Summary

Theme Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJYZl1Ewoxk This song means A LOT! It has followed me around Lisbon... played it LOUD in Maria's car...


OK a summary is needed here because just too much has happened. Katarina has LEFT another GOODBYE. It the most surreal by far… we were spending all our time together before she left and then, “poof”, she is gone. We went to the top of the Sheraton hotel to say goodbye. It was surreal as hell. Maria was very upset indeed.
That weekend, I missed ANOTHER Erasmus party and went to the house of Maria, where her younger siblings needed looking after. They are adorable, the most caring children I have met, always asking me if I needed something, sharing everything. Maria has hammocks and clear stars and sandy roads and cork trees. Cooked bacalhau com nata and ate together and made up a song or two. It was just what I wanted. The next day, in the afternoon, I rode a moped for the first time. Wonderful! Freedom… golden light… sand. Saturday night was Cesars goodbye meal. Then a gypsy band covered in paint with a crowded room of dancing people. On Sunday I studied all day. On Monday I went to university, had lunch with the man in the jewelry shop, bought lots of things, cleaned the house, studied.
I keep meeting random people. It is easy here. Today – a masters student from London but Portuguese, a tramp from Czech republic, an angel on the bus (I will explain. Feeling a bit… blue, I suppose, on the bus to university. Wanted energy, and comfort. A German guy gets on, a bit lost. Start chatting. He collects fortune cookie slips and sticks them onto cash machines. Brilliant. Ended up showing him the university. At the end he told me to close my eyes and imagine I was in a cosy room with my Granny and she had just cooked buns and it was warm in there. Perhaps he saw that I needed comfort like that. It was surreal. Like god had sent him or something.)

Birrrrfday

18th was the day … but I got it wrong and booked the restaurant at TiNatercias for the Friday (19th). Woops. Anyhow, on the 18th there was an Erasmus meal at a restaurant, oragnised by some of the Portuguese students. They are SO SO very nice. They have been terribly welcoming. I was expecting to be handed a timetable and told to go to class. But these students have organized meals, have asked us all in the corridor if we are ok, have given us numbers to ring. They have been just fantastic. The night was wonderful with lots of chatter in various mixed up European Languages. On the Friday, I went to TiNatercia with the usual gang, minus a few members. It got going and was a great evening. We went to the viewpoint in Alfama and sat around with “champagne”.

This is my favourite viewpoint in Alfama with all the orange-lit houses stacked up against eachother looking out to the river, with occasional palms, lit from underneath, poking out and the beautiful churches towering behind the buildings. Then we went to Bairro Alto, Usually we all get separated but we stuck together and even made it to the brilliant tree in Praca do Principe Real where we all clambered up and sat in the branches. The night ended in Jamaica, an odd but great club, a little Jamaica-coloured, stuffy place near the dock where you have gypsy music, bob marley and reggaeton back to back.. you don’t know what to expect. I felt really happy at the end of the night: all these friends from such different corners of Lisbon, together, and staying together and keeping the spirit up all night. I felt very happy indeed!

Had to Escape

Theme tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ88oTITMoM

I do not know what came over me – I know I ought to have gone out and socialized and made Erasmus friends – but I just couldn’t face it. So on Saturday night me and Miguel took up Tiago on his offer and ran away to his farm in Leria. The bus pulled in at 2am and we went back to lovely Tiagos house where his mum was finishing making cakes in the special bread oven. In the morning we went for a run, Me, Tiago, Senna and Miguel, around the valleys and then had a huge huge huge lunch with lots of MEAT at a local restaurant. We then walked and travelled the area, seeing some caves and some old shepards huts in the wilderness. The sun was setting and the sky was purple, with a great chalky disc of a moon, shining bright, with cows grazing in the field… and I took a big deep breath, knowing that this was the last little drop of summer. It was beautiful. I love the countryside. What a summer it has been. I cannot condense it in a few thoughts. It is so long and varied. But that moment, with the moon and the cows, was the last real drop of summer. WE drove back to Lisbon, me fast asleep of course, and went our separate ways.

Uni began again on Monday. It has been a week of sorting out timetables and admin, basically. The classes are so different to Nottingham. There is no presentation or any color. Just white rooms, a black board, a desk with a teacher who talks super fast. I cannot understand much at all but hopefully this will change! The Erasmus students seem lovely.. we have already had about 15 coffees together outside.

University Starts

So on Friday I had a meeting at university. I did my very first commute. This involves leaving the house, out past the artists gallery, past the café already full of old men getting boisterous and the calmer café across the street with the women sipping cafezinhos. I follow the cobbled hill down past the cathedral until I com near Praca do Comercio. Here the bus 60, filled with students, old people – in fact every kind of person – picks me up and takes me through Santos and Ajuda (best tree in Lisbon – great umbrella of green over tables where old men are playing cards) until it drops me off at the Uni. It is an odd place – on the edge of the biggest park in Lisbon, with no other houses, just university buildings. They are all very futuristic, white, with corners that cut into the blue sky. The meeting was brief but comforting. They seem supportive and eager to welcome Erasmus students. Our group is rather small, with French, Italian, Slovakian, German. Two Italian guys are clowns, they are very outgoing and funny. The professors, all speaking in English, are very dignified and look like Roman Gods. After the presentation we took lunch together and found out a little about everyone. It was a surreal situation – my summer has been so long and diverse and tiring in that sense, to be plonked down among new Erasmus students, my friends for the next 6 months, was very surreal.
The uni seems very posh and there is wireless internet everywhere, café tables, an endless hubbub of people talking, diverse students, etc.

