Hello again!!!! This time I come with greetings from Portugal...I just got back last night. I intentionally didn't write about this trip ahead of time because I figured it'd just be better to do so after I had already arrived back to Sevilla safely :)
So here's what happened: We have heard from tons of people around here that Lagos, Portugal is amazing.... everyone raves about the town and the beaches, so naturally we needed to go there. Four of my friends (Maggie, Dana, Tim, and Billy) and I decided that we were gonna go for it so we set a time to meet in an internet café and plan this thing. First we rented a car.....then booked a hostel......then we were off!...it blows my mind how easy it was to do this. So all of us in our wise old age of either 20 or 21 years old showed up at the car rental place with our bags packed for portugal (it was a good 35 minute walk from where we were, but since we got lost it took us atleast an hour). We arrived just minutes before they closed down for siesta so we got lucky. We couldn't get there any earlier because we all had class. The only identification they looked at was Maggie's expired driver's license with a hole punched in it (we were prepared to provide more documents, but they didn't even ask for them), we paid, then they handed us the keys. It was unbelievable. Oh and we paid an extra 5 euros each to insure our windows and tires. My father has stressed the importance of insurance time and time again so by golly I got me some insurance. It only cost us 16 euros each to rent this thing for 3 days. As we pulled out of the parking garage we had one of those "Holy cow we are about to drive a rental car out of one foreign country and into the next, what the crap are we doing" moments but that soon passed. Driving in the insane traffic here in Sevilla proved to be challenging just like we thought. Thank goodness for our extra skilled driver, Tim. He handled it all calmly and was an excellent driver. Once we got on the highway it was all smooth sailing. About 2 and a half hours later we arrived in Portugal only to get lost once again. Turns out Lagos is just as confusing to navigate as Sevilla except add some major hills. And yes, we were definitely driving a manual. After stopping at a hospital, a store, and 2 gas stations to ask for directions (all of these places gave us maps and each map had enitrely different roads marked on it.....awesome) we finally found it. We didn't even have to stop when we crossed the border, no passport checks, nada. They just don't at all care what you do around here I guess. That would never fly in the U.S.
The name of our hostel was The Rising Cock. Hahaha! Apparently this is a pretty famous hostel to stay in (it always fills up which is why we had to book ahead of time) so we were excited and it turned out to be awesome. This was my first time staying in a hostel and it was such a cool experience. It's basically a big house type thing that people typically between the ages of 18 and 25 stay in for a couple nights at a time as they travel through Europe, or wherever. The 5 of us all had one room which was actually an old bar in the basement of the hostel with 5 twin beds in it. Upstairs there was a huge hangout room with tv's, couches, music playing, etc...a balcony outside with chairs to hang out in, a kitchen where some lady that everyone calls "mom" cooks for us and runs around doing whatever we happen to need, and just a bunch of bedrooms that have 4 or 5 beds in each of them. There is no such thing as privacy in a hostel, that's for sure. It's so cool because you meet people from all over the world. Just during the 2 nights I stayed there I met people my age from Ireland, Australia, Spain, France, Germany, and other Americans. Everyone just hangs out with everyone which is necessary since you share pretty much everything. It was 20 euros per night, not bad at all.
I loved the town of Lagos and the beaches were awesome.....there were tons of rocks that we climbed and there was a massive cliff jump. We ate in 2 really cool restaurants during our nights there and the nightlife was very busy, very late, and a blast as usual. It was weird not being able to use spanish to communicate though since we're so used to that when out in public. Communicating was not difficult though because nearly all of the Portugese people speak english in addition to portugese and usually a few other languages too. I tried out my french skills for a little bit with someone I met and that was disastrous haha.
All in all, going to Portugal was a GREAT decision and I would love to go back. We had a ton of fun, met some really cool people, plus I learned a lot....I was proud of our inexperienced selves navigating through something like this because travelling can be confusing and a lot of work at times just to make it all happen.
Second session of classes started today so that wasn't too bad. I like my other prof. way better but I was expecting that to be the case. This one is still really good. All of the new students for session 2 have arrived so we all went to the same place last night to hang out/meet each other etc. which was a blast. I love it how every 3 weeks we get more new people, so exciting!
Last night was another cockroach scare, it was even bigger than the last one and waiting on me when I got in the shower. I ran out of the bathroom (just in my towel....this was dreadful and so weird) and Juan came in to see what the problem was. He tried to hit it but missed and it went running out of the bathroom headed right for me in the hallway, I turned and ran shrieking, then Juan finally got it, and then I was a paranoid mess again the whole rest of the night thinking that everywhere I stepped there was going to be one. Ahhhh.
I've gotta go for now but I'll update again soon. I think I'm going to go see Oceans 13 tonight (in english!!!) with a big group of people, we're gonna take a little break from the foreign languages and actually understand what's going on for once, haha! I'm hoping to get to bed at a decent hour tonight to rest up from the weekend.
I have every intention of uploading some pictures tonight, so check back later for that!!
LOVE AND MISS YOU ALLLLLL!!!
Hater of Las Cucarachas, Kristin =)