This past weekend was the first in many that we had just to ourselves.

Saturday was basically shopping day. Not only did we shop to refill our almost empty freezer/fridge and food pantry, but we shopped for some very cool-looking decoration items for our house. I also bought half of my sweetie’s x-mas gift, which ended up spoiling the surprise, but hey, best to buy it before he did. :P The other half we will have to go back there to get sometime soon. Plus I saw some other cool things there, which are potential x-mas gifts.

We had dinner out over at Pizza Hut and went out later with some friends to the movies. Unfortunately ‘Max Payne’ is damned boring. Not horrible like people were saying. But very, VERY boring at the exception of a couple of scenes. I hadn’t been this close to falling asleep at the cinema since ‘Aeon Flux’.

Anyway, on Sunday we visited the Pena Palace and Park in Sintra. The Palace is really beautiful, and it has a patio with one of the most beautiful views I’ve seen. The park is quite large but we didn’t manage to see it all. Funny story though (funny now, not so much then), the park closes at six o’ clock, and we were aiming to get there on time, bue miscalculated by four minutes and ended up being trapped inside.

Luckily we had the map of the place, which has a phone number and after a whole FIVE phone calls (yes, five) we finally got one of the security guards to come down and open the gate for us. Seriously. What idiot replies ‘go to the other gate [one that’s not that close] because that’s the only one open’ repeatedly when it’s dark already and you can’t see frak? Only after the fifth phone call, when I asked if we had to call the fire department and then take the security people to court did they realize that they had to move their slacker butts and go open the gate. The one that’s less than 2 minutes away from the security place if they take the car.

The next time I’m there (won’t be too far from now since we were planning to go to the Moir Castle soonish), I’m going to file a report on their yellow book, describing what happened and how unacceptable their attitudes were. And how dangerous it is to not keep a guard over there, or at least doing rounds there to see if there’s a problem. Okay we miscalculated the time it would take for us to get there from where we were in that huge park, but a four minute difference and there was NO ONE there. No one. Imagine if we didn’t have enough battery on our cellphones, or if we hadn’t taken the map which had the phone number. Hypothermia is not my idea of a night well spent.

At least we’ll have a story to tell.