Meeting the eagles and deciding to stay

Not having had the best sleep and, indeed, having been abandoned by Mrs. Ottawacker at some stage during the night – a berth next to a farting 11-year-old being preferable to sharing a matchbox-sized mattress shaping up to a point with me, allegedly – we realised it was going to be a rough day no matter what we did. Things had not been helped by my early assertion that finding another room in Lisbon that met my wife’s demands – gold-plated shower heads, diamond chandeliers, massages from Daniel Craig being among the more reasonable “non negotiables” – would cause our budget to be not so much exceeded but exploded. They had also not been helped by the discovery that the shower block had actually been improved by the previous evening’s mood lighting – and that in the harsh morning light, it looked less like a facility that might be used by rugged naval salts for their ablutions and more like something Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn might have complained about. Plus, one of our fellow marina users had left a giant turd floating in one of the toilets. It was bigger than the boat. Nonetheless, it appeared as if the boat was going to be home for the next couple of days, so we had to make the best of it.
 
Being led around a strange city by an 11-year-old who doesn’t speak the language is an unusual experience. In fairness, it might raise a few eyebrows… but only if you haven’t met Ottawacker Jr. and his Rain Man-like ability to instantly understand every transit map he has ever seen. Within seconds of our purchasing the Lisbon yellow day pass, he had us on the tram towards Algés, pointing out street signs as he followed along on the phone. We wandered around the streets of Algés for a little while, found the bus depot at Vasco da Gama, and finally caught (thanks to my midget Passepartout) the 750 bus to Estádio da Luz, where we had booked a tour to look around Benfica’s stadium. This was a sop to Passepartout, as I had initially promised him we could go and watch a game there – but it turned out Benfica were playing Porto, which is a grudge match, and tickets were rarer than unicorn tears. Worse. They were expensive. And the black market would have been the only way to get them.
 
I wasn’t actually holding out much hope for the stadium tour as (a) I have little or no interest in Benfica and (b) it’s a stadium, which I thought probably looked like every other stadium in the world. But, I was wrong: the tour was excellent. We were taken around by a Brazilian who spoke (like almost every Portuguese I met) impeccable English. He agreed that Alisson was a better keeper than Ederson (“but in Brazil, we tend to select goalkeepers who are more spectacular,” he said), and let Ottawacker Jr. pose with Benfica’s goalkeeping shirt. He also managed to conduct the tour in Spanish, Portuguese and English without it seeming to drag. There was a group of six Italians there too – all young men, in their 20s – and they were brilliant fun. Pleasant, engaging, joking with everyone on the tour. Three were from Naples (Napoli fans) and three from Turin (Juventus fans). When we reached the media room, they took turns asking questions of the people posing for pictures, and were witty and a little cheeky. Running into people like this used to be what I liked best about being in Europe, before the UK went more insular than the floater in the shower block loo, that is.
 
But the highlight of the tour was undoubtedly the chance to see the famous Benfica eagles up close. As we walked round the pitch, you could see them on their perches, basking in the sun. Vitória and Gloriosa, they are called. I’m not a fan of mascots – either human or animal – but these seem to be undeniably well treated. They train for an hour a day, then rest in the sun or the shade; apparently, they live to the age of 50 in captivity. My God, they are beautiful; probably bald eagles, and they were in full show-off mode for the people there. There was an almost reverential silence from the tour group – which is very different, one would imagine, from when they swoop down from the sky during the pre-match show. We stayed out on the field for a long time – there seemed to be no rush to get us out of the door and into the souvenir shop. Eventually, however, we were out of the door and into the souvenir shop.
 
Then we decided to have lunch, as we hadn’t even had breakfast, and it was getting on for 2pm. I’d noticed a concession stand near the souvenir shop, so we decided to go there; we were not expecting much, as food at sports grounds tends to be both overpriced and (how shall I put this?) shite. But this was exceptional. I had something called a Francesinha, which was a sort of hot sandwich with ham, sausage, and cheese, liberally covered with gravy, and with a fried egg added on top for good measure. Sort of an even more unhealthy version of poutine. And, as bad as it sounds, it tasted wonderful. We all ate in the café, watching the world going by, and on our way out bumped into the six Italian boys again, who wished us a happy stay in Portugal and reminded me that Napoli had had Liverpool’s number over the last couple of matches.
 
After the stadium, we walked back to the Colégio Militar and got the train to Baixa Chiado, and then headed back to Belém. We were still tired – not surprising, really, after the train/plane epic, the hassle with the boat, and the lack of sleep. We walked for a while, then decided to have an early-ish dinner at the  Adega de Belém restaurant, which was the place we’d not had a drink at the day before. The waiter was a Sporting Lisbon fan (Ottawacker Jr.’s penchant for soccer shirts opens so many conversations with people) and was very friendly. The food was good – Ottawacker Jr. and I both had the grilled codfish, which was not necessarily what he thought it was going to be – and we made our way back to the blockhouse of the Belém Archipelago in a slightly improved frame of mind. The boat was most definitely moving more than it had done the previous evening.