Lisbon is famous for its tiles. Apart from the sun and the port and the warm, witty people, the tiles were my favourite thing about Lisbon. Many of the buildings are covered in beautiful old ceramics, painted in all sorts of lovely patterns and colours. Why? According to this text that I copied and pasted last week from a now-forgotten website, it's because the tiles are, "durable, waterproof, and easily cleaned, providing cool interiors during Portugal's hot summers and exterior protection from the damp onslaughts of Atlantic winters." If I had vandalistic tendencies, I'd have brought a chisel and hacked off a few favourites to take home for the Bathroom Of My Future Dream Home. But I'm no thug, so took a few photies instead. Meanwhile back in the Very Posh Hotel, Rhi and I were taking advantage of the Very Posh Facilities. The gym was magnificent, a glass box on the roof of the hotel. So one could huff and puff while looking down to the castle and the tiles and all the poor peasants who couldn't afford to stay in a five star hotel for free. After that it was down to the basement to the Very Posh Pool. Against my better judgement Rhi convinced me to get changed in our room, which meant getting into the lift in our swimmers and Very Posh Bathrobes. And wouldn't you know, instead of taking us straight to the pool, the lift stopped in the lobby. The doors flung open, revealing us in our fluffy white splendour to the tuxedo guy at the grand piano and all the expensive people sipping champagne. I frantically stabbed at the Close Door button, but a Very Posh Bloke in a suit that probably cost more than my annual salary hopped in beside us. "Good evenink ladies!" "Hello!" I gestured at our lovely attire. "We're going to the pool." "Yes of course!" I hammered the B for Basement button again, but the lift started going UP! "Noooo, lift!" I squeaked, "Pool is DOWN!" "What's going on?" said Rhi. "Ze lift is broken," declared the Very Posh Bloke. "And so is ze pool. It is all broken. You can't go down there. I'm so sorry ladies." Rhi and I exchanged alarmed glances. I could tell she was having the same flashback, to that nutty German girl who'd patrolled our hostel door back in Reykjavik. But then he grinned, revealing with huge yellow teeth, "I am just joking! Just joking!". The lift stopped at the sixth floor and off he went. Weirdo. The pool was huge and beautifully lit, with servants I mean staff wandering around with soft towels and cocktails. Rhi and I paddled for awhile, then hit the sauna and steam room. I had a bit of a freakout in the steam room. I'd never been in one before. I never expected it to be so bloody… steamy. After that I had a shower and washed my hair twice, because the shampoo was expensive and free. Then I slapped on three kinds of free lotions and talcum powder then slipped a few free shower caps into my bathrobe pocket, as you can never have too many of those. Then I put my swimsuit in that spinning wringer machine thing and put it in a free plastic bag, then took the lift back up to our room. Taking a lift in a bathrobe with no underwear in a five-star hotel will probably end up being the biggest thrill of my sad suburban wife life. HA! That night we ate cheap supermarket bread rolls with ham and cheese for dinner, then realised we'd run out of toothpaste. One call to the concierge and a woman appeared at the door within two minutes, presenting me with a fancy Very Posh Hotel gift bag with a tiny tube of L'Occitane toothpaste nestled inside. I almost went stinky-breathed just so I could add it to my stash. So all that was my brief brush with the high life. Oh! I almost forgot to mention the Wobbly Thigh Game in the pool. You can all play along at home. All you need is a pool and a pair of wobbly thighs. "Hey, you have to try this," said Rhi as we splashed around some sculpted businessmen. "Stand in a squat position. Now put your hands on the back of your thighs. Then just wave your legs back and forth!" I assumed the position. "Oh lordy. I can FEEL MY FLESH FLY!" It was a hoot. And even funnier if you put your hands on your butt. Have you ever known the ridiculous feeling of your flesh undulating underwater? Of course, if you have perfect, unmoving thighs of steel you will never know this pleasure.

Sister Rhi and I just got back from a few days in sunny Lisbon. It was our first trip together since the Baltic Saga of 2004, which I still haven't finished writing about! So instead of my usual slow, tedious manner of taking years to write about holidays in carefully crafted episodes, I am just going to blurt out some random thoughts in unruly fashion until it's time for bed.

Lack of Blokes
I left my husband at home for this trip. You wouldn't believe how many people thought this made me some sort of harlot. But I like to keep the Home Office and my mother-in-law guessing… Sham Marriage: Yes Or No?

