It's hard to quantify right now but this time last year I was on a holiday to Lisbon for my best friends surprise 30th. Every part of that sounds wrong at the moment. A sign of the times.
He knew that he was going on the trip but I cried off for work reasons. It was short notice. They flew out on the 6pm flight, just 5 of them. All of his Dublin crowd rather than his old mates but I know them all from events over the years and we have been lots of places as a group.
Myself and 2 others took the earlier flight at 4 and were sitting in the airport drinking coffee nonchalantly when the arrived slightly later.
It was a great surprise as he had no idea and was quite pissed at me for not making it to his birthday. We do have the arrival video which gave a good laugh.
The photo above is from the last day of the trip after the rest had flown home. We had one extra day and decided to go for a little wander around the city and see the sights.
What actually happened was that we found this tiny little cafe bar ran by a 90 year old Portuguese lady with zero English and no customers. As irish people are want to do, we were thirsty on a nice day and said we would have a couple of cocktails to slake the thirst.
As Irish people are also want to do, this then turned into a six hour drinking session with just ourselves and that nice old lady. We noticed that she had a small shot menu for 2 euro each and it included flaming b52's.
These are a gorgeous mix of I think bailey's, calua and tia maria. But my memory might be slightly skewed on that point. The trick is to light it on fire and then drink it with a straw before the fire melts the straw. It's actually lovely. I swear.
We made a great run of it and had a nice evening with the little old lady until noggy dropped the bathroom keys down the toilet. That told us it was time to leave. We got some drink and food before heading back to the apartment. I think I went to bed at 1am and was back up at 4am for my uber to the airport. Not a fun morning as the rest were still drinking in the kitchen. I was going to a different airport so had to route through France with an 8 hour layover. That's where I was woken up at gunpoint by two French soldiers as I was making the most of the layover to get some sleep. The only problem being that while I slept, the terminal emptied out and left just me suspiciously lieing beside a bag in an empty terminal.
It did get sorted once the realised I was just a hungover Irish man but it was the right way to finish off an epic trip.
Live, laugh, love. 😂