Portugal

Mmmkay. So first off, I’m behind again in my blogging – I was planning on catching up last weekend but then I got real sick… I got some weird stomach bug thing that gave me stomach problems from like Wednesday till the following Thursday or so… Saturday and Sunday my tummy was cramping so bad that it felt like I was going into labor or something and I couldn’t get out of bed on Sunday morning.  My madre here took me to the hospital and I ended up having a fever and all that.. she did some feeling around and took xrays (not quite sure why they needed xrays…?) but pretty much it ended up that I had something weird going on (they always call things infections here, so I had a stomach ‘infection’ and had to not eat anything for 24 hours, which ended up being 36 hours.. and then I was on some strict diet of like rice and bananas and carrots for a few days.  Real exciting stuff.  I’m feeling a hundred percent now, but I definitely felt like crap for about a week.  I do have some experience now with socialized health care… and I must say, going to the doctor in the US is much more pleasant.  Just throwing that out there...

So. Portugal.  Or shall I say Cancun?  That place was wildddd!  We (a group of 35 of us) went to a town called Lagos, right on the Atlantic coast.  It’s an absolutely adorable little place with hilly streets and lots of restaurants and cute plazas.  Pretty much everyone there spoke English, which was kind of odd for us since we’ve all been used to Spaniards surrounding us everywhere.  Obviously… since we are in Spain… so we got there Friday night after a long bus ride and got led to our hostel – named the Rising Cock- by some drunk British guy promoting a bar.  I’m pretty sure that was the moment we all realized we had just entered a serious party town.  It took awhile for everybody to get assigned their rooms and stuff-  our 12 person room was called the Princess Room and was decorated all in Disney Princess stuff- there even was a nice painting of Cinderella holding a beer bong and a fifth on the wall. Gotta love it.  By that time everyone was all sorts of ready to go out and party… so party we did.  We made our rounds and hit up a couple of little bars, where Kelsey and I made friends with this great group of British guys—they were amazing.  There were 4 of them, and they kept us entertained all night… like until 5 or 6 in the morning.  That was pretty rough, since we had an organized booze cruise to go on the next day…  After getting a good 3 or 4 hours of sleep, we ate crepes made by the mom of the hostel and then went and explored the town and took pictures of things.  The booze cruise started at 1ish and went until 5:30 or so… and yeah. Booze cruise-y things went down.  However, in the middle of the booze cruise we all got to go on these grotto tours, where they took us into these amazing rock formation things in the water.  Hands down the prettiest beach scenery I’ve ever seen. 

After the booze cruise, my friend Kelly and I decided we wanted Thai food, so we ran around town looking for this Thai restaurant.  We found the place and literally sat there for an hour until the place opened, then we ate A LOT of Thai food. It wasn’t near as good as at home, but it was satisfying.  Then, after a brief nap we went back out onto the town and met up with our British friends.  We ended up at some weird mansion/bar/party thing, and were entertained by some nasty Brazilian or Portuguese man wearing leather pants and gloves and his skeezy woman wearing the shortest dress ever doing their own version of Dancing With the Stars, porn style.  People in Lagos are odd.

Basically, my experience in Portugal involved a full 6 or so hours of sleep, a booze cruise, Thai food, British boys, and a lot of amazing scenery.