Iberian Adventures Part 2: More Portugal

We stayed at the cottage for 2 nights, which was awesome. In the mornings, old Portuguese ladies would bring us breakfast and stand around patiently, but persistently until we cleared out of the house so they could clean it. The surrounding area was nice as well, although quite rural. We were able to walk around the nearby town, which consisted mostly of cottages similar to the one we were staying in and a small church which was preparing for some sort of festival. Festivals seemed to be common in the area, as there was also a larger city within easy driving distance which had just finished celebrating a horseback-riding festival.

In the city, we were able to browse the local shops, which mostly sold gold jewelry, which Portugal is apparently famous for, but which held little interest for me. There was also a thriving pastry industry, as evidenced by the abundance of pastry shops that sold gorgeous and delicious pastries for around fifty cents a piece. Me and my brother had a wonderful time capitalizing on this. Portugal also has wonderful and wonderfully cheap red wine. Anyone who looks down on Europeans for drinking a lot of wine has only to try a glass themselves, as honestly the smallest sip will sway the most devout tea-totaler. The region we were in was also famous for something called "green wine" which results from the fact that the growing season is too short of the grapes to fully ripen. Thus, the grapes are harvested and made into wine while they are still "green." The resulting wine is very tart, and quite interesting, but I preferred the traditional wines, which I guess come from the southern parts of Portugal where the season is longer. Another thing we ran across in the town markets were strips of dried and salted cod that smelled awful. Apparently it's a very traditional food that the Portuguese have been making for centuries, but I for one was quite happy to embrace refrigeration and other modern food preservation technologies.

We were slated to head for Spain the next morning, and I was looking forward to going back to a country with which I was a little more familiar, and where I spoke the language reasonably well. Portugal was a fun experience, but overall I was ready to move on.