Hello everyone!  Sorry I’ve been away for so long - but I just spent this past weekend in Lagos, Portugal!  What a beautiful town.  Well… let me start at the beginning.

On Wednesday night we went to La Feria until 3 am, and then I had to pack just one backpack’s worth of clothes and necessities for the weekend!  On Thursday morning we took the bus from the Granada “Estación de Autobuses” (station of buses) to Sevilla, Spain which was a 3 hour bus ride.  I just listened to my iPod to pass the time and slept a little bit here and there.  When we arrived in Sevilla, we started the journey to find our hostel where we made reservations - however, we got lost a few times and couldn’t seem to find it for over an hour!  The rising temperatures in Sevilla (it was well over 100*F!) didn’t help our journey… I could feel the sweat running down my back with the heaviest backpack ever on top of that.  Gross gross gross.  We FINALLY found our hostel, the Sevilla Inn Backpackers hostel, and it was semi-cute.  Little did we know what an awful night we would spend in that room!  After dropping our stuff off, we headed out to look around Sevilla - there is a gorgeous cathedral there (it’s HUGE, I will put pics up on Facebook soon!) but I think we were even more excited to see about 10 different Starbucks on every street corner!  We couldn’t resist; of course we stopped in to get some treats! :)  After exploring Sevilla for a few more hours, we got dinner and decided to call it a night.  However, the amount of sleep we wanted far surpassed the amount of sleep we got… with 6 girls in one room that was incredibly hot, WITHOUT A FAN, we couldn’t sleep for hours.  It got to the point where we had to strip down to our underwear to actually fall asleep!

The next morning, our bus to Lagos, Portugal was leaving at 7:30 am so we got up while it was still dark outside and made the trek to the bus station.  Not so funny then, but funny now: the bus driver made everyone put their backpacks under the bus.  Are you kidding me?!  I had to shove everything I felt was necessary for a 6 hour bus ride into my tiny purse.  This of course included my iPod, a water bottle, motion sickness pills and my phone and wallet.  This seemed to be a sketchy bus company (information gathered from the above incident and others that are too long to write about), so we looked out the window at every bus station we stopped along the way JUST to check that our bags were not lying on the ground outside.  Luckily we all made it in one piece, bags in tow, to Lagos.

Portugal is simply stunning.  In some ways, it very highly resembles the streets of Spain’s smaller towns, but in other ways, it is so unique.  We didn’t speak Spanish all weekend because most people only speak English and Portugese, and since none of us know Portugese, it was a nice break for our brains to think in English :)  We got to the hostel, called the Rising Cock (yes we’ve gotten a good number of laughs out of that name), and it was A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E!!!  The lady who runs it, whose name is “Momma”, makes the beds and cleans the whole place every single day with only the help of her husband (who we noticed mainly washed the deck) and one other cleaning lady.  Momma made crepes and lemon tea every morning, which was such a treat!  We stayed in a room with 3 bunk beds (6 girls) and thankfully Momma put a huge rotating fan in our room so I slept like a baby for two nights straight.  We went to the beach after checking in and laid in the sand for hours.  The water was pretty cold there too, so it was a suntanning kind of day.  We went out to dinner at a burger place right across from the hostel called Nah Nah Bah - they had this huuuuge ice cream sundae that we just had to share at the end :)

On Saturday, we went on a boat cruise to see other sides of the coast near Lagos, and we stopped to swim along the way.  This cruise took up most of the day, and afterwards, we spent more time at the beach.  Kristina and Lisa went cliff-jumping, which I considered but decided against once I saw how high the cliffs were and realized that it was low tide.  When we returned, our nap, which was supposed to be “just an hour before going out”, turned into my all-night sleeping session!  Kari and me slept in through naps while the other girls went to a bar nearby.  I am turning into such an old lady here!

On Sunday, we got crepes and lemon tea from Momma and packed up our hostel room… we were sad to leave but I was so ready to sleep in my bed again at my host family’s house.  We spent 9 hours in two buses and a total of 14 hours traveling home… what a day!  I didn’t get to sleep until almost 4am and I had 9 am class.  A nap is probably in order this afternoon :)

Sorry this was so long but I figured a longer blog was necessary since I haven’t written for 5 days!  Pics coming soon!!!