Casa da Azarujinha

The apartment is just a 5-7 minute walk from the ocean, a big plus. It’s a two-bedroom ground-floor place with its own entrance. There’s a stovetop, kettle, capsule coffee machine, microwave, iron and ironing board, clothes dryer, fan, pots and pans, so most of what you need is there. We didn’t use the coffee machine because there’s a coffee shop with delicious coffee just steps away. The pillows were uncomfortable, and the synthetic blanket didn’t breathe and felt stuffy. We missed having an oven since we wanted to cook fish. We knew there wasn’t one, but didn’t realize how awkward cooking without it would be. All the pans were small and had no lids, which made it worse. There were no wine glasses either, just thick blue stemmed glasses, and drinking excellent Portuguese wine from those felt like a crime. Regular clear wine glasses were definitely needed. The apartment has no balcony, and the towels stayed damp after a day drying on the indoor clothes rack. It’s next to a school, and one day while we were home, local teenagers threw several crumpled paper bags from buns through our window and ran off. That was unpleasant.