Dear Travel Diary,
It’s a holiday today in the UK. Here in Portugal, there is no Easter Monday. It’s just a normal day and I work most days anyway. Holidays don’t count when your freelance.
I got up at 9:30, had a quick breakfast, checked my main email account and then set to work writing at 10:25. I had a 15-minute break at 13:00 (an apple and milk) and then got to work writing again and didn’t stop until 16:05. I was having problems with the internet connection anyway and thought it was a good time to eat.
It may not be a bank holiday here today but, for me, Monday is always Meat-Free Monday, so I decided to have egg and chips. I’ve been eating a little too much fried food lately, but I really wanted to try the malt vinegar I bought last week. What a disappointment that turned out to be! It turns out it’s not malt vinegar at all. It’s Worcestershire sauce and it doesn’t go well with chips at all. I’m feeling pretty dumb about that, I can tell you.
After eating, I had to go to the supermarket. There’s a small one in the next street, but it didn’t have everything I needed, so I had to go to the local Pingo Doce. It’s a 2.5km walk each way and the weather was not good.
When I got back the internet was still giving me problems so I ran a virus scan and did some other maintenance tasks. By 20:00 the internet was working, so I began writing again. I stopped at 23:05, and had some beans on toast. It’s hard to find baked beans in Portugal. Pingo Doce is the only supermarket I’ve found that has them and all they sell is Heinz. There doesn’t seem to be a local alternative or cheaper option. It’s strange, in the UK beans on toast was a cheap meal to prepare and I used to be able to buy a tin of Supermarket own-brand baked beans for less than 30 pence. In the Netherlands, it was possible to buy a jar of Jumbo (supermarket chain) baked beans for less than a euro. Here in Portugal, I had to pay €1.85 (£1.62) for a tin of beans. I find that expensive, but plenty of other things are cheaper.
I started writing again at 23:30. I lost a lot of time by going to the supermarket, and I’m finding it takes me little longer to write articles these days, so I still hadn’t met the daily target I’d set myself. By the time I met my target, it was 02:35 and I wanted to do some work on my own projects, so I had a lettuce and mayo sandwich and then pushed-on. It’s 04:35 now. I can do more, but I think I should stop for today, wind down, and go to sleep. So I’m going to have a couple of bottles of Portuguese Radler, watch the Monday episode of GTST, and then go to bed.
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