian. When I told my parents this, they got upset saying why are we walking such a long distance then. Anyway, after a while of walking super slowly around the city, we got to this restaurant, Vegan Junkies, and ate there. My parents got a big double patty burger, and I got 6 tacos. I shared these with my dad, while my dad shared the burger and fries with my mom. My mom wasn't able to finish her portion so she gave me her remainders.

Then we went to a grocery store, and I had to carry this 5.4 liter bottle back to the hotel, walking for like an hour carrying this. We would stop at some places to shop and take pictures, so that's why it took longer.

Oh yeah, yesterday I forgot, we talked to this Japanese man traveling solo. He was a cool dude. Japanese are pretty dang cool people. He said he was just in Ireland for like 5 days I think, and he was just traveling solo. He took these different bus tours to places, and would just take photos with his camera around his neck I think. I think he had a camera around his neck, which is pretty old fashioned. But yeah, he was just an interesting guy, extremely humble. He didn't form any negative feelings about anything. You know when we said we were from the Philippines I thought he would have this like negative view of us, but he only said "ohh Philippines!!" excitedly. Anyway this was yesterday.

So we walked back home, and at home we just rested. I went to the gym to exercise and it felt great. Then i took a shower afterwards.

I' m so sleepy or else I'd have written the previous paragraph in much more detail, but that's essentially what happened.