Whoa. I just realized I haven't written anything in 9 months and really, there's not much to report. How sad! Anywho. This is a special post as it's directed at my friend D who will shortly be moving to Portugal. I have just returned from a week visit there and told her I'd give her my opinion. So here goes. The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Plus a little more.

The good: The people are lovely. They're friendly and helpful and do they all really speak English? Amazing! UNLIKE Italians who work in shops and restaurants, they seemed pleased to see us and tried their utter best to work with our (GP's) basic Portuguese. The daughter and I stuck to English. In Italy the concept that the customer is always right has never really sunk in. Shopkeepers in Italy treat you with indifference at best and contempt at worst depending on the type of shop. The only place I've encountered worse customer service is in Paris where shopkeepers blatantly glare and snarl. There's also quite a bit of smirking in those French shops. They do like a smirk. Enough of that. The countryside in Northern Portugal, where we traveled, is beautiful. Hill after hill covered by olive or orange groves or piney forest. In fact I don't think there's a square inch in the country that's flat. Even the cities are all up hill and down, mostly up it seems, and we got quite the workout every day. (So is that good or bad?) The city centers have some fabulous architecture and many buildings are sided with the famous, colorful Portuguese tiles. The food was good, the prices for said food were terrific. There is a wonderful bakery on every fricking block! Thank God for the hills.

The bad: I haven't seen that much traffic since Marrakesh and I live in ITALY. Just the number of cars on the roads at all hours is astounding. Consequently the air quality is pretty damned bad in urban areas. Even by the sea. Fortunately though the Portuguese are much more polite than Italian drivers and more flexible than American drivers so there is no road rage or contant honking of horns. Another issue is how rundown it is. The cities looked like Italy in the '80s before the economic boom. Grand buildings are falling in upon themselves. There is so much that needs to be cleaned or painted or repaired. It just looks grubby. Though that is mostly in urban areas. The smaller towns were in better shape. And there was surprisingly little litter compared to here. And this leads me to...

Porto's waterfront is vibrant and colorful. The bridge is a walking (yikes) rail bridge crossing the river.

The UGLY. Man did they do a poor job of urban planning when the cities grew after the war. If it wasn't built over a hundred years ago or in the past 10 (even that's iffy), it's (as they say in Boothbay Harbor parlance) SDU. Some Damn Ugly. The resdential areas outside of the centers are blocks after blocks of big plain BLOCKS. These expanses of apartment buildings have no saving graces. And there are hundreds of them.

And now the other stuff. We played tourists and visited Sintra with it's castle and palace. We braved a ferocious rain and wind storm off the atlantic to see the "World's Biggest Waves". We went to Obidos, a charming little walled town where we ate the best dinner of our trip. We went to Tomar for it's history of the Knight's Templar. We saw the Sanctuary of Bon Jesus in Braga and walked up it's gabillion steps. We started in Lisbon and ended in Porto. It was a quick spin through, apart from Lisbon, an area we'd never visited. A good time was had by all!

xx me