Joana's apartment is beautiful and in a great part of Lisbon.
But, we experienced a robbery whilst we stayed there. We returned home from a meal and some drinks around about midnight and went to bed soon after. We discovered in the morning that all valuables left in the living room were stolen, so, the burglars had robbed us in the night whilst we were there sleeping. We had the following stolen: 2 laptops (one a brand new macbook pro '15), two passports, 1 driving license, 2 wallets, 2 bose noise cancelling headphones as well as numerous other items and manuscript paper with new original musical compositions comprised of pieces in development. We spent the next two days of our trip at the police station reporting the details and at our respective embassies securing our emergency passports. Since returning home we've had a fair bit of hassle with insurance companies and trying to resource data on our former laptops, which has been frustrating and time consuming.
Obviously, our experience of staying here was dampened since being robbed. We are still a bit baffled how exactly the thieves managed to get into the flat, having thought we shut the windows appropriately. And, for it to happen whilst we're in the apartment sleeping, it's pretty frightening.
We're grateful that Joana was able to offer us some compensation and so quickly. We also understand it's not her fault that this has happened. But, it's hard to feel overtly positive about the experience having experienced this and having to sort out so much since our stay.
We all felt it was necessary to let prospective guests know this has happened so as to avoid it in future. We didn't know that there had been a burglary here in the past, which Joana since informed us about when we met her the morning after our experience, and it may have helped us should we have known prior.
If it is simply a matter of Joana having more secure window locks and clearly informing guests that there are potential buglers in the area, we feel this is certainly necessary.