27/29-09-07Portugal

To Portugal!

At 9AM, I made it to the rental car shop ready to hit the road to Lagos. We were off to Portugal from Thursday to Sunday, heading down to the coastal town of Lagos. People started to trickle to our meeting spot, but the person with our reservation, Chloe, was a good hour and a half late (which I found out later was normal). So, after another half hour of paperwork and dillydallying we headed towards the new part of town, picked up the others, and the nine of us headed out of Cadiz. I drove since Matt, who rented the car, was not familiar with the art of the manual. Also, I kind of wanted to try out the driving style on the treacherous Spanish roads. The roads here are interesting. Europeans, as always, are in a bind for space. The old parts of all the cities I’ve been to have been made up of roads big enough for one car and a person on both sidewalks – walking around the streets is sorta scary, driving is a whole different experience. People hardly even take a glance when they cross the street and need a prodding with the horn to get them to clear the road (I’m guilty of that when I’m walking too, but the sidewalks are way too small to expect us to use them all the time). The corners are ridiculously tight, and had I not been in a dumpling-like car, they would have been extremely difficult to navigate as well. Regardless, it was really fun and I enjoyed driving again too (mostly due to the fact that we were free to do whatever we pleased). Also, the nine of us got along great. We rocked, that was that.

Getting to Portugal was easy and no getting lost occurred. We drove into Lagos and sent one car off to find the apartments we were off to stay at while we waited. The scary part about that, lack of communication. A couple people had cell phones that worked but not well and it cost a ton. It’s a little uncomfortable to be so out of contact now that we’ve become accustomed to cell phones. It seems harder now than it was before cell phones to be without them. Landlines are almost nonexistent and pay phone prices are much higher since they are used much less frequently. Also, nobody knows other phone numbers anymore since every one they need is stored in their cell phone.

Lagos and the south of Portugal are generally dry but there is a gorgeous coastline. The first thing I noticed about the town was the excessive number of tourists and generally people speaking English. It seemed that the town was a popular vacation spot and possibly had many people making Lagos their summer home.

Finally, we got to eat what we wanted to eat! The apartment we were staying at had a full kitchen, so we went to a grocery store and got everything we’d been missing living with pseudo mothers. I got the ingredients for red curry chicken and cooked it that night. It was glorious. We also bought bread – a full, large, fantastic baguette for .50 Euros. Portugal, like Spain, did bread well and cheap. The US needs to figure that out. Going to a supermarket wasn’t too difficult especially due to the Americanization of food here in the Spain/Portugal region. What we normally buy in the US isn’t all there but it has similar goods and if you really wanted, you could live like an American college student, eating frozen pizza and coke (which is what Matt did). That night we took all of our food, had some drinks by the pool (apartments, chicken, AND a pool!) and then made a wonderful dinner.

The next day, our first full one, we went to the nearby beach, Luz. It had a little bit of a different structure from our beaches in Spain. It was a lot more rocky which made swimming a little treacherous. The upside was that we were right next to huge rock formations around which we climbed for a while and actually found a little secluded beach which would have been nice to discover a little earlier so that we could have spent all our time on it. We frisbee’d, walked around, swam around, and took in some more sun. Our group split up that night since the rest of them were not as interested in going into town. Josh, John, Vanessa, and I went into town to look around and possibly find some dinner. What we found – boring, tourist based menus with a huge lacking in authentic Portuguese food. There were street performers, all sorts of international food, and as I said, very little Portuguese culture. We saw two cool acts – one was a human statue set with two people, an angel in white and a demon all in black (creeeeepy); the other was by far the funniest, a Jamaican man, in Portugal, singing an American Song (Times Like These - Foo Fighters), and doing so poorly. Good times! After some debate we stayed the night in, having dinner at our place.

We woke up Saturday with the mission of actually doing something unique that we couldn’t already do in Cadiz. We went to the tourism office and booked tickets to take a tour of the numerous grottos of Lagos (water caves). The tour was nice, nothing spectacular but still cool. The caves would have been fun to swim around in and explore a little deeper than our speedboat could take us. The most awesome sight was the holes in the roofs of the caves. They were carved out over millennia by water from the sea hitting the rocks and spewing up to slowly eroding that little area of the cave. As we rode around I got to know the man driving the boat/guiding the tour. He was Portuguese and spoke relatively good English. We began talking about the USA and where within it he had traveled. When talking about his visit to L.A. and I asked him how he had liked it. His response was interesting and disheartening. He enjoyed the country but the people put him off. Due to his skin color he immediately was tagged as a Mexican. Furthermore, after he would correct their mistake, it would still be assumed that he spoke Spanish due to the fact that they believed Portugal was a part of Spain. It really embarrassed me as an American. Especially since all that lack of education was coupled with a negative treatment in general due to the anti-Hispanic sentiment a lot of grudging Southern Californians feel.

After the tour we happily walked back to our car to have our mood demolished. The lock to the car, which Matt (who wasn’t with us at the time) rented, had been tampered with and was completely unusable. All the doors were unlocked which was even scarier. Fortunately the thief had taken absolutely nothing. Maybe we got lucky and got back at the right time or someone else might have scared them off. Regardless, it was really annoying, a little depressing, and made the trip a little less fun. To finish up our Lagos tour we took a walk around the city walls and through the old part of town which, despite being tourist ridden, is really quaint and beautiful. After that, we went back to the house to be depressed a little more and take a little siesta.

Dinner – Indian food!!! We ate curry and tikka and I burned my taste buds for the first time in a looong time with my curry of 5+1 stars. The food was great and my pride was boosted by the waiter who kept coming over concerned that my food would be too hot and I kept sending him away with the, “it’s perfect,” response. We found the others at a bar in town and proceeded to party the night away in a couple different bars, one of which was four stories of dancing and drinking. I went home “early” at 3:30 AM and was to bed by 4 AM. The others, in all their intelligence and knowing we had to be out of the apartments before 12 PM got home at around 7 AM. They were a little out of it the next day as we started our journey back.