Lisbon, a Pleasant Surprise

Our next stop on our trip around Spain & Portugal was Lisbon. Honestly we weren’t expecting much from this city, me even less than Laura. After seeing such wonderful places as Granada and Ronda, plus our incredible time in Salema, I didn’t really think we would find much of interest in Lisbon. Especially since the guidebooks didn’t really talk too much about it.

Lisbon after dark

Turns out though that Lisbon is a very pretty city with some great history. Way back when, it was Portugal that discovered some very important shipping routes, and controlled much of the seas. Since then they have lost most of everything, but what is left are some great monuments to their past explorers and some incredible castles. Our next post will show you some shots from Sintra, a small city right next to Lisbon that was amazing, but for now we will focus on the two days we spent in Lisbon.

Neat ruins of old church (Convento do Carmo - destroyed in earthquake 1755)

We arrived late the first night and only had time to go out to dinner. Our dinner was fun though, since we went to a restaurant that had live Fado performers, which is traditional folksy melancholy music of old Spanish sounding guitars. The food wasn’t great, but it was fun overall, and we got to see some really neat city riding around in the cab.

Fado singers

Nasty Fado food

The next day we spent going on a walk through the city that our guidebook recommended. The walk didn’t work too well since a bunch of the things were closed, but we got to visit the institute of port that regulates the Port standards for Portugal. I am referring to Port wine, and they had over 300 different samples. We tried a combined 6, and were glad to stop there since we are not huge Port aficionados, and because it’s fortified 22% alcohol rate went to our heads and just made us sleepy.

Laura sampling Port

Us taking a nap after the Port kicked in

Me wishing Candido and Truman were with me so that we could enjoy a cigar

After that the next recommended stop was the oldest brewery in Lisbon, and that didn’t help either. I ordered a beer and without asking they assumed I wanted the large one. I was dragging a bit after that place, but we persevered on and finally ended up in St. Georges castle, an 18th century castle first build by the Moors. I have come to the opinion that the Moors were pretty cool, as most of their castles and palaces have been even nicer than the newer castles.

Big beer that I wasn't ready for...

Fun city trolley

View from Moorish Castle

In the castle

Laura over the moat

The next day we went to Sintra, but as I am going to cover that in the next post I will jump ahead to Belem, the part of the city we went to on our third and final day in Lisbon.

Not too much to say here, I will just post some pictures. We saw some neat stuff, but we are getting pretty tired or walking all over the place and so some of the enjoyment has gone out of it. Our favorite part was the Monastery of Jeronimos, where we got some incredible pictures. Other neat places were the monument to the Discoveries, and the Belem tower.

Monestary of Jeronimos

Close up of facade


Inside the cloister (same for next couple of shots)

Monument to the Discoveries

Belem tower

Well that is good for now. Hope you enjoy the pictures!

Salema, “Beach Beach Beach”

As you can tell the pace of the blog posts has picked up a bit recently, as our internet connections have become a bit more reliable. Thanks for all of your congratulations to Laura about passing the boards. We appreciate all your kind words.

Laura and I in our really neat house/condo in Salema

Today we are going to tell you about our time in Salema, a wonderful little beach town on Portugal’s south shore, but before that we want to say hello to a few people. Robin and her friend Debbie will be coming over to Spain soon for a trip to Seville. We are looking forward to seeing you guys, and are also excited about going to Seville. We had to drive through it on the way to Salema, and it was hard not to stop. That should be a fun town.

The view from our kitchen window

Additionally, even sooner than Robin and Debbie come, our friends Truman & Lauren are visiting. They are first going to Belgium where Lauren is going to follow up on a really interesting series of old love letters from the early 1900’s that she acquired through an old family connection. Then they are coming to visit us in Barcelona and accompanying us to Toledo, a small little town about hour south of Madrid. We look forward to seeing you guys also. Truman and Lauren are some of the few people that made the harrowing trek to visit us in Santo Domingo for some fun in the sun (and a little amoebic dysentery). =^) Can’t wait to see you guys!

Laura sampling a local dessert wine called "Moscatel"

Now about Salema. Most of our trip so far has been enjoying incredible old towns with interesting culturs and architecture. Salema was totally different. Instead of going site seeing, we spent our time relaxing on the beach, enjoying excellent food, and soaking in the experience of an old Portuguese fishing village. Of course it is not entirely authentic, but that was a good thing. The extremely small town is probably about half populated with tourists and ex-patriots, which made the environment even more relaxed.

