Angra do Heroismos- a Week on Terceira Island

 Thursday June 2nd

It is day 2 of our Azores trip and we are relaxing in our hotel room after a somewhat lazy day exploring the town.
 Our flight , Azores Airlines landed at 6:30am yesterday morning after a 5 hour red eye from Toronto Pearson. Amazingly our luggage arrived on the exact same flight- so AzoresAir gets an extra * compared to Alitalia and Delta with their less than spectacular track record. Customs was straight forward with a cursory “remove your mask” as the officer scanned to make sure we weren’t wanted criminals.
A prearranged shuttle service took around 30 minutes to get to our hotel where we discovered that check in was 2pm, some 6 hours away. Dropping our cases and grabbing only the bare essentials, camera, hat sunglasses, we set off in search of whatever.
 After wandering the streets for an hour we located the hotel where Susanna’s friends were staying. It turned out they were in the same boat with a later (4pm) check in.
 So we settled in at a nearby pastry shop for some amazing coffees ( non of that swill made by Timmies) !
Accompanied by Portuguese egg tarts and ham and cheese in a very messy flaky pastry sandwich we reviewed our plans for upcoming trips around the island.
A brief walk around the area proceeded at a much slower pace than planned as the town centre was the focus of an Annual Childrens Day - 2000 screaming munchkins playing games and swarming the streets, terrorizing the Grandmas out doing their shopping and just doing what kids do! 
Escaping the madness we found ourselves at the entrance to the town museum. For the meagre sum of one Euro we were able to wander the cool air conditioned galleries displaying everything from ancient archeological remnants to a collection of old horse drawn hearses. 
Following our visit, we returned to the town square adjacent to the hotel and settled on a small cafe for lunch of chicken salad, a somewhat disappointing option as my first choices, octopus salad and shrimp salad were sold out.
Finally able to check into our hotel, we quickly unpacked, showered and changed in jime to attend our orientation meeting with the rest of our group. Having arranged our various excursions for the next few days we set off in search of dinner. With most restaurants not starting dinner service till 7 or later we ended up skipping supper and settling for an early night, having been awake for the better part of 36 hours, apart from a couple of hours of catnapping. Oh well, such is life!
 


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