Portugal: Part One

Settle in folks, or ignore this all, because it's gonna be a long one...
I have never been so happy in all my life to hear French. I don't think I'll be complaining about not speaking it again for a very very long time. The Portuguese language is essentially the result of a bunch of drunk Spaniards with a lisp deciding to really confuse the rest of the world by making their own language. Or maybe that's just my interpretation. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
DAY ONE: Tiffany and I left Thursday afternoon for Portugal from the Grenoble bus station where there's a RyanAir shuttle to the airport. In true French style, they overbooked the bus and Tiffany and I had to shove ourselves on it so that we weren't left standing on the sidewalk as our luggage and only way to the airport drove away. This should have been an indicator that the trip would be interesting... the flight all the way to London and then London to Porto. It was raining and we decided that since it was already late it was probably best to just take a taxi to our hostel. The taxi driver didn't know the address and had to ask someone else and then there was a traffic jam for approximately 4 minutes, 3 of which our driver spent laying on the horn. Somehow this seems to sum up Porto, Portugal pretty well. It's not a city I reccomend. We got to our hostel and checked in, it was a really really nice place (though it smells EXACTLY like Claire's (friend from high school) house which brought back a lot of memories and was nice. We went out to ask where to eat and there was another tenant there... and Brazilian man who offered to take us to the restaurant down the street. Probably not the best idea in the world (going off down a dark road late at night to an unknown place with a man we don't know) but we were really hungry so off we went. In Portugal if you tell someone "Io nao fallo portuges" (I don't speak Portuguese) they immedeately respond in Portuguese. To make a long story short, we saw a million pictures of his baby, were repeatedly assured he wasn't married and he claimed to work for Brazilian television. Then he found a Portuguese man who spoke English and could translate so he asked for our numbers and asked to take us out for the night, we lied like crazy and ran back to the hostel.
Day TWO: Left hostel ridiculously early to catch a train. Rode the train forever and ended up in the wrong city! Ooops. Luckily there was a train going to our city in like 5 minutes and they smiled and nodded at the stupid Americans and let us use the old tickets. We got to Lagos (say it Lah-goosh) around 8 and miraculously found our hostel where she informed us we had signed up for a shared bathroom room but she could change it if we wanted to pay extra. Luckily we're cheap, because the "shared bathroom room" was an apartment. On the waterfront. With a kitchen. And a balcony. And we were the only people there all weekend!! Talk about amazing luck. For $12 a person per night we got our own APARTMENT!!! It was incredible. Also, we had NO idea but this past weekend just happened to be essentially the 4th of July type celebration for this little town. Which meant there was a huge festival, a fireworks display (that we had a PERFECT view of from our balcony) and all sorts of nifty stuff going on all weekend. Gorgeous town too, right on the ocean, with palm trees and blooming flowers and everything.
Day THREE: Left Lagos mid morning for a day in Sagres (say it Sah-gre-sh) which is the southwestern most point of the European continent. We frolicked in the Atlantic, walked along the coast, explored the fort, rented bikes to explore more... it was just a really awesome day!! Got back to Lagos really late after waiting for the bus for two hours (Portugual makes French public transportation look early...). We had been planning to go out on the town but ended up falling asleep to a movie on tv (American film, Portuguese subtitles... really good way to learn a language actually).
Day FOUR: Slept in til about noon then got up and explored Lagos all day. Another fort, another beach, went to the festival for a while, found a convertor at a Portuguese Dollar Store, went out to eat at a nice Portuguese restaurant and fell asleep at like 9pm.
Day FIVE: I ended up waking up early enough to go watch the sun rise over the ocean... pretty much one of the coolest things I've ever done. Then we went to get our train tickets back to Porto. For some reason the train connections were all REALLY close this time and we litterally had to RUN onto one train as it was pulling out of the station. Insanity. Got back to Porto early and tried exploring, but it's a really slummy scary town and after getting lost for over an hour and not finding a SINGLE restaurant we succumbed to McDonald's (I'm so sorry everyone, I hate myself for it too) and then got lost trying to find our way back to our hostel for about 2.5 hours. Again, DO NOT VISIT PORTO!! Stayed up talking and watching random American TV shows with Portuguese subtitles, being dorks and analyzing the language til way too late.
Day SIX: Woke up at 6:30 in the morning and checked out, where the man told us to take the subway to the airport. Considering is was approx. a million times cheaper to do so, we found the subway station, asked a worker to explain ticketing, and got very clear directions from him on which lines and which stops to take to get to the airport. Unfortunately he was wrong. So we had to backtrack, take a bus which reeked of urine, run across five lanes of highway traffic with our luggage, run up 4 flights of stairs and get to the ticket counter only about 5 minutes before it closed. This was the beginning of the 'Trip Home Fiasco of 2005". We got to London, but a combination of the flight being a bit late, our terminal being a million miles away from every other terminal, luggage not coming, me not knowing which luggage was Tiffany's, Tiffany getting confused and getting in the wrong line, and RyanAir ground staff having an attitude problem forced us to miss our connecting flight back to France. Eventually we found another flight into France, but not the city we had train tickets for, and not Grenoble. 2 hours in London Stansted Airport and a two hour flight later we were in the middle of a cornfield somewhere near Limoges(no, we'd never heard of it either) stranded at the airport. There was no bus to get into town and a bad combination of age and driver's license validity made it impossible for us to rent a car... so one very expensive cab ride later we were at the train station in Limoges. Where we found out our other tickets were non-refundable, and the only train to Grenoble left at midnight... 6 hours away. So we hung in Limoges train station for 6 hours (it wasn't really IN the city, so we couldn't go tour or anything) and then got on a very weird sleeper car where we were packed in with four other people, two of which snored and someone really smelled... Waited in the Lyon train station for another hour at 6:30 in the morning and then took a final train to Grenoble, but it got there late so we ended up not making it to class.... Thus, we arrived, safe and sound, back in Grenoble, 26 hours after leaving our hostel in Porto. Whew.
Overall I give trip an 8 out of 10 though, because it was wonderfully relaxing, great views, totally different, and now we have a million stories to tell the grandkids. Glad to be back home speaking French though. That's all for now. Over and out!!