To Sao Luis for a UNESCO event where I am the main speaker…

Tuesday night 2 Nov

I am sitting at the“First Class Café” near gate 44A in Lisbon airport.

Waiting for the flight to Brasilia.  The destinations here in the international bit are mostly former Portuguese colonies.  There’s a massive queue to get onto the plane to Luanda.  Was that in one of their colonies?  There’s also Dakar weirdly but then I remember that the Portuguese got there before the French and they all tussled with the Dutch! And they were all enslavers!

I really wanted a meal but I joined the wrong queue and ended up buying some expensive fried snackery  -croquettes and samosa-like cheesy pastry things.

At least the beer is as I rememer it. A nice cold Sagres.

Coming on to land over Lisbon was lovely – we flew over the Rio style Christ statue on one side of the Tagus, banked a little as we flew over the river mouth and right over the Rossio and various wide avenues which I recognized even at this height.  Felt very nostalgic for good times there and tired enough to want to stay. But also excited about going to South America for the first time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday – Wednesday night flight Lisbon – arrival in Brasilia 2/ 3 Nov

Long bus journey out to the plane at 11 pm. Did not get the joke being shared around me but I think they might have been saying maybe we were driving to Brasilia. Passengers are mainly – it seems to me – business or Brazilian returnees.

Flight good overall and managed a bit of sleep.  Guy next to me shares his cough with me the whole way so we’ll see how that goes in the next few days.  But views were sometimes great. Just before trying to nod off with Brian McBride’s music droning away I look out on a sky full of stars. Orion directly at the end of the wing tip.  There are so many stars it puts me in mind of the skies in the Night of the Hunter!  Later, after fitful sleep and being nudged in the back by “cough man”and the pillow sticking to the window with the cold outside (-71 degrees) I wake to a spectacular sunrise over the clouds.  With an hour to go before landing.

Brasilia just appears out of the green below – a city placed here in the 50s and 60s as the nation’s capital. You can see the sprawl for miles on either side where the workers live and shape of the roads and the towers and so on. From the air it is supposed to look like a bird or a plane – futurstic anyway.

The airport is like the new Bilbao one in design (they must have seen this one!) with large open plan decks for embarking and arriving stacked on top of one another.  The difference is the amount of greenery and tropicalia and fountains everywhere.  My welcome has been one of the warmest ever from a border control person…horrified that I only had three days here!  He indicated the 90 day visa newly stamped in my passport and recommended forgetting about going back for the full 90 days.  Yes, but only if the others could join me!

Find a breakfast bar and accidentally push in because I don’t get the system but everyone is very relaxed and so it’s ok…nice peaceful few miniutes in prospect and then…

 

… bizarrely, whilst getting out laptop and sorting through bag I cut my middle finger on my right hand on something (I really don’t know what!) and start bleeding everywhere.  Thank heavens for the Lifesystems first aid bag and some plasters. I have no idea where or how I’ve managed to release so much blood into the environment.  It’s not too busy thankfully so people don’t seem to notice the extra clumsy and embarrassed English person fumbling with laptop, plasters and tissues.

  Left: Finger incident ruins calm breakfast.

Thanks heavens for…

the Lifesystems first aid bag. Never leave home without it…