Language
I always make an effort to learn a little of the native tongue before hitting a foreign country, with varying degrees of success. While I spent three months cramming basic Spanish, I could only muster "penis" in Icelandic and "ham" in Latvian. Not that all that Spanish did me any freaking good. I am okay at learning to read/listen/write in foreign languages but absolutely stink at saying the words out loud to actual residents of that country. Verbal conversation just ruins a perfectly good language for me. I panic and go red-faced and squeaky, rendered mute in anticipation of butchering a beautiful language. I'd been rehearsing a simple line for weeks, "Two train tickets for Valencia please," but when I finally rocked up to the ticket counter I froze, and just open and shut my mouth for ten minutes before running away.

So for this trip I was determined to learn some goddamn Portugese. My father-in-law loaned me his tapes at Christmas and the task was at the top of my New Years Resolutions list. But somehow it became the Night Before The Trip and all I knew was "bom dia" and wondered if it was more important for me to know which way to the monastery or My name is Pedro.

A conversation with a charmingly wacky taxi driver went like this:

TAXI DRIVER:  Bom dia!

SHAUNA:  Bom dia!

TD:  Do you speak any Portugese?

S:  …. I can't remember the word for no!

TD:  You don't speak any Portugese! [pounds steering wheel and pretends to cry] Why? Why!? WHY!?!

The Hotel
Rhi works for a Very Fancy Hotel in London. Each year she gets a number of complimentary nights at any Very Fancy Hotel in the world and was kind enough to use a few for our trip. When we arrived at Very Fancy Hotel Lisboa Branch, the foyer was swarming with expensive people and their matching luggage. I was pink and mildly sweaty, because I've lived in Scotland for almost three years and now consider anything above fifteen degrees to be a heatwave. I was also carrying a bulging, ancient backpack. Yet the doorman bid us welcome and opened the door with a grand flourish like we were duchesses. Then another bloke arrived and asked "Miss Rhiannon" if he could take the bags to our room. All we could do was stand there and cackle at the ridiculous sight of our grotty backpacks trundling past the expensive people on a golden trolley.

It was a hoot staying in a five-star hotel. There were slippers and spas and bread in silver baskets. They turn down your bed and give you a weather report each night:

But the egalitarian Aussie in me felt extremely uncomfortable having some bloke opening doors and pouring my tea at breakfast. I hate the idea of anyone thinking I am some pampered git, incapable of unfolding a napkin or placing my own pair of slippers perpendicular to the bed. Not that anyone could mistake me for a wealthy dame – when we caught a taxi back to the airport, I had to leave Rhiannon in the car as security while I ran to the ATM as we didn't have enough cash for the fare!

In homage to my convict roots, I nicked 7 soaps, 3 shower caps, a pen and 10 wee bottles of shampoo.

Wavelengths
I've written before how Rhi and I are ideal travel companions, always seeming to hit the same moods at the same time, e.g. knowing when it's Time To Shop or when it's Chocolate O'Clock. Best of all there's no competitive backpacker heroics. You can freely say stuff like, "How about we tell people we went inside this ancient castle and just take a photo of the outside instead?".

The Ham Man Yelled At Me
Foreign supermarkets rule. This one had a man in a Ham Corral. I don't know what else to call it. The butcher stood in the middle of a circular counter, surrounded by gorgeous hams on chopping blocks. The customers would walk up to whatever ham they fancied, and he'd hack off a few slices for them. It was fascinating because all the ham legs still had the hoofs on them. Or maybe they were faux-hoofs? I wanted to take a photo and discuss with you, except as soon as I whipped out my camera the Ham Man pointed his saw at me and screamed, "No! NO! NONONONONO!" in ever-increasing pitch. I scampered away and hid by a display of huge-yet-flavoursome strawberries. I was scared, but mostly jealous because he could say No in English but I couldn't say it in Portugese.

Man Creche It was probably a good thing that Gareth was left behind on this trip as we did a lot of shopping. He would have been cast out with this assortment of bored yet obedient blokes, waiting outside a Zara store.

Abandoned Husbands of Lisbon

Righto chaps, it's bedtime. Boa noite!

Rhiannon has gone! The traitorous wench found a great job with a work permit so she's moving to London.

We keep telling people that it feels like a divorce. I've seen the rolling eyes, I know they think we're being melodramatic. But you have to understand I'll no longer be near someone who finishes my sentences, instinctively knows when to buy chocolate on the way home, and is my best friend.

Growing up we weren't as close, but there was always an unspoken solidarity. We would exchange bemused glances and raise eyebrows as our various parents threw tantrums and houseplants and did crazy things.

