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!

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. 

To Portugal we go!

We start at the sun and go left.

Next week is a week off in Málaga schools, so we find ourselves in the position of being footloose, fancy-free, and in a convenient spot to do a little poking around the neighborhood.

Our fellow teacher friends Becca and Bradley had been planning a trip to Morocco...until the protests started there.  Probably good for Moroccans, but bad for Becca and Bradley's dreams of camel-trekking through the desert.  So we collectively put our heads together, and thought:  ROAD TRIP!

And so, to Portugal we go, from the south all the way up through the north, along the coast, and we're hoping to take a jaunt around northern Spain in the Galicia region, seeing as we're up there.

I plan on taking a kickin' playlist ("Tiny Dancer" by Elton John is a must-have on any road trip, in my book, and it must be sung at the very top of the lungs), plenty of road snacks (Spanish-style though of course, ham-flavored potato chips anyone?), and of course my trusty camera La Rebel.

Since we're taking a car and don't have to cram everything into a single backpack, I'm also bringing along some blogging equipment, so I'll keep you updated intermittently while we're on the road.  And, of course, pictures will be a-comin', so stay tuned!  I'm sure there will be some interesting stories, especially seeing as how none of us have driven a car in at least six months, none of us have driven stick shift in a few years, and we don't speak Portuguese.  No sweat, I'm sure.