Ten.

Picture by Tara at Third Book Photography

Ten years ago today, we were a couple of 15-year-olds who were googly-eyed over each other. He asked me out. I said yes.

Ten years and one wedding later, I find him more and more fascinating each passing year.

We're off to Galicia this weekend, in the north of Spain, to enjoy the weekend. His birthday's also tomorrow, so it's a big grand celebration of life and love and time together.

(If I had any of our old-school pictures with me here in Spain, this is where I would have put one.  They're fantastic.)

This takes cojones

Four ways in which this day was extraordinarily pleasant:

1. After months and months of pining for a library (maybe the thing I've missed most about the good old U S of A), I finally found one (with English books to boot) and applied for a library card. I felt like singing Beethoven's Ninth, I was so excited.

2. I took an actual siesta today. Daylight Savings and an encroaching cold have been kicking my butt this week and I won a few points back.

3. The Mister and I went to our favorite neighborhood bar for some tapas and ended up having a sing-off, Spanish songs vs. American ones, with some Spanish pensioners.  We discovered the following: a.) They are better singers than we are (of course), and b.) everyone knows the basic tune to Hotel California.

4.  I saw this guy, pictured above, crossing the street, wearing practically nothing.  This is why people hate tourists.

Honestly though, this guy made my day.

That's right, scratch it where it counts.

Spanish school lunches involve a lot of lentils.

Behold a Spanish school lunch menu.

Things of immediate interest:

• Eating at school is optional, because lunch is at 2:00 and is after the school day has officially ended.  About three quarters of the kids at my school stay for lunch, and the other quarter go home to a home-cooked meal. This probably fluctuates a bit depending on the school.
• There is only one meal option every day, and nothing is a la carte like in most American schools. There is no option to bring your own lunch. Students who eat at the school eat whatever the school is serving that day.  I like this idea myself, being heavily in favor of non-picky eating.

Here we go.

Each day has total calories listed, as well as carbohydrates and protein and all that jazz.  I shudder to think of what that would look like on an American menu (today your child had a corn dog, tater tots, canned peaches in heavy syrup, and topped it all off with sugary chocolate milk.  Total calories: THREE BAZILLION.) They serve vegetables everyday according to the guide on the back, and at least half of those vegetables every week must be raw (i.e. salad and fresh fruit).

Let's check out one day: Tuesday, the 15th. We've got a green garden salad, followed by lentils with chorizo (a Spanish sausage), whole wheat bread and fresh fruit for dessert.  The children that eat at the comedor range in age from three years to eight years old, and they are having green salads as appetizers.  Being American, I'm naturally impressed by a three-year old that doesn't run screaming from anything that doesn't involve chicken nuggets.

Look at Tuesday the 8th: cream of zucchini and potato soup, followed by a stewed pork dish in tomato sauce, with whole wheat bread and fruit.

Monday the 14th: spiral pasta with tomato sauce, followed by fish in a garlic and olive oil sauce, vegetables, white bread, and yogurt for dessert.

All this begs the question: if you have a small child, would they eat this stuff? Oh yes, they would. If they were Spanish.

Inside out

Inside out. Happens to the best of us. Apparently.

Last night I had one of those sleepless nights - toss and turn, toss and turn. Spaniards are enthusiastic double parkers when it comes to city streets, and there's etiquette involved. The person that's caged in just sits in his car laconically and honks his horn until the offender comes out and moves his car.  It happens daily, to the general exasperation of the surrounding neighborhood.  Last night must have been a double parking bonanza, because the horns went on, and on, and on.

Then I woke up an hour early against my will - Daylight Savings Time, I'd like to have a few words with you.  Went to school, yawning all the way, and lo and behold, second graders aren't any more fond of Daylight Savings day than I am.  They were unprepared, cranky and generally unhappy, and the teacher let them know exactly what she thought of this behavior, in a voice that can be described as nothing other than...shrill. Very, very shrill.

This was not a promising beginning.

In my class of five-year-olds, it got worse.  Out of their seats, screaming and yelling with energy and a zest for life that is frankly more admirable when one has slept soundly the night before (as I'm sure all parents can attest).

