Portugal story time

So last week was our lovely spring break here in Paris, meaning that we had the opportunity to travel for 10+ days straight as opposed to quick 5 day trips ;) So I headed to Portugal and Spain with some new friends!

I will start this with declaring my love for all things Portugal! I can tell you all about the yummy food we ate and the kind people we met and the lovely sites we saw in Sintra (which is a magical place!), but instead, I will tell you some fun little stories!

On the first day, after paying 7 euros for bread (yes, there is a trick in Lisbon, where bread is brought to your table along with appetizers, which you never actually ordered but you pay an arm and a leg for if you eat them), we decided to drown our sorrows with ginja (a brandy like drink with cherries sold in little shops on the streets ) and then after riding a tram all the way up a hill and back down (in search of the castle, which we didn’t find until much later in the evening, and I blame this on the ginja!) we drowned our sorrows in nutella coffee (yum!).

On the following day, we explored Lisbon with a bike tour. Now this may sound innocuous enough, but, if you are me, and you haven’t been on a bike (other than in cycling class) in, oh, maybe a decade, and you are a klutz like me, this could be problematic! Now I thought I was doing ok, and getting the hang of all this, and then we veered away from the bike path and joined traffic. In fact, before joining full on city traffic, our guide told us to be careful because the streets have tracks for trams, and we needed to be careful because our bike tires could get stuck. So, now you can picture me, on my bike on a cobble stone street, sharing a lane with cars and trams, trying to drive straight, stay away from the tracks, ignore the honking by angry motorists all the while thinking that while a car can actually go around me, if a tram were to appear, I’d be slightly dead since there was nowhere for me to go. Having survived this lovely portion of our bike tour, our guide then told us that we would have to go up a small hill. Now, a hill I can do, at least I can in cycling class and I figured this would not be a problem. Ahh, I can be so naïve. At this point, I saw a hill unfold in front of me, and indeed it did look fairly small, but steep, though most importantly, said hill involved motor traffic. But when I say motor traffic, I’m really not giving you the full picture. What you have to see is me, peddling up this hill, standing up to try and get some leverage (as I’ve been taught to do in cycling class), realizing that there are cars going by in the lane next to me, and thinking that at any moment I just might roll back and then realizing that there was a bus behind me and that rolling back would, well, not result in anything good! Obviously, as evidenced by my live status, I obviously did not roll back and made it up the hill.



Now, our last stop in Portugal was Porto, where, since we only had a day to explore, we decided to do a hop-on-hop-off tour and headed to their information desk to figure out the details. MC and I decided to talk to the man in charge, who was a good looking young guy and, at this point wearing sunglasses, looked at us and told us to wait a moment until he was finished with another client. MC and I stood around, waiting for this guy to pay attention to us, annoyed that he wasn’t helping us immediately, and then he came back… In fact, he sauntered back and, with a move reminiscent of a supermodel walking out of the water and shaking off her wet hair, he removed his sunglasses and revealed his superpower – his eyes. His beautiful, unexpectedly deep blue eyes, which caught both MC and I off guard and caused us to stammer and lose our train of thought. As MC put it, he was ‘deceptively’ good looking! In fact, as we found out, if you want to find a good looking man in Porto, you should head to this bus tour area as this company seems to have cornered the market on good looking men in this town!

In fact, those may have been the only good looking men we saw in Porto, until we arrived at the airport that is. We were flying Ryanair, which has a lovely policy of one carry-on (ie, your purse had better fit into your other bag!). Since each of us had a carry on plus a purse, one of the Ryanair employees decided to give us a warning. Now, I looked up, to shoot this man the evil eye and argue with him about the fact that in theory my purse can fit into my bag, and that I would simply rather keep it close so I can have easy access to my book and music, but when I looked up, I managed to lose all semblance of speech and simply smiled and nodded that yes, we would put our things away. In case you hadn’t guessed, this man was tall, dark and quite handsome! I shoved my purse into my bag, making it fit, and as we stood, he came back and said that he was working the plane and he wanted to help his customers so we wouldn’t get into trouble later. All I could do, was smile, nod and say thank you. He asked how Porto was and if I liked Portugal, I smiled, nodded, and said that I loved Porto and Portugal. Then we got on the plane, and things went from shameful to worse. He checked my ticket, I said hi, he said hi, and then, I’m 99.999% certain that I said hi again. I sat in the aisle seat that MC and Teena had kindly forced me to sit in (and by forced, I mean they jokingly suggested it and I thought, why not, I can flirt with the steward, but alas, that was not meant to be), and smiled back at him every time he came by my row and offered me a smile. Yes, I know, my actions (or lack thereof) are despicable, but at least they should be funny to everyone but me, and really if you can’t laugh at yourself… well, then that’s unfortunate, so in the spirit of laughing at myself, the story is here for everyone to see 