On Christmas Day on December 25, 2016, I landed in Lisbon (Portugal). I flew from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where — for several weeks — I had been giving Thai massage sessions and several Reusi Dat Ton (Thai Yoga) workshops.
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As you can already imagine, things didn’t work out for me in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). Therefore, I had been looking for a job in Portugal, and I would start working at a car rentals call center in the first week of January 2017.
I took the flight on December 25, simply because that’s the date when flights are always the cheapest (often among the cheapest of the year, to give you a tip).
I had booked a guesthouse room in Lisbon for a week, also the cheapest, which then of course turned out to be a very shabby place, with a very dirty shared kitchen and perhaps even worse bathrooms.
The first night turned out to be immediately an exciting one. I had already heard some heavy banging, noises, and loud voices in the neighboring room, ignored that (I’m somewhat used to weird things during my years of traveling), but at about 1 a.m., I heard some hard knocking on my door with the phrase “Polícia!”
So, yeah, that’s something better not to ignore, I guess. And, “a bit” disturbed and half-sleepy, I opened the door. They wanted to see my papers; you know, things like identification and stuff. They asked me who I was, why I was in Lisbon, and then, seemingly satisfied, they left.
Well, that was Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day I asked the receptionist of the building what it was all about that night, and he said that some “thugs were arrested,” without giving any further explanation.
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You bet that I didn’t want to stay there any longer, so I looked on the Internet for some other (cheap, of course) guesthouses nearby, and went out to check on some of them, at least to be able to sleep in a somewhat less obscure place.
Apart from all that, I was really enchanted by the city center of Lisbon. At the time, still fully in renovation (with European Union money) and a bustling place — a rising star-city in Europe.
Until the day that I started with my call center job in January, I actually had two wonderful weeks of exploring the city and enjoying the culture, traditions, and ancient architecture.
With perhaps one exception: my new guesthouse, which, although safe, had no heating, and hence I was kind of freezing my ass off — as the saying goes — in the little attic room.