Then, finally, a breakthrough.  One of my kids, a mischievous little soul that looks startlingly and adorably like a tiny Barack Obama, turned to me.

"Seño, Seño!" he pestered, pulling at my leg.

I looked down.

He had two colored pencils, one yellow and one red, fixed firmly in each nostril and pointing downward like tusks on a walrus.

"May I go to the bathroom?"

I giggled.

He grinned wickedly.

I belly laughed.

He was delighted.

And then I looked down and realized that I was wearing my shirt inside out.

And it returned to being a so-so day.

Really, why else would you get a hot air balloon?

One from the archives.

Sunrise in Arizona. 7 a.m., August 2010.

How many people do you think are getting proposed to in this picture?

My guess is three.

Chestnuts roasted o'er the open fire unfortunately smell better than they taste. I've tried.

Spring is in the air and summer is a-comin'.

Exhibit A: blooming plant life. In particular, the whole city is steeped in the fragrance of orange blossoms, azahar.  I walk around taking big, deep breaths of air like I'm in a yoga class or getting ready to deep-sea dive, but really I'm just trying to somehow embody that smell. I want to feel it in my eyelashes and in my pinkie toes.

Exhibit B: our local chestnut roaster guy has put out his fire for the season and erected an ice cream stand instead.

Rosa's stamp of approval

This is Rosa.  Rosa is one of my favorite Spaniards.  She and her husband Mauricio are good friends of The Mister and I, and since they lived in San Diego for a bit (we've even compared notes on the same restaurants, half a world away) they have a rather unique cultural perspective.  We hang out all four of us, and the conversation flows in English and Spanish, often all in the same sentence, which gets really fun when someone says something really ridiculous, like "el wino," a mixture of the word wine and its Spanish counterpart vino. El wino.  Oops. It has a ring, no?

Rosa offers independent verification of my Stuff Americans/Europeans Like lists: she agrees that salad dressing is, like, weirdly popular in the US and that one of the things she couldn't get over about living in the US was how everything just worked (i.e. item #10 efficiency) - if you had to call the plumber, the plumber came right away, and if you needed something, you just went and bought it.  

Rosa is also European in the following ways: she freely admits to eating the whole animal, she likes tuna, and she is one of those people that's just hopelessly cool - I include this picture as proof.  She is sautéeing mushrooms, people, and she still looks chic - she can't help it. 

Europeans always manage to look pretty cool.

It's a cultural trait.

Stuff Americans Like

It's been said many times before: there's nothing to get you to notice your own culture like being outside of it for a bit.  Yesterday the Europeans had the hot seat - today I'm throwing my own people on there. Hold on tight, we're in for a roasting. 

Stuff Americans Like:

Eating in cars
Don't turn up your nose like that.  If you hail from North America in any form, you've done it.  We all have.  Europeans, for the most part, wouldn't dream of it.

Free toilets
The notion that taking a whiz ought to be free is so deeply ingrained in the American consciousness that most of us don't even know until we venture out into the big great beyond that this isn't a world standard.  It's not uncommon in the least to pay a small fee to use the toilet in public.  Also, toilet paper is a privilege in Europe, not a right.  Beware.

Chicken
I never knew how much Americans love their chicken, because I just thought that everyone ate that much chicken.  They do not.  Chicken is widely available, of course, but it isn't anywhere near the most popular meat here in Spain (I'd say the hierarchy goes something like this: ham, then pork, then every other part of the pig, then fish, then rabbit, then beef, then maybe chicken).  In Africa, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in every other part of the world I've been in, people eat chicken but they do not adore it like Americans do.  Not by a long shot. (You know you're American if at least once a week you have the thought: Hey! We should throw some chicken in this!)

Fancy schmancy coffee
French vanilla hazelnut butterscotch creamer, soy double shot americano with a twist, on the rocks (can you tell I'm not really a coffee drinker? Which part gave it away?). Coffee is big here, but the plain black stuff usually does just fine.  Maybe sprinkle in a little sugar.  From what I hear, it helps the medicine go down.

Enormous things
Buildings. Cars. Plates of Nachos. People. Did you know that the United States is over twice the size of all of Europe combined? Or something like that.  The scale of our country is so expansive that it can't help but seep into our mindset in nearly every possible way.  Americans just like things grand and showy, and when we set out to do something, we usually don't do it halfway.

