Then the Sea Cucumber Says to the Mollusk....

PORTUGAL is wonderful! We really, really love it here. Everywhere we have gone people have been so nice and everyone speaks english which makes everything so much easier. We started our POrtugal tour in Lagos which is in the south in the Algrave part of the country. It was soooooo beautiful. So many people at home told me I had to come here and that the beaches are so great and the town so nice, etc etc and it totally was....although truthfully its got nothing on SE Asia (though nothing really compares so far). Unfortunatly it was the crappiest weather for the first few days we were there which was devastating for me as all I wanted was a day at the beach and the return of my tan. But finally, on our last day, the sky finally cleared up and we got our beach day!

One plus of traveling with Steve: intense sand castle building. Check out this beauty, took us like 2hours. So worth it, our castle totally kicked the ass of the castle kids had built a few meters down from where we were. Ha!So sadly we had to continue on from Lagos even though it would have been nice to get in another day at the beach. We headed up to Lisbon, the capital, where we are now. Sooooo nice here. And its relatively small so we have managed to walk the entire thing and in 4 days we now get around so easily. Our first full day in Lisbon we checked out the ocean side of the city where we found an Oceanarium! Honestly, it was the coolest thing ever. Although there were school children in large groups everywhere (with matching hats and t-shirts), the oceanarium had so much cool stuff that we managed to look past this unfortunateness. The coolest was this fish below:They had sharks, tons of sting ways (a huge manta ray too) and huge fish with eyes on just one side of their bodies. The penguins werent as cool as the biodome though (and they had the north pole penguins and the south pole penguins altogether - the biodome would NEVER allow that!) but i enjoyed them a lot more than last time if certain people recall hahaha....

Anyway, after our thrilling few hours at the Oceanarium we found a movie theater! So of course we had to take advantage and saw Oceans 13 annnnddd saw a preview for Harry Potter thus this day in Lisbon in total was the greatest ever!

That night we went out to educate ourselves on the Lisbon nightlife. Right now the city is crawling with Marines, so random! We,ve met a ton of em. Cant believe how different we are from them, they are like American through and through. Total army boys, they are all our age but married, and they seem to be mostly from the South (and tell us they eat gravy for breakfast and think its wierd that we think thats wierd). But yeah, baisically anywhere we go we end up talking to some Marines.

Next day we took a train about 45mins to Sintra where we visited some palace that was sooooo cool, it looked like a fairytale Disney castle! Loved it-

This morning we awoke to find an inch of water surrounding us. Our room was completly flooded from some pipe in the wall or something and somehow only my stuff managed to get wet, sweet! bahhh! but otherwise our hostel was pretty awesome. ALthough the other night i overheard Steve telling one of the army guys we were staying in a gay hostel to which i thought he was lying...but when has anyone ever heard the boy lie? So i asked what in the world he was talking about...well turns out I had missed all the signs: a massive rainbow flag above the door, gay club pamphlets at reception, and numerous amounts of older men in groups of two traveling together....yeaahhh i guess im pretty unobservant!

So now we are just killing time as its back to Spain tonight on an overnight train. Im kind of excited though, after all those overnight buses with steph where the lights come on and off like every hour, stops in the middle of the night, honking all night long, and the general feeling that you might not be alive come morning (crraazzyyyy busdrivers), i think a train that has a bar and resteraunt car will suit me just fine!

See ya back in Spain!