Greetings all! As promised, here is a new post. I sincerely apoloigise to you all for the lack of postings for the last month. Ever since school finished, I seem to have been busier than ever! I have painted the inside of the apartment, done lots of chores around the place and a bunch of other things. Time seems to have flown now that we are in June! Cna you believe that we are coming back next week? Part of me is looking forward to it and part of me is not. We have had such a great time here, and it has been a super life experience. I am, however, looking forward to having a washing machine again! Six months of having to handwash has been a real challenge, especially with jeans!
A few weeks ago, we too a trip to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. I have never been there before, and neither had James. We found super cheap flights from the island to Barcelona and then a great deal from there to Lisbon. We really didn't think we would be able to make any more trips as we are appoaching being broke now, but the flights just appeared and we found ourselves a really cheap hostel as well. You can see the hostel room on the flickr account. It wasn't bad for only 20 euros a night, though not for the fainthearted! On the first day we just tramped around the city after arriving. Lisbon is quite beautiful, and very different from a lot of the other european capitals I have spent time in. In some ways it almost looks like an eastern european capital, a little run down at times, but with a comfortable, worn feeling to it. It is also unusual in that the capital is very lived in. Usually capital cities are lived in only by very wealthy people (the downtown areas, not the suburbs), but Lisbon has people of all classes living in it which makes it very different. On the Friday we spent a pleasant time walking around and then spent the evening sitting outside a street cafe with a bottle of wine. Imagine that! We had a great experience with Lunch, as we ended up in a restaurant were we had no idea what anything was on the menu at all. In the end, we just ordered things that had interesting names, and waited for them to arrive. We are still not entirely sure what we ate, but it was jolly good anyway!
Saturday morning was to be our big sightseeing day. We headed out early and had our breakfast. At this stage it was also nearly two months since we had last had haircuts, back in Barcelona. James was by now remembering lots of Portuguese (he studied it in university for a number of years and actually speaks it very well...are you surprised?!), so he asked the owner of the hostel were to go for haircuts. After following the directions, we we ended up at this amazing barber shop, which, it turned out, used to be the barbers to the royal family many years ago. We were also informed that you used to have to wear a tie to be able to have your haircut there, but despite the fact that we were only wearing shorts and a tee shirt, they let us in anyway. Not only did they do haricuts, but they also offered wet shaves with a cut-throat razor. I have had one of these before and loved it, but this was to be a new experience for James. So, towelled and sheeted up, he was covered in shaving foam and the baber deftly shaved him. You can see a picture of the finished, newly shaved James and with his great haircut in the Flickr album!
Then we started to roam Lisbon, following a walking tour that was outlined in Lonely Planet Portugal. Lisbon is a very hilly city, and the book recommended that we do ths tour in a certain way to avoid going up hills. So we followed the instructions, took the tram up to the top of one of the hills and started our walk. Our walk took us through some of the old part of the city, and over towards the castle. It was supposed to take us about 3 hours, but because we kept stopping to see the sights, take photos and generally dilly dally around it in fact ended up taking all day! You can see a selection of the photos that were taken on the Flickr account, in a set called Lisbon 2008 (original huh...) It really was quite beaustiful and I would highly recommend it to anyone thinking of a visit. It's also a little cheaper than the rest of Europe for meals and accomodation, so that was a definite onus at this stage of our trip! Saturday evening saw a quiet dinner in a little restaurant which served great food. James had Hare cooked in red wine with haricot beans, while I had Wild Boar in red wine. All of this was washed down with more red wine. A perfect day!
On sunday we decided that we wanted to go the big art museum. We bought train tickets and headed out to the suburbs. The museum was really awesome, with one of the best displated collections of any that I have seen. The Museum really is an undiscovered gem, and best of all, it is free on Sundays! What more could you wish for. We then visited the museum or Modern Art, which, I have to admit was very un-inspiring for me. Maybe one day I will get it. A leisurely lunch of sandwiches in the park and we returned for a nap and the eternal decision of where to have dinner. We settled on a small family cafe, where we had a good meal. We decided that we really wanted to check out the local gay scene as well, so off we set again, heading to another part of Lisbon to find a gay pub. The gay scene in Lisbon is very discrete, and when we arrived there, we found that you had to ring a bell to be let into the pub. Once inside, the venue was small, but friendly and very cheery. We spent a lovely evening having some drinks and just relaxing before heading home.
On monday we had just the morning in Lisbon and just kicked back a little. We spent an hour or two in a small Port cellar, which specialised in hundreds of different ports of all kinds. After a few glasses each, sampling some tawny, ruby and Late Bottle Vintage ports, we grabbed our bags and heading for the airport. A few hours later we were back in Barcelona and then in no time at all it seemed we had arrived back in Menorca and were heading for bed.
Since then, we have been busy in Menorca. As I mentioned earlier, there have been chores to do and we have just generally been hanging out with friends in the evening. This weekend past, it was my birthday and we had a small party in the Reina Isabel, the bar/restaurant in the main square at Salgar. About 16 people came, including my sister, Jane, and her partner Mike, who had flown in for the weekend. They stayed until Monday and then left. This week is the end of the painting and then homeward bound!
So there you have it, an update! I'll try and post something again before we leave. Those of you who like to know such things, we leave next wednesday (11th June) at 7am. We head to Madrid, and then around lunchtime we fly to Chicago, arriving there mid afternoon, early evening US time. Then we fly back down to Cincinnati around 930pm in the evening, arriving around 10.30.
Have a great week, and a super weekend and I'll write again next week!
Big love
DavidM
PS, the spell checker seems to have stopped working on Blogger, so apols for spelling issues!
