Cadiz, Spain

After ten days at sea we arrived in Lisbon, Portugal for my birthday.  Lisbon is a crazy maze.  It's a city beautiful in its decay, with tiny streets opening to reveal crumbling marble facades, peeling paint and broken tile fronts.  The city is all hills and the sidewalks twist and tilt, which did not help our balance, newly off the sea.  Still, it was a lovely birthday.  We walked for seven hours, mostly through the old town.  We ate pastries and drank espresso (the flaky, custard-filled pasteis de nata and the tiny, intense and sweet shots of espresso).  In the evening we came back to the ship and had our usual four course dinner in the dining room, with extra desserts.  The waiters sang me happy birthday and gave me a huge piece of chocolate cake.  Afterwards we sat in the hot tub on the deck with a perfect view of the city, the dome of the cathedral and the rising layers of red roofs.
Today we are in Cadiz (Seville), Spain.  Cadiz is in every way a contrast to Lisbon.  Where Lisbon is rough, dirty, filled with cars cramped in the tiny streets, Cadiz is elegant, clean, easy to navigate and almost entirely pedestrian.  The tourist routes, color-coded, are even painted on the sidewalks!  Cadiz is like a rest after the confusion of Lisbon.  And our first chance to get on the internet after nearly two weeks.  Tomorrow we're in Malaga, the day after Cartagena.  Then we reach port and begin our bike trek-- not in Rome as we had originally planned, but on the island of Sardinia, then down to Sicily.  After all this time at sea, I'm worried our sea legs will make us fall over the moment we get on our bikes...