Monday July 2nd–Into Portugal

This morning we had no early start and a block out blind… this meant the best sleep in ever until just before 11am. We were due to meet the group at 12pm so we packed our bags and ducked out into the town to have some breakfast (because 11.30am is still a very reasonable breakfast time on a Monday). This ended up being in the form of ham on toast and coffee whilst sitting in the shade on the square – very nice. We popped into the meat filled market on the way back to grab some random fruit and then clambered on a private bus with the rest of our tour.

Our bus ride into Portugal took around four hours, including a lunch stop where we had big chunks of meat and chips – good hangover food! At around 3.30pm we arrived in Coimbra (clocks went an hour back!), settled into our hotel room and went out on an orientation walk. This town is basically a student haunt, with a big university sitting on a hill in the middle (it’s the oldest university in the country). It is not as pretty or as charming as Salamanca was (I loved that town) but it still has its own character. Our walk mainly involved climbing up big cobblestoned hills and shade hopping around the university grounds. We stopped for a drink on the way back and somehow it was already 7pm when we were back at the hotel.

    

After an hour relaxing (and/or blogging) we met some others downstairs and headed out to find dinner.  We ended up at a big grill restaurant with a waitress who spoke no English and a Portuguese menu. This resulted in a lot of pointing and sign language – eventually we ordered what we thought was just enough, to find we’d ordered four giant meals to share with a side of chips and salad on each of them. We didn’t finish it all but we gave it a good go, the grilled meat was very good and the chips were very moorish.

    

At 9.30pm we headed back to the hotel to meet the others and head to a Fado performance (the traditional music here). This involved three different parts with a operatic style singer, an accordion/piano player, a guy on a 12 stringed Portuguese guitar and a classical guitar player. They were all very talented, particularly the man on the Portuguese guitar (his fingers were blurred at one point he was playing so fast). We enjoyed just sitting and relaxing in the little chapel and watching them play for two hours. The space was small and it was quite intimate – they often stopped to chat to us and had us sing along twice.

Bed at around 1am.