Walter and Mike are already in the air: they fly from Syracuse to Newark before flying to Lisbon. Stu and I are sitting in the VIP Lounge at Logan airport waiting for a direct flight to Lisbon on TAP, the official airline of Portugal. The flight leaves around 6:30pm and arrives in Lisbon around 6:00am local time: about six-plus hours of flying time and five hours of time change.
Here's the first picture of our trip: lounge lizards!
I blogged about this last year but it's worth saying again. These lounges are a very humane way to travel. You sit in a quiet area, the seating is more comfortable than what is in the gate area (although Lufthansa's lounge that we used last year was even nicer), there is an open bar and an open buffet. If you don't upgrade to business or executive class, you can pay cash and while I don't know how much it would have cost to get into today's lounge, the Lufthansa lounge cost $35. I bet I could eat $35 worth of food and one could certainly drink $35 worth. That said, I would probably never pay for this. Today, I talked my way into the lounge. Having a frequent flyer account with United seemed to be good enough.
Flying TAP was fun. All the announcements were in Portuguese first and since we all know what the announcements are saying, it was fun to pick out words that were obvious translations. Then they followed up the Portuguese announcements in English. I have to say that Portuguese in not at all like anything else I know (a little French, a very little Spanish, and not surprisingly, even less like the half dozen or so Croatian phrases I know).
To avoid being an ugly American, I try to learn a couple of phrases before arriving. Three years ago, before going to France, I took a FRN101 class at Le Moyne and it was a useful brush-up. I know less Spanish but now that I have a Spanish daughter-in-law, I am constantly working on that. Learning Croatian last year was a challenge for which knowing a little French and less Latin were no help. Russian helped a little but not much. So I learned a handful of phrases on the trip, and it always helps.
When I got home, it turns out that the two women who clean the building where my office at Le Moyne is located came from Bosnia. One comes from Mostar and when I discovered this, I showed her pictures of the four of us in front of a famous stone bridge! Now, when I see them in the morning, I give them a very bad "dobro utro" (good morning). They are teaching me additional phrases so when they ask me "sto ima" (what's up?), I can say "nista" (nothing). I am probably good for one new phrase per month but then I lose the previous word-of-the-month.
Our Rick Steves guidebooks tell us not to try Spanish when in Portugal (no problem there) because it's not a variation of Spanish and they will be offended. So I am behind on my basic Portugese. So far I have "hello" (ola, easy enough) and "thank you" (obrigado - vaguely japanese). A few days before leaving, I downloaded Mondly over Duolingo, Babbel, and Rosetta Stone because all I wanted was a few basic phrases and it works pretty well. Our VBT guides are often happy to provide basic language lessons and the hotel staff are often amused when I ask them how to say something in their language.
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