We went our separate ways for university, but finally in 2000 we both ended up in Canberra. The Mothership phoned the day after we moved in together. Rhi was downstairs and I was perched on my bed with the extension. It was the usual Mothership fodder – local gossip, recaps of Oprah episodes, tales of wayward students that she had to Skin Alive or Put Bombs Under. Without realising, separated by stairs and salmon pink carpet, we were responding with the exact same mindless phrases. In the exact same tone. In perfect unison.

Right. Yes. Hmmm? Oh I see. Innnteresting. 

"WHAT is going on?" demanded The Mothership, "Are you two being facetious? You're picking on me! Already!"

From that point on we were a unit. We compared twenty years of notes from our childhoods and discovered those shared experiences had given us the same warped humour and cynicism. We both loved to bitch and moan and laugh. We never had to explain anything to each other, because we always knew the backstory. We understood that the crappiest day could always be cured with a bar of chocolate and a trashy magazine. We also liked picking on The Mothership.

Just like retired old farts in a caravan, we had ROUTINES and we treasured them dearly. I chopped meat and vegies, she wielded the wok. I booked our gym classes, she ordered in restaurants. I picked up the Thai takeaway while she got the cutlery queued up the video. When I'd fart she'd say, Shall I reply? and let one rip too.

A favourite ritual was the weekly shop at Tesco. We were a precision shopping machine. We synchronised our watches, caught buses from our respective workplaces so we arrived at the same time, paused at the magazine rack, glided up and down the aisles with a shopping list that was ordered in harmony with the supermarket layout, then wasted half an hour browsing the chocolate so we'd have to run across the car park to make the bus on time.

Last Monday was The Final Shop. It was a rather emotional experience. We were dawdling in the car park, talking about jeans and how the ones with the "pre faded" stripes down the front make your thighs look fat, when suddenly our bus came barelling round the corner.

"Shauna!" Rhi screamed, "STOP THE BUS!"

I panicked, spinning the shopping trolley round in small and helpless circles. I am useless when asked to make a sudden movement. "Stop the bus? YOU stop the bus!"

Rhi bravely leaped out onto the street with manic eyes and outstretched arms, "SSSTOOPPP!".

Do you know how hard it is to find someone who'd stop a bus for you?

Last week I did a dress rehearsal Solo Shop. It was very traumatic. The checkout chick was merciless, flinging bananas and soup tins and expecting me to keep up with the plastic bags and grope for a debit card AT THE SAME TIME while a lengthy queue of snotty bastards looked on with pursed lips. For the past four years, Rhi had packed the heavy stuff while I took the fruit and veg, then she'd do the bread and loo paper and magazines while I handed over the cash. WE HAD A SYSTEM. How can you have a system WITH JUST ONE PERSON?

Rhi arrived in Sydney just one hour ago. She's there for a few weeks to visit friends and family, so it's all I can think about right now. She'll return for a few days in January when we'll fight over the frying pan and wage a bitter custody battle over the hairdryer, then that's it.

Things have changed dramatically these past four years and I owe so much of it my little sister. I am too rubbish to say this person, so I have to tell the WORLD on the internet. How do you like that logic. Anyway, indulge me for one paragraph.

When Rhi moved in I was very ill, depressed out of my skull, afraid of the world and generally an apathetic blob. If you've been kind enough to have read this blog since the very beginning, you may have noticed I've changed a lot since then. Rhi managed to see through my bullshit and encouraged me to take risks. She's always known when to kick my butt or when to bring home some icecream. Without her I doubt I would have found the guts to move to the Other Side of the planet. It's taken awhile, but I'm not scared of silly shit anymore, I don't lay awake worrying about what people think of me, I've learned to make things happen for myself. Without Rhi's coaxing I may have ignored the nagging voice inside that said I could do something with my life.

So sister dear, thank you for just being your brilliant, arse-kicking self and making every day so hilarious. We both knew this would happen. It's time to move on and we'll be fine. We have telephones, email and Easyjet. We both have everything in the world to look forward to.

When I asked Rhi how was I supposed to go on, she replied with the usual withering wit, "I have nothing left to teach you."

Sometimes you can just feel change in the air, people. It's as thick and heavy and inevitable as the yeasty dog-food fug that spews from the Fountainbridge Brewery. Change is a bit like a brewery, don't you think? It makes a lot of scary noise and it stinks like hell, but the end product is delicious and good for you.