Portugal: Lisbon

We stayed at a great hotel in Lisbon with a great view of the city. Here's a view of the castle from our hotel:



And a view in the other direction:



The only downside to our hotel was the hill it was on and all the confusing turns you had to make to get down to the main part of the city. But once you figure out the route it's no big deal. We would often take cabs home at night to avoid walking up the hill though. Good luck finding a hotel that's not on a hill in Lisbon - it has seven hills and they're all good sized.

We have now been to Lisbon three times and have never been bored or disappointed. Our first time there we visited the Monument to the Discoveries:





And we happened upon the gay pride parade:



And we visited the castle, where there were lots of cats:





And we visited a neat church which had great carvings on the inside of it but I only have a picture of the outside:



And here are a few more pictures of Lisbon from a different vantage point. The castle:



The straight streets in this picture are in the area known as "Baixa". It contains lots of shopping and some pretty big bakeries filled with goodies:



Here's a street-level view of Baixa:



We always go to the area of Lisbon called the Bairro Alto to grab some drinks and dinner. The Bairro Alto is filled with restaurants with all different flavors of food to choose from (it is also filled with bars so you can hang out in that area all night long). And we always go to a Brazilian steakhouse named Sul for some mojitos because the mojitos are good there. I highly recommend it.

When we were in Lisbon just after Christmas, it was filled with Christmas lights. It was nice just walking through all the streets because every street had a different theme and different types and colors of lights.

Portugal: The Castles

There is no shortage of castles in Portugal. And they are all labeled on maps of the country so that when Martin and I were driving around Portugal in 2007 we simply planned our route so that we could stop by as many castles as possible. I think they're pretty neat.

So below are some pictures of castles that we found on our journey in 2007. They are all located in the southern half of Portugal. Some day we'll get to the northern half!

Some of these are of the same castle but I can't remember which ones. We only saw 3-4 castles on our drive Lagos-Evora-Obidos-Lisbon so don't go thinking we toured like 12 castles on this trip.






This one was neat, in the middle of a river. We couldn't quite figure out how to get over to it because there was nobody manning the boat there to take us. But there were people in the castle, and some sort of army training going on up top with people scaling down the walls.




Some of them are not in as good of shape as the others:

Portugal: Obidos

Obidos is a little town located about an hour north of Lisbon by car. It is surrounded by an intact castle wall. We stayed at this B&B, in the 2-bedroom apartment:

http://www.casadobidos.com/english/index.html

It overlooks the castle and the apartment we stayed in had a yard and BBQ that we used for dinner. The breakfast they served there was the biggest breakfast spread I've ever seen at a B&B - even bigger than the breakfasts we ate while on safari. I highly recommend it although things might have changed in the past 4 years since we were there and it's probably not the same anymore.

Here is our B&B with the castle behind it (the town of Obidos is all contained within the castle walls):



And another pic with the rest of the walls in it (I couldn't get the whole thing without some sort of panoramic camera):



Obidos is a very cute little town. It's filled with shops and it's fun to walk around in for a day. You don't need more than a day in Obidos though, unless you have day trips planned to other nearby towns. We stayed two nights there and would have been somewhat bored the second afternoon/evening except that we met up with some friends from college there (who flew in from Germany) and hung out with them that evening.







You can also walk all around the wall, which we did (I think most of the pictures in this post were taken from the top of the wall):



I'm not sure if you can go into the castle anymore or not ... it has been turned into a 5-star hotel or a spa or something like that for rich people. Many castles in Portugal have been turned into luxury hotels, and they are called Pousadas. I'm sure they're very nice to stay in if you can afford them.

Portugal: Evora

Our next stop in Portugal on our 2007 trip was the town of Evora, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Evora cathedral is the largest in Portugal (which we took some pictures of but none of them do it justice ... the streets of Evora are so narrow that you can't get a picture with more than a little bit of the church in it at a time).

The two things we saw in Evora that I found the most interesting were the Roman ruins and the Chapel of Bones (not connected to the cathedral mentioned above but to a different church, the church of Saint Francis). It's a neat town to wander around in as well and it has a 9km long aqueduct and some other minor sites of interest and churches but it's not very big and we did everything we wanted to in less than 2 days.

Here are some of the Roman ruins, we took pictures at night and during the day:





There was a little park in Evora as well which was filled with peacocks (and some more ruins).





And then there is the Chapel of Bones. It is indeed a chapel made out of human bones. You kind of have to see it for yourself so I won't give too much away here but this is what the walls look like:





There were an estimated 5,000 bodies used in the walls and pillars. They are not from any specific war or battle but are simply all of the people buried in Evora over the years leading up to the 16th century when the chapel was built. Apparently the cemeteries in Evora took up too much valuable space so the monks there decided to consolidate them all into one and to use the bones to build a chapel that would remind people of the inevitability of death. There are several full bodies hanging on the walls as well:



and the inscription when you enter the chapel reads, "We the bones which are here, for yours await."

Portugal: Lagos

More pictures from Lagos, from our trip in 2007.