Fresh milk
It's called UHT milk, people, and most of my compatriots, including myself, wouldn't touch it with a two-by-four.  Americans simply do not like to put their milk in the pantry.  But lots of Europeans do it everyday.

Wearing seatbelts
It's a national habit.  Turns out in this one area at least, we are a nation of conscientious rule followers.  In a lot of the world, seatbelts gather dust and wearing one is seen as a bit childish.

Wearing workout gear in public as if they were actual clothes
In America, wearing workout gear does not have to mean that you are working out currently, or that you just worked out, or that you are planning on doing so anytime in the near future, or, for that matter, ever. The ability to wear your sweats to Wal-Mart is a fundamental American right, right? Acceptable features of such an outfit include: workout hair, tennis shoes, yoga pants, sweatshirts of any kind, baggy t-shirts or basketball shorts. Number of these acceptable in Europe: approximately zero.

Salad dressing

Europeans seem to prefer the oil-and-vinegar route.  Boy are they missing out! Cranberry Walnut Vinaigrette.  Avocado Ranch. Chipotle and Red Pepper Fiesta Dressing. Bleu Cheese. The options are endless, and take up half of an (enormous, see above) supermarket aisle. The result: delicious.

Efficiency

We love this one.  We are famous for it (believe it or not).  If you are American, you may be shaking your head right now, thinking "they just haven't seem me yet!". But come to Europe (or much of the rest of the world for that matter, Japan and Germany being two notable exceptions) and try to observe anyone actually trying to get something done.  You will have at least three ideas that randomly pop into your head that would streamline the process and make it easier and more reliable.  You will be surprised at yourself for having these thoughts. Then you will understand.

Choices

We can choose between hundreds of varieties of carpet cleaners, spaghetti sauces, car models, universities, sports teams.  This effect is by no means gone here in Europe, but it's certainly muted a lot.  In America, you can eat Thai food one night, Italian food the next, then Ethiopian and Mexican and Japanese.  Variety! Choices! Possibility!  Ah, America. She still has glitter, doesn't she?

  

Stuff Europeans Like

Unexpected light switches.
Americans are pretty predictable when it comes to light switches.  They're usually just inside the doorframe on whichever side of the door has the knob. We almost invariably like the kind that look like this:

This is not my picture.  I did not have a picture of an American light switch, and I find myself lacking access to them at the moment.  This is m.martinphotography's picture. Isn't the lighting pretty cool?

Europeans like to hunt for them, like a big Where's Waldo game anytime someone wants to turn on the lights.  Is it inside the door or outside? Or across the room? Or down the hall? Nobody knows!  They also almost always prefer the ones that look like this:

Splashing water on their privates

Oh, the bidet. 

Tuna

Tuna is the chicken of Europe. Everywhere that Americans randomly put chicken, Europeans put tuna. Examples: pizza, plunked on top of salads, in empanadas and on top of baked potatoes. I could say more but, as a lifelong tuna hater, I'm starting to gag.

Wine

The rumors are true.  The wine really is better here (nobody tell the Californians!), they really do drink it a lot, and it really is cheap.

Nudity

Okay, it's not that they love it, but it just isn't offensive like it is in America. In Europe, a 3-year-old does not need a bathing suit. 

Black

Oh, did no one tell you? (They didn't tell me either.) Black is chic.  So are brown, grey and beige. Only Americans wear clothes in rainbow colors. Dead giveaway.

Eating the Whole Animal

Blood soup, tongues, livers, fried pig ears, sauteed cow stomach, fish eyeballs, whole rabbits...I could go on.  And on. And, I assure you, I don't even know the half of it.  Americans get a bad international rap for being pretty picky eaters, a stereotype which I would have strenuously objected to before witnessing European kids chow down on cow brains and stuff like that. They win.

Labor Strikes

Any given day in Europe, some country is experiencing a strike. The only place that this varies is in France, where you can expect a strike approximately every hour.  You just learn to plan around it.

Automatic Cars
Americans overwhelmingly buy automatics.  Europeans overwhelmingly buy manuals. Why? Nobody knows.



