Portugal

This weekend I went with a friend from CLIC to the city of Lagos in Portugal. We took a bus there, the bus ride was 5 and a half hours! We met up with 2 of her friends that are vacationing and traveling in Portugal and Spain. They had a rental car, and I have to say that it was quite strange to sit in a car again after 3 weeks of not being in a car. We spent our days and the beach and nights in the city of Lagos. It is a quaint antigua pueblo cerca del mar. One of the sad points in Lagos´ history was that it was the first site for selling of slaves to the new world. The beach that we went to was absolutely beautiful, it was called Dona Ana beach (a picture of the beach is above) and it was right outside our hotel (Carvi). I was told that it is one of the top ten beaches in Portugal. The strange thing was though despite the heat of the day, the water temperature was freezing. A few friends back here in CLIC have told me that this is so in all of Portugal. It was the kind of tempertature that makes you legs feel numb. So the whole day consisted of me running in and out of the water to cool down, but I couldn´t stay in for longer than 30 seconds. I also attempted to scale a wall to get to another beach (I was the only girl attempting to do it, and I don´t know if it was my ineptness or the fact that girls dont do these things in Portugal, but ever guy was offering to help me). I successfully reached the top, but didn´t go down the other side because it looked even more difficult than the first.
Dinners were a nice treat during the weekend too. Usually here in Sevilla, we go to cheaper restaurants and have little bocadillos or tapas. But during this weekend, we went to some nicer restaurantes (it was a vacation for the other people in the group), and I had barbequed fish (it was either sea bass or swordfish, I can´t remember) the first night, and cod with rice dish the second night which is a traditional Portuguese dish similar to paella. The thing that we had to watch out for though was the bill at the end of the meal. The waiter brings bread, butter, pate, and olives to your table in the beginning of the meal but you have to pay for them if you eat them. We were warned that sometimes they will charge you for it even if you don´t eat it because they know that tourists may not understand the bill. Our first meal was fine, but after our second meal we had to send the bill back 3 times because there were charges on it for things we didn´t eat.
Sunday was another day spent at the beach, and thn my new travel friends were kind enough to offer to drop me off in Sevilla on their way to Cadiz. That meant that I didn´t have to ride the bus home alone and the trip back only took 3 hours, rather than 5 and a half :)