Tel Aviv to Lisbon is a long flight, particularly when you wake up at 1:30 a.m. to head to the airport.  Our flight left at 5:30, but we caught the hotel shuttle (which consisted of the two of us in a taxi) at 2:00 a.m. in order to deal with the legendary airport security lines.  Somewhat to our surprise everything went smoothly and quickly.  The ride to the airport, which was in stop-and-go traffic during the day, was much faster at 120 kph.  The dreaded security line was short and quick with only a few questions, and check-in, like pretty much everything else we have encountered in Israel, was fast and efficient.  In total we were past security and being merchandised at Duty Free in less than an hour.  (The one possible glitch, a huge slow-moving line for security that we initially encountered, dissolved when we found someone looking official who directed us to a different line with only a few people.)  Off to Lisbon.

The flight on TAP Portugal was quite satisfactory though the seats were a little closer together than anticipated since we had paid a bit extra for premium seating, but we had an empty middle seat so all was well.  When we landed, we had a rather surreal experience with our luggage.  A couple of our bags came pretty quickly, but after a while there were only two families still waiting, one of them being us, and the conveyor belt seemed dead.  A baggage staffer checked status and advised us just to wait a little longer.  Craig checked our Air Tags app, which said both bags were "right here" even though clearly one was not.  After more than a little longer we and the other couple were cross-examining the staffer and getting a little nervous, when Craig (with his height advantage) happened to look down the baggage ramp into the lower level where sat several bags, indeed "right here" but not moving.  Surprisingly, it took quite a while longer for our staffer to find someone who could start the belt again, but eventually we were all reunited with all our luggage.

We had booked one of the two hotels within five minutes walking distance from the airport and the Metro (in which we had stayed in on prior trips), allowing us to expeditiously drop our bags off and then head out to deal with those important initial "in a new country" chores: getting a card for the Metro, a Portuguese SIM card for the phone, Euros for the wallet, and lunch.  Fortuitously our research as to where to go on the Metro to find these items left us in front of the huge Vasco da Gama Mall with an incredible array of eating options.  After eating we walked down to the waterfront, an area known as Park of the Nations,  developed in 1998 for the Lisbon World Exposition.  Our first stop was at a sculpture of a colorful giant cat (Iberian Lynx) put together with scrap metal and plastic.  In our view this is a taunt directed at Bilboa in Spain for its large dog sculpture (Puppy) in front of the Guggenheim Museum.  The Portuguese do not admit to this.  Near the cat sculpture was a weird spiky thing that we uncharitably attributed to a put-down of the spider (Maman) sculpture also at the Guggenheim in Bilboa.  We are not certain of any of this of course but it surely felt likely.  We walked along the waterfront for a bit and then, feeling accomplished and sated, took the Metro back to the hotel and, in recognition of the fact that our day began at 1:30 a.m. on a different continent, found a beer in the hotel bar and then crashed.