Portugal

First off I just want to thanks my parents, the funks, for the awesome early Christmas present that they gave us.  I don't want to get into the whole Mac vs PC, or Steve jobs vs bill gates debate, because I know the salmonds are reading this and i don't want them to feel like they are winning this topic at all.  But In case you didn't already know, we were given an iPad and I don't even want to imagine how this trip would be going if we didn't have it.  I think we would still be trapped in italy somewhere flabbergasted trying to find available hotels.  So thank you again!

We just ended about a week and a half in Portugal.  Well...more like four days in portugal and a week in "little Britain".  We booked this amazing four star hotel in a place called albufeira for a week, for only twenty dollars a night.  All we saw were pictures of amazing beaches, pool side bars, and a ginormous room.  Sounds perfect right? Right?? Wrong!  A little bit of research probably would have shown us that being there you will experience as much Portuguese culture as being in britain, or Canada, or pretty much anywhere else in the world except for portugal. Our first clue was when we arrived at the hotel and we were surrounded by retired British people.  Kalia refers to it as the Waikiki of Europe.  We thought maybe if we went out into the town we could get away from it but no such doing.  Every shop in a two mile radius was serving fried beans for breakfast, or playing some "blokes vs mates" football game.  We did manage to get on a bus and get to someplace called city center where there were a bunch of shops where we could get some authentic Portuguese swag.  Or so we were hoping.  We felt like when joey from friends was in England and the vendor salesman convinces him all the locals wear the tall british flag hats.
Needless to say that was a painful week.  We at least got a couple days of sun out of it and got to chill poolside for a few hours, but we were over the moon when we finally got to ship out and head to Lisbon.

Finding the Lisbon "hotel" gave finding the venice hotel a run for its money.  We arrived in the city around noon thinking we would go drop off our things and head out onto the town and get a nice full day in still.  What we weren't aware of though was that if the information people in Lisbon don't know where something is off the top of their heads you're pooched.  We were basically running around town asking everyone in sight if they knew where the hotel or even the street it was on was, resulting in about twenty different ideas of where we should go.  Finally we were able to find the street on a map and started our trek.  After arriving at the address located conveniently on top of a giant hill in the ghetto, we discovered there was no place called residencial Alegre there, and were left running around for another two hours or so.  To cut the story short, some other young people who worked for the "hotel" found us wandering and showed us that in fact we were in the right place but the hotel was actually just a spare room in their parents three bedroom complex.  Kalia suitably calls this place "the room".

Enough with the venting though and onto Lisbon.  The city is really quite nice.  We arrived just late enough in november to see the city with all its christmas lights up, which of course makes any city look that much nicer.  We spent countless hours walking up and down the pedestrian only streets looking at all the quaint jewelry shops, or chowing down on the most delicious tarts ever to have graced our mouths.  I even ventured out to try a baked good called a brisa which is basically a brick of icing sugar, dough, and lemony goodness.  Even though im sure I have severly damaged my insides it was oh so worth it.

Aside from the city center we also managed to check out the infamous jeronimos palace and Belem tower, which were no rome, but were definitely interesting seeing the different styles of architecture going on in the world hundreds of years ago.
Lisbon is also home to some of the coolest contemporary architecture out there, and thanks to the heads up from janaya we made sure we checked it all out.

One of the funnest things in the city that i forgot to mention was their epic trams.  We managed to hop on one which is apparently famous as it was the first one ever in the city around a hundred years previous, and by the looks of it's wooden stature was probably the exact same one used back then.  It basically went for a tour of the city ripping up and down steep narrow streets, taking you to all sorts of sights like st jorges castle that overlooks the city, or ancient churches which I have no idea what their names are but you know they've got to be important in someway so you take a picture and act like you know whats going on.    

I think that's about it from portugal though, we just arrived jn Madrid today after another pleasant overnight train and look forward to seeing everything this city has to offer.   

g&k