And don't think we Americans get off easy - there's nothing that sheds new light on your own culture quite like being outside of it!  Stuff Americans Like is coming tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Cherry Blossom Hope

Spring is in bloom.

These are plum blossoms, but they look so much like cherry blossoms that I fell in love with them a little bit.  I love cherry blossoms - I lived in Japan for a couple years when I was a kid, the land of the cherry blossom, and I remember riding my bike down this one long street in town that was filled with cherry trees.  They seemed to soar to the sky, and in the spring it was a riot of color and fragrance.  They looked like blushing brides, draped in lace,  clothed in pink and white innocence.

The news out of Japan this week has been terrible, just terrible.  I've added a lot of words to my Spanish vocabulary that I hope I would never need - words like total destruction, radiation, and reactor meltdown.

2011 has been brutal so far for the world. Revolutions, civil wars, stubborn dictators, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis.  

It's been a hard winter.

But I, for one, am hoping with all my might that beauty, and healing, will return with the spring.



  

Top o' the mañana to you!

This picture is of Portuguese vino verde, green wine.

It's been a lovely spring day in Málaga and tonight, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I am going to drink green beer.

See the connection between the picture and the post?

Green wine.  Green beer.

Get it?

Persimmon, How I Love Thee

Lets take a moment of silence to observe the passing of the 2010-2011 persimmon season.

*crickets chirping*

Just me?

Persimmons don't get a bad rap in the States necessarily, they just get no rap. No rap at all.  Before I came to Spain, my knowledge of persimmons was...well, I just tried to think of a single thing that I knew about persimmons and I couldn't come up with any.

But here in Spain, the persimmon is the orange goddess of the winter produce section. Sweet, juicy, subtle.

It's spring now and they're disappearing faster than good taste at a Justin Beiber concert.

And so, this, my sendoff.

I'll be tapping my foot until the fall.

Europe isn't all rainbows and butterflies

Looks like a cute, innocent little market, right?

Look, I love living in Europe, I really do.

But it isn't paradise, not by a long shot.

Europe has seedy parts, overflowing dumpsters, and philandering politicians that seemingly number in the thousands. Just like everywhere else.

The most awkward part for me is the racism.  I am not going to sugarcoat here - there is a pretty strong underlayer of latent racism here in Spain.  I'm not saying they're even necessarily going to show it to you right off the bat, because Spaniards are still quite a genial bunch, but being at least mildly racist is still pretty socially acceptable here in a way it hasn't been in the States since, oh, 1982? ish?

The country, if you remember, was pretty closed off for a huge part of the 20th century under the dictatorship of Franco, and non-Spaniards didn't really start flowing in immigration-wise until the past couple decades.  It still shocks them, especially older Spaniards, and they'll tell you with kind voices and gentle hands on your arm to not go into that one neighborhood "because it's full of Gypsies," or that the best place in town to buy cheap goods is from the Chinese, putting their fingers to the corners of their eyes and stretching their skin for emphasis.

To an American (and a millennial to boot), it's....awkward. I know I said that twice but I don't know what else I can say about it.

There is no moral to the story and no cute anecdote or anything.  I just thought that since I give a pretty solid majority of this blog to the many joys of Europe in general and Spain in particular, I thought it would be fair to step back and do a little audit occasionally.  Maybe I'll make it a series called "Europe has dumpsters too!"

Here's the sign above that little fruit market. The barely civilized indigenous man serving the white man his afternoon tea. AWKWARD.

Merece la pena

My head is so full of Spanish that it feels like it's going to start leaking out my ears.

This weekend The Mister and I met with Rosa and Mauricio for tapas (bull tail meatballs, anyone?)  We also hung out with Pilar and Juan to grab a beer and eat peanuts and popcorn at their favorite American bar.  Then, we celebrated Salva's birthday into the wee hours with a whole raucous crowd of Spaniards (see photo above, shamelessly stolen from Beatriz).

The only English I spoke was to The Mister and occasionally it admittedly came out rather Spanglish-y. Like, "hey, that was a little fuerte, tío."  I am pretty sure that my English skills are cratering in direct proportion to the improvement of my Spanish skills.

