Boa Noite! (Good evening)!
While you all fall in to a deep misery and dark hibernation of the sad season we call winter.. Tom and I are welcoming Summer with open arms. In fact, we welcome it with our whole body, heart and soul. It's freaking delicious! We're currently in a small town, at the bottom of Portugal called Lagos. It translates to heaven. Not really..but if it did I wouldn't be surprised because I would be happy to be dead here and never have to leave.
We've been in Portugal for .... Days.. It may have been a week now.. I lose count.. But we love it! Porto came as a shock at first.. We were semi delusional post over night train, walking through the grungy streets of Portugal wondering why the furrrruit cake we had decided on this City. But after finding a good feed, having a nap and rebooting we thought, hey, this town is pretty cool. Completely different to the Europe we had seen, with run down buildings, completely stripped bare on the inside, dirty street cafes and absolutely no comfort coffee stores aka Starbucks. Tiny streets with tiled houses, trees over growing all of the fallen houses and homeless *practically* smacking you in the face. But, with all of these little touches, comes mighty character and Porto had it! Our hostel was a delight, owned by a couple who had travelled themselves and built this hostel by putting all of their favourite hostels into one.. This means good showers.. Curtains around your bed.. A laundry.. A bar.. Dinner made for us.. Good wifi. We were happy cherubs here! While in Porto we tried Port..and more Port....and a little more. We had the traditional Portuguese Francisinha.. Google it. It was disgustingly good.
Then on our last day.. We were like hey let's get a boat along the river.. So we went with the cheapest option as all good backpackers do.. Waited for our boat to pick us up.. Nice big yellow boat approaches us and I'm feeling excited.. Boat continues to approach .. Coming in fast.. Maybe a little too fast.. Why is the boat not slowing down? And before our very own eyes, the boat we were meant to board goes crashing into the dock where it's meant to park.. Then out of control the boat man reverses it directly into the boat behind it. Freaking havoc! I crack the shits and attempt refusal to go on it.. But Tom makes me still get on despite my boat fear being bigger then ever at this point. So we board onto our shitty boat.and so does karma. An old man sits next to Tom and talks compete shit to him for the whole one hour.. Well deserved I say for making me get on that boat.
The boat ride was actually quite nice. I enjoyed it. Tom, not so much. Mwaha.
Lisbon was next in line. Another nice city, and not such a cultural shock after Porto. We did a walking tour to learn about Portugal because we actually had absolutely no idea what the heck the Portuguese have done and what came from this lovely country. So we got our history tour.. Did you know that the Japanese word for bread 'pan' actually comes from the Portuguese word 'pao'... And tempura is not Japanese... It's Portuguese! History lesson done. You're welcome. We found a dirty ol flea market, got offered cocaine, ate delicious Portuguese custard tarts and hit up the Sporting football game. It was the most boring 2 hours of my life.. I literally fell asleep in my seat. The only good thing about it was my ice cream. But Tom enjoyed it! We were welcomed home at the end of the game by our train NOT stopping at our station.. The street was completely filled with crazy Portuguese celebrating the win of the other Lisbon team who had just won the championship. So we walked from the next station, found a squishy green patch of grass, a few beers and watched as 500,000 people piled into the Marque de Pombal in celebrations of the win. I've never seen anything so crazy with fire works going off a meter away from you every 5 minutes and heavy gangsta music being played throughout the whole of Lisbon until 3 in the morning!
And that brings us to Lagos. Lovely, lovely Lagos. We had 3 nights booked here, and half an hour into arriving we had already discussed staying longer, then 12 hours later we had another 2 nights booked and Madrid has been booted from the list. Like I said, this place is heaven. The beaches are stunning..the weather is always good, our hostel is perfect with a gigantic Newfoundland dog named Urso.. Which translates to Bear and he is so beautiful! He may or may not have been the reason we booked this hostel. There's plenty to do here along with plenty of relax time so we are as happy as pigs in shit. The end.
Love to you all, from heaven.
