What I'll Remember
Airport day, airport day! Let's pack our bags and run away.
Today, I say goodbye to Portugal. We've had two beautiful weeks of tourist time, running around, taking pictures, huffing and puffing up the steeply sharp hills. I'll remember Portugal as a country that exists at 45°, and so beneficial for the glutes. Full of views that seem to come out of nowhere because you're always summiting. Seattle is fairly hilly but we have nothing on Lisbon or Porto. San Francisco could take notes.
What will I remember, exactly? The fairytale beauty of Northern Portugal around the Douro River, for sure. Wine country, with all those hillside terraces cut like ribbons into the soil. I'll remember billows of gray smoke from the carts of roasted chestnut vendors. My first time spotting a brass seashell on a sidewalk – a signpost of the Camino de Santiago. All the brightly colored building along the river and the hillsides of Porto. That wonderfully derpy Sunfish at the Oceanarium in Lisbon. How hard it rained the night we arrived. Tile in thousands of patterns and hundreds of shades, covering everything. I loved walking among the big wooden ships at the Navy museum, marveling at the complexity of the rigging. And I admired the incredible talent many Portuguese have with language, switching from their native tongue, to English, to Spanish, to French. As one of our tour guides told us, “We don't do dubbing here. We watch everything in the original language, with subtitles only, to help us learn.”
Obrigada, Portugal! Thanks for letting us visit.