Living at the intersection of two languages can be fertile ground for confusion.  My phone's spell check is in Spanish, so occasionally I send my mother texts that read "Haga (supposed to be: haha). Dang my spell checo is in Spanish" (actual text sent today, 16:22  - oh yes, remember 24-hour time?).  I dream in Spanish and in English, and sometimes I dream that all I can speak is a crazy unintelligible mix of the two and nobody can understand me no matter how well I pronounce things.  Then I stop dream-talking and just start eating extra spicy buffalo wings drenched in ranch dressing (hey, it's my dream).

The good news is that each day Spanish gets a little easier to speak, the words come to me a little bit faster, the grammar mistakes a little less egregious.  I once felt that listening to a native Andalucían tell a story was like being drenched all over in water and then asked to separate the drops from each other - that's how impossible it felt to identify each individual word out of the rapid-fire syllables.  But now they make sense mostly, and when they don't I actually know how to identify the unfamiliar part and ask what it is.

It feels like a milagro.

Rain, rain, don't go away

Rainy, windy, cold day on the Coast of the Sun.

The kind of day that turns your umbrella inside out - twice.

I love it.

I think that's a statement you can only truly understand if you've spent any time living in the desert.  I feel like my three years in Phoenix created a huge longing in me for rainy days that hasn't quite gone away yet.  I had lived in Maryland for 13 years before I left for Phoenix, and had regarded rain as a necessary evil - something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

But there's nothing that will get you to appreciate something like experiencing the near-total absence of it.  Don't get me wrong, the relentless sunshine of Phoenix is one thing I like a lot about the city. But sometimes the soul just needs a good stormy day, for balance.

Today my bus stopped early and I had to walk the few minutes home along the beach (rough life), the whitecaps frothing, the sea silver and heaving. The rain was darting down like missiles, and I was getting creamed in the fight to stay dry.

But I knew that waiting for me at the end of the cold, wet walk was warm pajamas, a cold beer, a movie and The Mister.

And that made it all okay.

An anti-recipe, for your consideration

Cinnamon = Canela

Cumin = Comina

That becomes relevant really fast when you have cinnamon sugar toast that is actually cumin sugar toast.

It was unpleasant, we'll leave it at that.

The Poscars

And the Poscars (Portugal Oscars) go to:

Most Valuable Player

Our iPhone GPS, affectionally named Mari Paz (she's Spanish).

Homeliest Team Member

Our black Nissan Micra, known as "The Fruit Fly"

Unsung Hero

Our clutch - only one stall out between the four of us (!!!)

Best Accommodations

Hanging out at the farm in Extremadura

Best Hostel

The House of the She-Pine Tree in Sintra.  If you're in Portugal at any time for any occasion, do yourself a favor and book a night - it's a destination in its own right. And stay for dinner, the cod is fantastic (and I don't even like fish).

Most Likely Culprit for an Unplanned Pit Stop

My bladder

Nerves of Steel

The Mister, who did all the city driving with those hilly, cobblestone streets that are so narrow you feel like you need to suck in your gut.

Coolest Spot

Tie: Porto and Sintra

Place That Turned Out To Be Not Worth Stopping For

Coimbra. Meh.

Best Pairing
Bradley and caffeine

Worst Pairing(s)
Becca and high bridges over water
Me and our GPS Mari Paz.  She only really responds well to The Mister.
The Mister and Portuguese toll booths.  Whoops. Sorry about that unpaid toll, Portugal.  We owe you 1.85

Coolest Cultural Experience
Watching Fado, traditional singing sort of like Spanish flamenco, in Lisbon.

Worst Drivers
The Portuguese.  It's like the whole country thinks they are in the Indy 500, and that they get extra points for passing around blind curves.

Best Drivers
Certainly not any of us. One (accidentally) unpaid toll (I ask of you: how are you supposed to realize that your lane is only for people who have the special toll debit card if you can't read Portuguese?), one parking ticket and one exceedingly minor (*ahem*) bumper kiss on another car.  All in a week's work!

For those of you who like pictures, all our Portugal trip photos can be found here!

Ding dong, the LSAT witch is dead!

