Which means: Thank you in Portuguese.. which, by the way, was absolutely amazing!!!!! Fifteen of us left last Friday afternoon on a six hour bus ride towards Portugal’s capital city of Lisboa. The ride to the border of Spain and Portugal is just over an hour, but Lisboa is closer to the South West coast hence the additional bus ride of fun! ha.......
We checked intoour hotel, Resedencia Imperador, later that night.. in rainy weather .. booo. The hotel was nice though. There were 3 of us per room, (Candice, Sarah, and I) and we all had our own beds--sweet deal. Once settled we all headed out to the bar district of the city via the Lisboa Metro……
Sarah and I, (being the sexy little things that we are) insisted on wearing heels despite the wet weather. Our reasoning was that if we didn’t want to ruin shoes, the best thing to wear would be heels because flats get wet and your feet never dry, and then leather sandals just shoudn’t get wet to begin with. Well, BIG MISTAKE. You see, like Salamanca and most places in Europe, every single walkway or street is cobble stones. Unlike Salamanca, however, Portugal’s cobble stones are 2 ½ inch tiles with absolutely no grouting—hence HOLES HOLES HOLES! Holes bigger than the heels of our shoes. So all night Sarah and I trailed behind the group ever so slightly… barefoot.. on the dirty streets of Portugal, which again—unlike Salamanca—are not washed on a daily basis (bad assumption.) So that was the worst of it, once we finally reached the bars all was good and we danced the night away to just about every song we heard, with the guys who were willing to salsa with our not-so-good-at-salsa-yet selves. On the brighter side, we discovered that taxis were only 5 Euros for a trip to the hotel so we opted for rides home, rather than walks through dirty rivers and soup kitchen stands (don't ask). J
Saturday in Portugal: Breakfast on the 8th floor of the hotel. We had little bocadillos with ham and cheese and espresso. A little old lady who works as a maid their came up for our table and started talking to us in Portuguese.. luckily we picked up on some enough of the language and were able to respond back to her with things like.. we are students from Estados Unidos and we are studying in Salamanca, but right now we are here to go to the beacccch!!! (all is spanish of course. She was honestly the cutest little woman ever. Reminded me a lot of my grandma! One irritating thing about Portugal--everyone can speak Portuguesa, English, and Spanish (in that order) so whenever I spoke to someone in spanish, they responded in English--this was annoying. After brekke-----Cascais! One of the most, if not most, beautiful beaches I’ve ever been too. (Mind you I’ve never been to the islands off the south coast of the US.) The weather was perfect—awesome temperature, blue skies, low humidity—just perfect. We stayed there for the day, laid en el sol, swam in el agua, tried the most amazing gelato.. all in all---everyone should have the opurtunity to visit. The town itself was so beautiful, the buildings were covered in painted tiles and palm trees lined the streets. The buildings were either pail pinks, blues or yellows..and did I mention Santini Gelato (chocolate & hazelnut)? The water was cold, but not too cold to keep any of us from jumping in, and the sand was so fine! SO much softer than any other sand that I’ve felt before..--(that sounded weird, but really--great sand!) you can bet we got our ciesta on. J That night we went out to a really fancy restaurant in Lisboa with traditional costume/ dance resturant! We all paid a set price of 20 Euros--a little much, we know, butttt we took the wallet dive. Took 15 of us 3 hours to finish dinner--for the most part lots of fun.. especially with a never ending service of vino and olives! Then we went out.
Sunday: We missed our complimentary Portuguesa breakfast from oversleeping. We traveled to Jeronimos Monastary--beautiful architexture--walked around for about an hour and then headed to la playa once again! one again--just as amazing
I'll put a few pics up under Portugal on the front of this homepage!
Sorry to breeze through, currently at the JMU office about to get started on una presentacion oral. wooot. hasta luegooo
Oh una cosita mas! This week is Salamanca's fiesta week. Absolutely insane. For the next ten days almost every bar has it's own kiosk outside of the actual bar until 6am and there are different bands performing in La Plaza every night! I'm not partaking too too much because I actually have work to do now--but it's a site to see!