Train to Lisbon

(Linda having gone, we have no camera... so this is the only photo I have of me and Katie. It is called the sun fish...)

Katie and I got the train to Lisbon and the dynamics changed once again. In Lisbon, we ate a Casa do Alentejo, of course, and we sorted out her braid at the market, and wondered to a miradouro. We ate a massive Indian Curry and Katie talked about India, I felt like I had done a small trip in India with her, with Bollywood TV in the background.

We then took the train south (she had a flight from Faro). Her friend Jorge was staying with his grandfather and his great uncle for a while in Olhao, a town near Faro. The apartment was so charming because it was run by precedent and routine. Each item in the house had been carefully placed and all kitchen appliances had their little place, the cigarettes here, the can opener here. Jorge’s grandfather and his brother lived together here and ran a screw \ nail shop in the day time. Jorge was very hospitable and took us out for ice-creams the first night on the shore where all the young people of Olhao were chattering in bars. The next day we went to the big fish market, where Olhao people were working away slapping and cutting fish, and then to the boat to an Island (I forget the name) – where there was just a little row of houses, and just a perimeter of beach all the way around the island.

So then came the day when I had to say goodbye to Katie. I am sick of saying GOODBYE! It hurts so much. I had to leave early to get forms and things in order of the university meeting the next morning. The train pulled away from the station and off I went to Lisbon, leaving Kate for another few months. How odd to have this relationship where we are forever being put and pulled apart.

Porto

The next morning, after a call from Hedda in Australia, we set off North. At the bus station, we decided to take a bus to Porto, directly. The bus went up North and north. This landscape I prefer. It becomes more hilly and green. Some forests have ruler-straight, thin trees. I must find out their names. Anyhow the bus worked its way up to Porto and arrived in the afternoon.
I had been told that Porto was a rather dull city, and I did not expect much.

The coach worked its way through the industrial outer areas and then, puff!, you are on the arching iron bridge, and Porto explodes in front of you, with the river winding hundreds of feet below you, and the steep banks stuffed with houses, windows, balconies, palms, overgornw gardens… unbeknown to us, we had arrived during the “RedBull AirRace”, and so Porto was holding 1 million people that day. We went into the super-ornate centre and decided, after some camp tourist advice, to go to the coast. We did not have much time, the sun was coming down. We hopped on the train and stopped at somewhere that looked rather nice, (Linda – “yes lets get off here… it looks like Italy”) called Granja. After some hopeless wondering about, and after coming across a rather concrete seafront, we had a lucky strike. A family offered to drive us to the local camp site at Espino. So off we went, and set up tent in a small campsite near the sea. Again, our 3-member team came up with a great meal, vegetable skewers and all. Afterwards we walked to the sea, through the graffitied walls and the passing train in the night and the orange lights. At the seafront we sat at a bar and had coffees. The waitress seemed offish but later bought us coffees and cake because it turned out it was her last night in Portugal – she was off to study in Switzerland, to become a doctor. The coast had that special smell that hits the bottom of your lungs, and the city was slumbering on the coast with the rail line in front of it. We went home, with the surreal sound of the circus in the next field, and slept.

In the morning, we went for runs on the beach and set off to Porto. At Porto we left our bags and wondered around the city. It is rather shockingly poor, with some terrible housing, and even some “shacks” right in the centre. We got lost in the alleys, watched the planes, walked the bridge, took a supper at a river-side restaurant. On the way to the hostel we stopped at a Shisha bar and relaxed deep into the cushions and reminisced about the trip. The hostel was clean and impressive, and within a few hours it was 6am, and time for Linda to catch her flight. We went off to the airport to have a little breakfast and say goodbye. It was sad (again!!) to say goodbye to a third of the team. We had made a good group, making direct decisions and speaking our mind. We had also been free and happy, and had had some really sweet, funny and special moments. So Linda went off back to England. She is in Corsica now with Soph, I think.

Setubal Bound

Theme Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WedRDYmtvX4
(but wait for the intro bit to finish in the song above)

Early the next morning we all set off, our bags brimming with tents and sleeping bags and odd bits and bobs. The weather was not too good but, in true English fashion, we pushed on too Setubal, taking a lumbering coach to the little city. Here we bought couscous and veg and set off to Arrabida. Leaving a second bus, we followed a road that curled round a wooded bay that pushed a green mound right into the blue sea and hid little golden patches of beach. Off we went, chattering away, with our homes on our back, until we followed a small overgrown path down to a little bay where there was nothing except dog prints in the sand and a view of the coast stretching away. We walked into the woodland that met the sand and found a sandy platform among the trees, where we set up the tent. After a free naked swim in the cool clear water and some relaxing in the sunshine, I went walking in the wilderness. I crouched under the plants and looked up to the orange cliffs through the green leaves with the blue sea on the side hitting the rocks. I felt so hidden in nature and so happy! Then we set up the barbeque. Amazingly, within an hour, we had a hot plate of couscous with vegetables with bread and fruit, watching the sea-sky slowly cooling down through the colours. We drew on our packs of cards. We daydreamed. It was fantastic. We had a silent disco on the sea shore with the lights of the city in the distance before going to sleep.

The next day, we took showers on the next big beach and got back to good old Setubal for a coffee and caught the bus (only just) via Lisbon to Coimbra. It began to rain. Boo hoo! At Coimbra, our “tough travelers” side dissolved as the option of a Youth Hostel arose. So we checked in and set off into Coimbra for an internet check up and a meal in a Tasca. Coimbra is beautiful in areas but lacks the energy that some places in Portugal has.