On the last night of our trip, we stopped in to visit our British friends in Extremadura.  They put us all up for the night, fed us delicious food as always, and schooled us on the proper pronunciation of ...well, of just about everything. We played charades late into the night, drinking Martin's homemade pomegranate and fig liquers, and we lit a bonfire outside.   

The night before we were in Extremadura, The Mister did some online sleuthing and realized that our LSAT scores were about to be released within the next few hours.  We stayed up late, feeling that nervous feeling that you get right before you go onstage somewhere, before deciding that we should call it a night.

The next morning The Mister woke up at 6:45 and took a bleary look at his iPhone to see if there were any emails from the Law School Admissions Council.  There were.  He took a quick peek and then grabbed my hand, pulling me out of bed in jubilation.  I was half-asleep until he choked out my score, at which point I came fully and suddenly awake like in a cartoon when someone gets  bucket of water dumped on them.  The scores were good. Very, very good.

I started jumping up and down in my bare feet and whisper-shrieking, trying not to wake our friends but not able to hush.

It's been a long journey, folks.  Fourteen months, 50ish practice tests, hours and hours spent inside studying while looking longingly out the window.  And it all paid off in the end.

But I have a few things in mind next time we have a big fire that needs to be cranked up (those LSAT books).

Drinking Port in Porto

Yesterday after walking around town for about an hour we realized how utterly cool the city of Porto is, and we told the hostel we were staying another night.  It turned out to be a great decision.  Here's a little glimpse of our time here in Porto:

This was apparently voted one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world.  Who would've thought that they would have a contest for such a thing?  Either way, a fun fact: this is the staircase that inspired JK Rowling when she was writing Harry Potter  - did you know that she lived here in Porto? Yes she did, folks.  And I'll say that the bookstore does in fact have some very Hogwarts-ish features to it.

Lunch. Typical Porto food of francezhina, which is a sandwich with steak, sausage and ham, topped with melted cheese and slathered in some sort of unidentifiable sauce that was downright delicious.  Mine was also topped with a fried egg.  This is non-vegan food at its finest, friends.

Porto has hilly cobblestone streets, and there are lots of old-fashioned tram cars ready to pick up the slack when your thigh muscles finally give out.

Also, we are in Porto, so clearly we needed to do some port-tasting, otherwise my parents the wine lovers would have disowned me.  We took a tour of the last wholly Portuguese-owned wine cellar, and drank lots of different kinds of port.  In the end they all tasted like...port.

Porto.  Most underrated travel city in Europe?  If you're planning on checking out the Iberian peninsula anytime soon, take a stop in.  I don't think you'll be sorry at all.

Tomorrow we'll start the trek homeward, and we'll be stopping in to see our friends in Extremadura (remember them?), which I'm super excited about.  Won't have any internet, so I'm signing off until next Monday. Until then, drink some port and think of me.

Road Tripping in Portugal: The North

Yesterday we woke up in Sintra, Portugal at the coolest hostel ever - a converted art museum that still has sketches and art hanging everywhere. It's like a little Victorian house, and they made us a homemade dinner and served it to us by candlelight.  Breakfast was on the back portico overlooking the rolling green hills.  Keep this in mind later in this story, because don't worry, karma caught up with us eventually.

We left Sintra and headed to Ericeara, a little surf town known for its strong waves and awesome seafood.  For lunch I had a pile of squid that were each about the size of my thumb and grilled whole.  They were tasty once I figured out how to eat them (a fair amount of trial and error was involved).  Here are some Ericeara photos:

After lunch we hopped back in the car and skipped up the road to Fátima.  In 1917 a few children were pretty sure they saw the Virgin Mary there, and she made some prophesies that apparently have come true.  So now there's a cathedral and convent and lots of souvenir shops selling rosary beads.  The churches are quite lovely.

In Fátima, it is not appreciated if you play your trombone, so leave it in the car please.

After that, we ended up in Coimbra for the night, which is a cool little university town.  It took all four of us to parallel park, and then we found what turned out to be the sketchiest hostel ever.  The proprietor was leaning in the door when we walked up, smoking a cigarette and appearing so completely unkempt that we thought he might be homeless.  The floors were sticky, the rooms smelled like sulfur and cigarette smoke, and the other patrons were wandering around in a strangely vacant fashion.  Bradley said it was like One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, and at dinner we laughed so hard over it all that we cried.  But it was cheap.

