tavira

As I mentioned over here, this was quite the spontaneous trip, which was also suddenly extended from an overnight stay to three nights when I found a charming little inn that had a special 3-night offer going. Pipocas and her husband Chucky (not his real name ) really made this trip special by taking Nog & me out for lunch every day and also driving us to places near Tavira that we would have never seen otherwise.

As Chucky is Portuguese he ‘did the honours’ at mealtimes, ordering all the food and drink so that we often didn’t know what was coming until it showed up at the table. This was quite a refreshing change for me since I’m usually the one doing this for friends visiting Sevilla. It was nice to be on the receiving end for a change and be totally taken care of.

Muito obrigada, Pipocas & Chucky!

Here are some of my travel notes on what we saw and did. There are also a few small photos here - if you’d like to see the complete photo album just click here…

~ Tavira photos ~

 

off to the algarve!

An impromptu holiday trip to Tavira!

When Pipocas and I went out for some much needed cold water after our Japanese luncheon the other day she mentioned that she was going to Tavira during Semana Santa with her husband and 4-year-old daughter and asked if Nog & I would like to come and hang out with them for a couple of days while they were there. And well, I’ve never been to the Algarve and Tavira is very close to the Spanish border (and also accessible by bus) so I started looking into this possibility . . .

lisbon story - the film

I’ve been listening to this CD a lot since I got home from Lisbon. This video is a scene from Wim Wender’s film Lisbon Story, featuring Madredeus and Teresa Salgueiro (who we saw at the Fado concert at the castle). It’s years since I saw the film - I’ll have to look for it on DVD and visit Lisbon all over again. I remember that the cinematography was fabulous and was in part responsible for my desire to go there myself.

lisbon story

I am in love with Lisbon.

Some general impressions include: the wonderful pavements, the amazing ‘churrasco’ restaurants, custard tarts, films & television programmes shown in the original language with Portuguese subtitles, hardly any souvenir shops but lots of sunglass and hashish street hawkers, cream coloured Mercedes sedan taxis, the trams, the HILLS …

I found the best way to communicate was to start off by speaking Spanish. If the person knew English they would automatically switch to that, if not it turned out quite easy to converse using Spanish and Portuguese. I picked up a few phrases while I was there and noticed that people quite liked it when I made an attempt at speaking their language.

The Lisbon photo albums are mostly up and somewhat organised, but still haven’t been properly edited and labelled.

And this is what we did . . .