Friendly Faces

We’ve been lucky to meet many new friends here in Portugal, but when living so far from home it is very nice to see some familiar faces again. We’ve recently been able to host several friends and family over the last month. The first arrivals were Laura, Katrin’s cousin from Oregon, and her boyfriend Hunter. They stopped here for a few days after spending a semester abroad in Cyprus. They were able to stay for a few days, and their visit overlapped with that of Karen, Katrin’s mom, and her husband Kevin. The six of us spent a cold day (a common theme for all of our visitors, unfortunately) exploring the mountains of Serra da Freite and the town of Arouca.

Laura and Hunter then had to leave for the US, but we had Karen and Kevin for a few more days. We decided to go to the Galicia region of Spain for a long weekend. We found a great B&B outside the town of Santiago de Compostela, and from there explored the coast out to Cabo Finisterre and up to A Coruna. It was a beautiful area, kind of like Vermont but with an ocean, although we did have to brave some pretty strong hailstorms to enjoy it. Karen and Kevin were good sports and we all managed to have fun, especially at mealtime. Whether it was Katrin’s homemade stuffed squid, seafood rice at our local neighborhood restaurant, or tapas in Spain, we had some great food. This marked the end of Karen and Kevin’s round-the-world trip, but they’ll be back when our little girl is born and liked our hometown of Aveiro enough to put a deposit on an apartment for the winter so they can be closer to their granddaughter.

Soon after we got to see our friends Val and Bryan from Burlington. Val’s work took her to England so they were nice enough to add us into their plans. We only had a few days with them before they were off to see the rest of Europe, but we did have a lot of fun doing a port wine tour in Porto, exploring a nearby castle, and experiencing the local dessert of ovos moles (sweet eggs). Mostly we enjoyed catching up with some old friends again.

Our most recent visitors were my parents, Mary and Pierre, who also included Portugal in a European vacation. We picked them up at the airport in Lisbon and went straight to Sintra, a town up on a hilltop where the Portuguese royalty used to go to escape the summer heat. There we explored a Moorish castle from the 11th century, many fabulous gardens, and a Portuguese palace that seems straight out of Disneyland but without the rides. Coming back to Aveiro, we joined some friends for a typical Portuguese sardine barbecue, which is a tradition at this time of year. It was a nice opportunity to give them a taste of Portuguese culture with some locals, and the language barrier wasn’t too bad with my Dad getting by with his Spanish and Katrin and I doing some translating from Portuguese. Finally, we capped off their visit with a sunny boat ride down the Douro River, in the heart of port wine vineyard country.

We are expecting a couple more visitors in July and August, and then we’ll probably lay low for a few months after our little girl is born. But to the rest of you, we would love to see you in Portugal. And for all of you who have come to visit recently, thank you so much. It’s a wonderful way for Katrin and I to stay close to everyone and still feel connected to home.

Euro Cup 2008

We've spoken to you about the importance of soccer in Europe before, but it ramped up several notches recently. This country pays attention to Formula One and the French Open, but it's passionate about soccer. And the Euro Cup 2008 was Portugal's chance to show the world that it's a country to be reckoned with. However, it didn't turn out that way, despite the fact that Portugal had one of the more talented teams in the tournament.

In the first round we watched the first game in town with some friends at a bar. Portugal beat Turkey 2-0 and you would have thought they had won the championship with the way the celebration was carried on in the street. There was flag waving and crowds gathered outside yelling, honking, and celebrating long after the game was over. With their second win over Czech Republic, Portugal ensured their group win and a place in the quarterfinals, so they played their B squad in a 0-2 loss to the Swiss in the final game of the pool play. They were expected to beat Germany in the quarter final game, so the 2-3 loss Thursday night was taken particularly hard.

We woke up Friday morning to a very depressed country. It is hard to imagine an entire country being so affected by a single game, but the last few weeks it has been all-consuming here. Nearly every house has a Portuguese flag hanging on it, and expectations were very high. We watched the game with friends at a local Brazilian restaurant and the blood drained out of their faces with each German goal. We've since learned that they don't care about Olympic soccer around here, so the 2010 World Cup will be Portugal's next chance to prove to the world that it can be among the elite.