The walk down to the beach from our place

We loved our time in Salema. For me it was the first place where I really didn’t want to leave. We had a great room with a perfect view of the ocean, comfortable beds, and a relaxed atmosphere. This was probably the most relaxed I have felt since we were in Tahiti for our honeymoon in April.

Beach Shots

From here I am just going to show you a bunch of pictures, because words don’t really do it justice. Of course, even the pictures don’t do it justice, but this is the best we can do.

And as always, one last one for Manuel (Jr). Welcome back from your road trip across America!!

Laura Passes the Boards

Hello everyone,

I was just chastised by our friend Alicia for not informing you all that Laura has officially passed both National Boards, Parts I and II!!! Now she can attend dental school in the US.

We found out last week, but with the trip it escaped my mind to post it here. Sorry!

A few days ago, Laura also got her first invitation to attend an interview at UCLA. This is also very exciting, although the dates aren't really convenient for us since she has to be back in LA before the 18th or October. This is especially inconvenient because we go to Seville with my sister from the 12th to the 15th - so she may have to actually fly from there. We are still trying to figure out what we are going to do about that.

Hopefully UCLA will be just the first of another four invitations, since Laura applied to five schools, but we shall see. I will keep you posted on any other interviews and their dates so you can wish her good luck. The other schools she applied to are USC and Loma Linda in LA, and UOP and UCSF in San Francisco.

That’s it for now. We will try to post our next blog about the wonderful beach town of Salema, Portugal soon.

Back from Africa

Hello everyone!

Today’s post we are going to talk about our trip to Africa (Morocco). But speaking of Africa reminds me to say hello to our expert on Africa, Armin. I just found out that Armin, Colleen, and Kai have not been included in our blog mailing list. Hope you guys can forgive us. =^)

We will give you a call after we get back to Barcelona. Hopefully we can get in a trip to visit you guys in Munich this winter, we would love to see you.

Besides that, our friend Keith just got back from Africa, although in a very different place (Zanzibar). Hello Keith and Alanna, hope you guys are having fun in San Francisco!

So we are back from Africa, and it was totally different than we expected it to be. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise, since we didn’t really know what we were getting in to. For one thing, it felt more like the Middle East than Africa, but I guess that is because the country we were in is Arabic and Muslim.

When looking into taking a trip to Morocco our guidebook mentions that “there are many ways to experience Morocco, and a day in Tangiers is probably the worst.” It then goes on to compare Tangiers to Tijuana, and comments about how we need to be wary of all sorts of undesirable things. Because of this, we decided to upgrade our trip to Morocco and skip Tangiers altogether. At the tour office they offered a three day/two night trip to Asilah, a small town about an hour down the coast from Tangiers that offered a truer Moroccan experience without all the big-city, border town problems.

So off we went to Asilah, without any real idea of what to expect. On arrival we met up with our group and started off in a bus, only to be dropped off 10 minutes later and transferred to a small van with the other four people who were headed to Asilah instead of the more common day trip around Tangiers.

The hour long van ride, done as fast as the van could possibly go, passing cars and trucks constantly on the way, was impressive. We drove along the coast line most of the way, and all you could see were miles of pristine beach, totally uninhabited. The land wasn’t too different from Spain, yet the beaches were totally empty. This was pretty exciting, as we imagined spending three whole days just relaxing on the beach without any crowds.

Local beer in Asilah, enjoyed in a restaurant next to the beach

As we neared town though we started to see small groups of people on the beach. The most fun thing was that they actually had camels with them! Now we knew we really were in the Middle East (Africa?), since the people rode their camels to the beach. Then there was another trend we noticed that wasn’t quite so much fun, of all the people on the beach not a single one was female…

This was when one of the side effects of being in a Muslim country started to set in. Since this country has much stricter customs about what women could and couldn’t, we would have to totally change our expectations of what was going to happen.

As we arrived in town everyone was very nice and polite. But as Laura and I walked through town afterwards, all we saw were men, and just about every man stared unpleasantly at Laura. At this point we realized that we would not be laying around in our bathing suits on the beach, since if the men stared when she had a normal shirt on, we couldn’t imagine what it would be like with a bikini.

Asilah's old town

The first day was a bit rough. We felt uncomfortable with the extra attention from the locals, and contemplated staying in our hotel room for the next couple of days until we had to leave. Fortunately we got over the feeling, and Laura made sure to wear clothes that went very high on her neck to avoid the staring (which was pointless, since they stared anyway – but at least we felt better).

