Waiting, no buses. This day’s end came perfectly. Well, a day spent at an IKEA roach motel had a perfect ending. After three hours of wandering, waiting, ordering, and buying we got out of the brightly lit reconfigured space hustling to the bus stop to be there five minutes early for the Carris 1704.
But the bus never came. And at 1800 (6 pm) Uber costs were too high. The next 1704 bus would not come for an hour so…we just jumped on the next bus with only a vague notion of where it was going. And the Carris bus app is abysmal. But with a little finagling I tricked Google Maps to give me the bus route we were on and where it was taking us.
Turns out it really wasn’t an issue of importance; we had taken a bus and we were out of the cold wind that was blowing. The bus terminated at the Algés bus terminal. This was a stone’s throw from either the train or tram line back into downtown. All that was lost was an hour or so of my life. What was added was an additional twenty kilometers of traveling.
Arriving in Algés I was hungry. Francie looked for places to eat on her phone apps. My plan was to get off at Winter Wonderland in Eduardo VII Parque and have an ‘artisanal’ pizza. But in that the bus to Wonderland never came so we went to Algés. Now we had to drop back and punt. Soya Noodle Bar Algés was what she found.
We had been to the Soya Noodle Bar Algés once before with a group. Wow. The noodle bar wasn’t where I had planned to be, it wasn’t where I wanted to be, but it was where I needed to be. Tom Kha Gai soup, deep fried pork belly in sweet sauce and sweet potato noodles with beef washed down with a couple of cold imperials shook off all the aggravation of the day. Well, most of it. What a delightful meal. My coiled spring of tension just unwound as I smelled that delightful food and quaffed that cold tiny Superbock beer. The dispersion of my grumpiness was almost palpable.
Sitting there at meal’s end belly full and mood elevated I thought back on all the Christmas lights we had seen between IKEA and the restaurant. Some of the displays were quite beautiful. Wanting a little more joy, we decided to take the 15E tram through town to see what other light displays we might catch. I saw some very pretty displays but I didn’t grab any pictures because well shooting through the tram’s tinted windows at night is not the preferred option for good results. So up above is the picture of the Eduardo VII Christmas Ferris wheel from 7 years ago.
Serendipity rocks my friends. IKEA for three hours, not so much.
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