Faro, Portugal

After spending some time in Sevilla, we headed off to Faro, Portugal Saturday evening. After settling into our hostel, we walked through the town in search of dinner. In the main shopping area, there is a red carpet in the middle of the sidewalks all through the city so it provides a nice guide to all of the winding, maze like streets of the city. We found a nice little restaurant and decided to eat there upon seeing how cheap the menu was and the waiter had a great personality and asked us in 5 different languages what we'd like to eat. One thing about the Portuguese people is they have a knack for picking up other languages. We were also treated to our other favorite part about Portugal, green wine. Green wine is basically a younger white wine that goes bad after only a few months and is absolutely delicious. We relaxed after dinner by having a few drinks and becoming the life of the party at a local club. The next day we ventured through the city in search of breakfast and found the tour boats to take you out to the Ria Formosa Lagoon. It is a natural area of barrier islands and one of them is big and has been setup with trails and has a beach for you to enjoy. We rolled our pants up and waded out in the water just collecting sea shells and enjoying the nice day. We found a couple of beached porpoises during our walk on the beach, it was sad. We returned to Faro in the afternoon and found another wonderful little place to eat that had Italian food and we tried a pizza with bacon and banana on it, it was strangely delicious. We left early the next morning and headed to El Rocio, España.

 

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Sevilla, Spain

On Friday, we packed up our rented car and took off in the afternoon for Sevilla. This trip had a few new encounters including driving in Europe, a place where they love roundabouts, one of the more ridiculous travel concoctions we've seen. After daring and fear, we made our way through a few of them and out of Madrid on the highway. The journey lasted about 7 hours but it was fun as we winded through the mountains and into the plains of Andalucia. We arrived in Sevilla around 1230 and wandered around the city looking for our hostel that was hidden in the labyrinth of Sevillan streets. After a serious of unfortunate events that resulted in I having forgotten my passport in the car, I discovered upon returning to the car to collect it that something had nearly punctured our tire. We spent Saturday morning eating breakfast and trying to change a tire. The tire change went off well and the local police circled our car a few times trying to check out what we were doing but in the end, the only trouble we had was putting the tire back in place under the car. After we gave up and put the tire in a trash bag in the trunk area of the car, we headed to the Alcazar. The architecture is from the 10th century A.D. and was built as a Moorish fort in the southern part of the Spain that the Moors inhabited for quite a while. A lot of the designs inside are similar to that of the Alhambra in Granada, also part of Andalucia. The gardens out back had a mix of designed plants that formed mazes and fun designs. There were also a ton of lemon trees and orange trees which have fruit that should not be eaten because of how bitter it is. Our entertainment was watching some young uninformed American girls pull fruit from the trees, peel them, take one bite, and spit them out while furiously trying to wipe the taste off of their tongues. After we visited the Alcazar, we headed off to the Plaza de España, where there was a huge display of tiled benches for most of the cities in Spain. We ate lunch at a couple of different places in Sevilla and left around 6:30 to head for the Portuguese coastal city of Faro. We spent the evening there and had dinner in a wonderful little restaurant that had waiters who could speak tons of languages. We capped off the evening with some dancing and a couple of drinks before heading back to our hostel that costs us 11 euros a night.

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