Friday 30 January

What a peculiar day it has been, weatherwise. It was bright and sunny when we left the hotel and within 50m, it started to pour – still with the sun brightly shining! Then the clouds came and within 5 minutes, it was back to bright sunshine – and so it continued for the whole day. Cancelling any plans we had for a day of wandering Funchal’s back streets, we made a quick trip to the Chapel, which had been closed yesterday and hooray! it was open, so Tom took some piccies of the painted interior. That involved him lying on the floor while trying to focus the camera, on his little “gorilla”tripod, up at the ceiling – I think the priest who was on guard must have thought he was mad!

Since, as I say, the weather was being very unfriendly, we caught the bus to Madeira Shopping, “the largest shopping centre in Madeira”, which is out near Pico dos Barcelos where Andre took us to the viewpoint on Sunday. Most of the occupants of the bus were also making their way there, so it was a mass exodus on arrival! Well, it is quite big compared to the other shopping centres we’ve seen, but small in comparison to even normal town centres in UK. Mostly filled with dress and jewellery shops, no nice gift shops and nothing that we were drawn to purchase. We did have coffee and stickies, however, while watching alternate sunshine and pouring rain and gave up after an hour, catching the bus back down to Funchal centre.

Deciding to wait about 45 minutes for the hotel coach, we had another drink, in what has become our café of choice, the Apolo by the cathedral and watched more sun and showers while enjoying the repartee of the waiters with what was obviously their regular clientele. Couldn’t understand a word, but the interplay was most amusing!

In the evening, we returned to the White House for dinner, with more free Madeira wine from our 2 lovely “guest gatherers”, Sandra and Theresa. What a way to earn a living – accosting people in the streets and inveigling them in to eat, but the 2 of them seem to have quite a good success rate and other diners, like us, come back several times. We’ve promised to send them copies of the photos Tom took of them with me.
And that was the end of what is almost our last day here as tomorrow is sorting out our stuff and packing.