The beaches in Asilah

The upside is that we were able to do some very cheap shopping, and saw their old town which is very picturesque. We found some great food, and I developed a new appreciation for couscous. We were really surprised at how good the food was, especially after we had so many disappointments in Spain (most Spanish food has not been very good so far).

The buildings were all done in classic Aribic fashion

Other fun experiences were walking late at night and watching all the people walk by (the woman were mostly covered head to toe – but with their faces showing). We also got to experience one of the prayer calls in the old town. At about four o’clock a loud chant went over a loud speaker and lasted maybe ten minutes. I actually took a video so you could hear it but it somehow got erased. Sorry. We had air conditioning in the rooms, that was nice. And we got to see a bunch of movies (like Gladiator and Pretty Woman). The ocean was pretty, even if we couldn’t relax in our bathing suits.

White washed Portuguese old town

The best part of the trip was when we rode camels on the beach. This was really fun, and we got a lot of great pictures of it. They are very easy to ride, except for when they stand up or sit down! The getting up process is pretty wild when you are sitting on their backs. I almost fell off, but Laura didn’t have a problem with it, so maybe she just has better camel form than I do.

Here is a video of us riding on the camels!!

That’s it for now. We got a lot of great pictures in Morocco, and we hope you enjoy them.

Here is a shot of Asilah at night

One last shot for Manuel (Jr)

Lost in Gibraltar!!!

Lost in Gibraltar!!

This post doesn’t have too many pictures, compared to the last two. Since we were in both Gibralter and Tarifa fairly shortly, (Tarifa one night and Gibraltar just one comical evening), I have combined them both into one post. Then the next one will cover Asilah, a small town in Morocco (Africa) where we went for two nights and three days.

This is a picture of Tarifa, taken from the boat when we were leaving. Most pictures in town didn't come out too well.

We were supposed to stay for three nights in Tarifa, a small dirty beach town on Spain’s southern tip, right between the Costa de la Luz and Costa del Sol. Of course when I say “dirty”, that is not in the guidebooks, and it is one of the principal reasons we reduced our stay from three nights to one.

Our intention for this stop had been to relax on the beach a couple of days, and then take a day trip to Tangiers, Morocco. It turns out, though, that Tarifa is a great place for kite-surfing. Kite-surfing is a sport that requires lots of wind, and when you think about it, lots of wind isn’t always conducive to a great beach experience. Having visited another great kite-surfing location before in the Dominican Republic (where it was so windy sand blew into our camera and broke it), we decided to check out our other options. That combined with no air conditioning convinced us to move on.

The first thing we did was to leave town for the night to see Gibraltar. For those who are geographically and politically challenged, as we are, Gibraltar is a large rock on a small chunk of land located on the coast of Spain. The interesting part is that somehow England tricked them out of it in the late 1800’s, and it is now a part of the English commonwealth. The good news for us was that when we crossed over we got our passports stamped! =^)

The Rock, at night. This shot was taken at the end of our "hike."

Gibraltar didn’t work too well for us. We arrived late, just hoping to fit it in before the day ended. We walked across to avoid the long customs lane, and hopped on the first #9 bus that came by (this was recommended by our travel book). We took the bus to the end of the line (as recommended) and hopped off, only to see the bus turn off its lights as it shut down for the day. It was at about that moment that we realized we were now stranded on the far side of Gibraltar with no way to get back!

As the bus driver began to pull away, Laura walked up calmly and asked him the best way to walk to get out of there. He gave us a funny look and pointed back the way we came, which to Laura and I seemed a very long ways to go. He then pulled away and we were left standing in the dark, at 9:15 in the middle of nowhere on a deserted street. So we started walking. =^(

A moment later the bus driver came back by and told us to get in, that he would drive us a bit of the way back because he felt bad for us. We must have made a pretty pitiful site out walking in the dark like that, so he took us about a mile down the road and dropped us at a run-down casino where a couple hundred old people were playing bingo.

At that point we started walking, and proceeded to make our way out of town. It only took about an hour to get back out, and it was nice to take a sort of walking tour of Gibraltar, but it wasn’t our first choice for modes of transportation.

Proof that we were in a British country...

Check this out. We had to walk across a live runway. Read the sign!

Me in my hiking gear

More proof we were in British territory

After the Gibraltar incident we headed back to Tarifa for the night and prepared to leave for Africa!!!

Back to Tarifa, after our trip to Africa!

And one final shot for Manuel (Jr)