Around the house/Em Volta da Casa

This is our front door. Pretty exciting, right?  We have a much cooler doormat now.

Our balcony, which wraps around the corner roughly the same distance. This view is looking east. Travessa dos Mastros is the street beneath.

Here, we are looking over the balcony to see our street, Travessa dos Mastros.  This is facing west.

This is looking over the balcony the other way, north.  Still Travessa dos Mastros beneath.  It jogs around a corner, in case you couldn't tell.

The missing portion of the street, the corner itself.  Those two doors on the right down at street level belong to the workshop of Salles Torres, Lda., a company which makes and repairs printing press equipment.  They often leave the doors to their workshop open, and it's like a time warp inside, with large, medieval-looking machines.  I haven't worked up the courage to ask them if I could take pictures yet.

Finally, as some family and friends have been told, our apartment is very close to the Palácio de São Bento (Palace of St. Benedict), which is where the Portuguese parliament sits and does their thing.  Currently, their thing is to cut benefits and raise taxes.  Not a very popular bunch right now.  (Of course, their fiscal policies were mostly forced upon them when they agreed to be bailed by the EU and IMF out so they could afford to borrow money and keep using the Euro).


Anyway, getting back to the picture, below you see the very tippy-top of the Palácio de São Bento, as viewed from our balcony (northward).  We are literally a 5-10 minute walk from the foot of the building.