Dinner was lively, as a group of about 50 (yes really) Portuguese university students were celebrating a birthday at the same restaurant, and they were singing, chanting, toasting, singing again, and so on.  We joined in, of course, and we got a standing ovation from a few people when we sang a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" in English. It was fabulous.

This morning we got out of that nasty hostel place as soon as was humanly possible, and we stopped into  Aveiro, which is known as "the Venice of Portugal" for its canal system.  Sadly, we all agreed that it was not nearly going to rival actual Venice, although it was quite a picturesque little town.

And now, I'm blogging from Porto, where we are lucky to have driven up the steep, narrow streets without rolling backwards down the hills.  We're going to head out soon to take some wine tours and sample some port.  Mom and Dad (my favorite wine aficionados), get jealous.

I also feel compelled to say that I didn't mess with these pictures in photo editing to make the skies bluer - we've had nothing but cloudless days the whole time we've been here, and the electric blue skies are all natural, courtesy of Portugal and not Photoshop.  Isn't that ridiculous?

Road Tripping in Portugal: The South

Hello all!

I'm blogging right now from a teeny town in the windy hills of Portugal. We're on day 5 of our road trip, and boy has it been a ride.  Portugal has been absolutely gorgeous, and oozing charisma.

Here's what we've been up to so far:

Day 1: Lagos

On the first day we picked up the rental car, a lovely black Nissan Micra that we've affectionately termed "the fruit fly" for obvious aesthetic reasons.  She's 5 manual gears of nothing but suave and finesse.

Once we got all settled, we wound around the coast of Spain and up into the hills and mountains outside Sevilla before we finally crossed the border:

The landscape was not ugly in the slightest:






We got to Lagos the first night, a cute little coastal town on the Mediterranean, and we had a home cooked breakfast served to us courtesy of Angela, the proprietor at our guest house and a grandmotherly Portuguese woman whose whole face crinkled up when she smiled.  She spoke to us in Portuguese. We spoke back in Spanish.  We all understood each other just fine - miracle.

Day 2: Evora, Lisbon

We headed out to a little town deep in rural Portugal that's famed for its chapel decorated entirely with human bones. 

Creepy, yes? We had lunch in Evora also, and The Mister ordered a creamy tomato soup that turned out to be a bowl of spaghetti sauce, served with a spoon.

Oh, did I not mention? Evora was beautiful.

After our time there, we headed to Lisbon, where we had Portuguese-style steak for dinner - thin beef fillets cooked in a gravy broth and served with a fried egg on top, served over a bed of french fries if you're lucky (and we were).

Day 3: Lisbon

We discovered how much Lisbon is like the San Francisco of Europe - hilly, breezy town bordered by the ocean on one side and a bay on the other. Their bridge looks pretty much exactly like the Golden Gate.  We checked out a couple castles and then climbed to the highest point in the city so we could look out over the whole thing.

 In the afternoon we went to a little bar that has Fado on Sunday afternoons - Fado being the traditional Portuguese singing that sounds a little bit like flamenco.  We were the only non-Portuguese patrons, and it was karaoke-style - everyone that was there, it seemed, would get up at the front and take a turn, and it was obvious they'd been doing this for years.  It was one of the coolest travel experiences I've ever had - I might need to write a whole separate post on that one time.

Day 4: Cascais, Sintra

We woke up and headed out of Lisbon toward the sunny beaches of Cascais.  Our mission was to see the famous "Boca de Inferno" rock formation below.  It was a windy day and the ocean spray danced wildly in the breeze.

After that we trekked down the road to Sintra, where we saw the coolest castle I've ever seen in my life. It looks like something out of Candy Land - colorful, with twisty ice-cream-cone shaped domes and turrets.  The whole thing is perched on a high hill overlooking the countryside, and surrounded by acres of lush gardens.  It used to be the summer residence of the Portuguese royal family.

I feel like a broken record because I keep saying that this was beautiful and that was beautiful, but suffice to say that pretty much our whole trip so far has been pretty inspiring.