Casa de Scaffolding

Portugal is one of my favourite travel and poker destinations, but I have a terrible record of booking accommodation there.

During the first time I had played beach volleyball, I received a recommendation of somewhere to stay in Lisbon. Firstly let me say, don't play beach volleyball. It really hurts your hands and you get sand in your face a lot.

On my ill adjudged foray into this sandy and painful game, I got talking to my team mate and mentioned I was about to go to Lisbon. "I know a great place to stay" she assured me. We chatted further between points and as I had no writing device to hand, I made a mental note of the B&B she strongly urged me to stay in Lisbon - Casa de Hospedes. It sounded great and just up my street.

A couple of days later, with the trip approaching, I still hadn't booked anything. I remembered the beach volleyball tip. A quick google and it popped up straight away. I had a personal recommendation and it was very reasonably priced so I booked it. Job done.

A week or two later I arrived in Lisbon and headed to the address. It was the days before I had a smartphone, so I navigated through those winding, hilly streets eagerly searching for the B&B.

Staying on a Building Site

Casa de Scaffolding

A strange thing happened. I thought I had the right address, but it was basically a building site. The front was covered in scaffolding and builders were at work drilling and banging away. I walked though the open door into the dust covered lobby. Buckets and dirt were scattered around the room. I approached the desk and nervously asked the man behind the desk "Casa de Hospedes? and received a curt nod in response.

Further stilted conversation confirmed that this man was the manager and owner. I was booked into this establishment for four nights. Yes indeed it was open and no, it wasn't possible for me to get a refund.

I probably should have worn a hi-vis jacket and hard hat to walk up the stairs to my room, but I ignored health and safety requirements and navigated the building site to get there. Inside it was basically clean, but I opened the curtains to find my view of the historic Lisbon streets obscured by scaffolding. The sound of a loud drill and repeated banging filled the air. 

Bigodudo

I needed to take a piss and this wasn't an en suite establishment, so I set off in search of the bathroom. Throwing open the door I was greeted with quite a sight. A big fat man with a moustache and cigarette dangling from his mouth who strongly resembled Brazilian football manager Luiz 'Big Phil' Scolari was sat in a bath in the middle of the room. 

I have noticed a phonemenon of older Portuguese men growing big moustaches. It is definitely a thing. The Portuguese word for moustachioed is 'bigodudo' and as there was no bubble bath, I could clearly see this man with a moustache was certainly a bigodudo.

Big Phil is not impressed

I pointed at the lock and offered some sort of expletive. In response he took a drag of his cigarette, waved his arm at me dismissively and glared at me like he wanted to kill me. I left the room without urinating.

Things were going badly and I decamped to an internet cafe to asses my options. I decided to double check the place I booked and typed 'Casa de Hospedes' into google. Scrolling down I noticed many places in Lisbon called Casa de Hospedes. This was odd and I soon realised my error. 

It turned out that Casa de Hospedes is the word for guesthouse in Portuguese and I had just booked the first place that came up on google. The owner of Casa de Scaffolding was clearly some kind of SEO master to get his place to the top of the google rankings and I had fallen into his keyword spiderweb.

Lisbon was a vibrant location with great food and good poker games, but the stay was lousy, noisy and dusty. I was awoken by drilling early each day and I did not enjoy it one bit. On the brightside I didn't bump into naked Luiz Scolari for the rest of my stay. 

I vowed to never play beach volleyball again.