This is the big beach we try to walk in its entirety:





Some pictures of the town and the neat tiling that is everywhere in Portugal:







This is the palm tree next door to the McLaughlin's condo when it was still healthy:



These pics are from the other beaches that are hidden in the cliffs:

Christmas in Portugal

Sorry this blog is out of order. I wasn't going to post about Portugal because I had done it when we were there for our honeymoon but I just went back to read that post and noticed that it only had a few sentences and one picture from Portugal. And, since I seem to spend more time in Portugal than most other places, I figured I should tell a little more about it.

We spent Christmas in Lagos, Portugal, where Martin's parents own themselves a nice 3-bedroom condo. Lagos is on the southern shore of Portugal and it's actually quite touristy. Seems to be most popular with Brits and Germans but I couldn't tell you why. I think for the Brits it's warmer than England and beachy and not too far away but you don't have to go into a different time zone to be there. I'm not sure about the pull for the Germans but German was the language on many signs around Lagos, after Portuguese and English.

Winter is the rainy season in southern Portugal so most of our days there were cloudy with showers with temperatures in the 50's or low 60's. The rains make all the grass very green but at the same time they destabilize the cliffs so you can't walk along them because you might fall to your death. So we didn't take many scenic photos this last trip. We did find a few minutes of sunshine to go up to the roof and take a few shots though. This is the view of the big beach from the roof of our building:



This beach is 2.5+ miles long and we try to walk the entirety of it (all the way down it and back again) every trip. We have only succeeded one time out of three but we would have made it this time if there hadn't been a huge river of water from the ocean blocking our way. Here are Martin and Mareika towards the end of our walk:



There is a nice restaurant in Lagos called Artistos where we ate dinner on Christmas. It was filled with foreigners, most of them English speaking, so apparently going out to dinner is not something the Portuguese do on Christmas. When we walked in the door we were handed glasses of Glühwein to enjoy before being seated:



Here are Martin and I at the restaurant:



The lot across the street from the McLaughlin's building has a big palm tree in it (which looks like it's dead but it used to be healthy) and about 15 cats. And, new this year, a dog whom we named Bello (aka Barky) because he likes to bark all the time but especially around 7am. Martin likes to take pictures of the cats:



And here's another view from the roof, of a church I think:



And here's a random rainbow we saw while driving around:



I have a large amount of sunny pictures from our previous trips to Portugal, one of which included significant time in places other than Lagos, so I will try to post other blogs about Portugal just because it's something new and interesting and maybe it will spark somebody's interest to go visit Portugal! Their economy needs you. :)

Winter Sports in the Alps

Let me just start by saying that we did not take any pictures this weekend. We brought the cell phone along to take some but our cell phone has not been working well lately and it decided it didn't want to work this past weekend at all. Sorry.

This past weekend we went skiing/snowboarding in the Alps. We managed to pick a weekend where there hadn't been fresh snow in about a week in the mountains so both resorts that we went to did not have very much snow. Some of the trails had rocks and grass and whatnot in them so we had to avoid some of the trails.

On Saturday we went to Flims-Laax. I wasn't a big fan of it there. There were gorgeous views from it, which I loved, but the slopes all faced South. When ski slopes face South they sit in the sun all day long and so every day the snow on the slopes melts and then at night it refreezes into ice so when you try to ski on it the next morning you're trying to ski on a sheet of ice. On slopes that face in the other directions, the snow that falls remains powdery or at least soft ... it might become packed down but it does not turn into ice.

The other issue with Flims-Laax was that it had a lot of flat terrain. It had a lot of steeper terrain as well, but all the easier trails were traverses which don't work for snowboarders. So I had a pretty miserable time wandering around there until I found a trail that I liked that wasn't a traverse. It's funny because Flims is known as a snowboarder's paradise but I think it's just because it has a lot of terrain parks for snowboarders, not because of it's trails for sure.

On Sunday we went to Andermatt. This would have been great except the mountains were in the clouds for most of the day. It's really hard to ski down a trail when you're in a cloud because everything is white and you can't see a thing or make out any features anywhere.

Another thing about resorts in Switzerland is that they're really spread out and do not have as many trails in them as American resorts do. You might have 3-4 different bases and peaks at a resort here but only a few trails on each, and they are not really labeled at all either. Here is the trail map for Andermatt:



For reference, Andermatt is on the left, the town there, and we started near the red cross on the upper right side of the town.

Interestingly, at Andermatt, you had to take a train to get from one base to another. And of course we have to park at Andermatt and all the trails I really liked (the wide open blue squares) were two bases/train stops away. On the bright side, I found some trails that I really enjoyed at Andermatt, it's just a matter of driving there, parking, and then getting onto a train for 20 minutes to get to them. But since I didn't find any runs I really liked at Flims-Laax, I would be happy to go back to Andermatt and take the train to be able to snowboard on trails that I enjoy. We also managed to come out of the clouds for a few hours while we were there and to find some nice soft snow so overall I'd say Andermatt was a better experience than Flims-Laax.

One thing I liked about the resorts was that they both had walking trails across the mountains. At Flims-Laax, these trails were nice groomed trails through the forests that you could just wander around on, on foot. You can't really find that in the US. Andermatt had a lot of sledding trails (again, right on the slopes with the skiers but they had their own trails) that were filled with parents and their children on toboggans which it seemed like were rented from the ski resort.