To ease my imminent integration into European social ways, I went to a McDonalds in the airport and my observations and thoughts were as follows:

*I am happy to see French people eating here. They have their BigMacs with beer.
*This is the busiest place in the airport
*In the ten years since I was in a McDonalds, nothing has improved taste-wise, and the carrots in little packets do not look appetising either
*Depressed

I spent a large percentage of the last two days in clothes shops, trying to buy clothes that will ultimately make me look like every other girl in Europe, but desperate not to have to go to my job interview in old jeans and flip-flops. In Zara, I could not make sense of the sizes and everything, from the teeny tiny numbers to the really big numbers that were hidden in a corner, seemed to be the same size and I eventually gave up. I did find one nice item though, a jacket with minuscule arms, so I got into the changing room and took a photo to show Omar. I also bought a nightie, which I will wear as a boubou.

It was good to get somewhere near home. Lisbon was aflame with jacaranda trees, and fallen purple blossom lined the city’s cobbled streets. My friend Marta, one of my Bissau sisters, got us tickets to a puppet show on the first night, in which the principle actors were two tea kettles and a piece of spaghetti. Last night we went to a beautiful Congolese dance performance, with a choral version of Jimi Hendrix’s Vodou Child and the intricate, danced-out memories of a man from Kisangani. One night we went to a Togolese dance class, and Marta and I pretended we were back in some dirty nightclub on Bissau’s outskirts and danced shaking Angolan koudouru during the break. We walked and looked at architecture, ate fantastic small cheeses, and drank café in old hole-in-the-wall shops and watched the trams go by.

Today we cooked a cockerel from Marta’s grandmother’s farm which even cut into three, was a monster. Quince jelly reminded me of my granny, and the time I took all their quinces from the tree and annoyed my grandfather, who rang me up to tell me so. Pastels de nata, possibly one of the finest creations on the cake creation scale, at midnight, described on a postcard as ‘little custard queens’.