Belly Update

Seems like I am getting bigger daily, and it is hard to imagine that it is going to keep trending in this direction for a while still. Today marks 30 weeks, 10 more to go. I'm very lucky to have such wonderful friends and family who braved the high shipping costs and managed to get me a great maternity wardrobe, and a whole library of books to prepare us!

Dinner Party

We’ve had friends over for dinner several times before, but recently we had our first full-blown 12-person dinner party. We invited people over at 8:00, which meant we didn’t see anyone until 8:50. Interestingly, the German invitees called us to tell us they’d be running late…little did they know they’d arrive before the Portuguese invitees anyway. After some socializing and caipirinhas and showing off all the tricks our dogs know, we sat down to one of Katrin’s amazing Thai meals. We decided to do an Asian meal since the folks here don’t eat much ethnic food. It was delicious and people were gobbling it down, although some weren’t quite able to handle the spiciness of the Tom Yum soup. Dinner was followed by music courtesy of a couple of friendly guitar players and singing that took us until a bit after 3:00am, at which point many of our guests decided to head to the bars. From our experience, this is a pretty typical dinner party here and it was great fun to host this time. Hopefully our neighbors didn’t mind the singing too much!

Greece

One of the nice things about living in Portugal is that we now have a few more holidays than the US. So we took advantage of some of my time off of work to do a European vacation…possibly the last time we’ll do a big trip until the little one is big enough to join us. We decided to go to Greece, one of the destinations we’ve both wanted to get to for a long time. And it turned out that spring was a great time to be there. We had lots of sunshine and temperatures in the 70’s, and yet small crowds and off-season rates. The only disadvantage of this time of year was the water was a tad nippy, but we braved it anyway.

We headed to Athens for a couple of days, mainly to see the Acropolis. It’s a very cool cultural site to explore, being a large area of ancient temples, theaters, markets, residential areas, etc. And of course topped off (literally) with the architectural wonder the Parthenon. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to battle the crowds and heat when most visitors go in July and August. We also explored some of the cute neighborhoods surrounding the Acropolis, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to Athens, which looks more like a dilapidated sprawling South American city than a European capital. So, after a quick 1.5 day visit it was off to the islands.

We flew to Santorini, which is an incredibly picturesque ancient volcano rim surrounding an enormous caldera submerged into the Mediterranean. We were told the power of this volcano when it went off about 1500BC was 40x that of Krakatoa, and I could believe it looking at the size. But the beauty of Santorini is in its whitewashed villages that cascade down the cliffside with amazing views across the caldera. It is also known for its much photographed white churches topped with blue domes. Our hotel room was literally a cave room that was built into the cliff, which is quite common (and great for keeping warm in winter and cool in summer). The old villages are lovely to explore as they are only big enough to move around on foot, no cars, and boating out to the currently active volcano to hike around and swim in the hot springs was great fun. But Santorini is really best for the cruise crowd that wants to stay for a day, take some pictures and shop. Beyond that it’s not as adventurous an island as we are used to, so we were off to Naxos for some additional exploration and beach time.

It was a 3-hour ferry ride to Naxos, our last stop of the trip. This more unknown island is actually quite big with a lot of little mountain villages to explore. The main town of Chora is very cute, right on the seaside, with some nice beaches nearby. This was a good place for us to wind down the trip with some exploring, biking and reading on the beach. The highlight, however, was stumbling into My Big Fat Greek Picnic. On May 1, a holiday throughout Europe for Labor Day or May Day, we were exploring the island by car and decided to visit a monastery. Since the gate was open, we did not realize it was actually closed for the day. But in the parking lot was a big family celebrating the holiday with a picnic. They invited us over and plied us with the most succulent lamb off the barbecue I’ve ever had, not to mention enormous amounts of wine (none for Katrin, sorry), dolmas, feta, etc…all homemade from the families lamb, goats, vineyard, and garden. They loved having a couple of Americans around and then started playing some traditional Greek music and dancing – holding hands and dancing in a circle, the men occasionally dipping and slapping their feet and knees. They got a big kick out of putting Caesar-like laurel wreaths on our heads and including me (Dan) in their dance. It was great fun and a very lucky way for us to experience Greek culture and hospitality up close and personal. Our goal should be to try to stumble into a group like that in every place we visit.

For a much longer pictorial tour of our trip, click here.

Since you've been asking

Here is a now outdated photo of my expanding belly...it was taken before we went to Greece (April 24th), so it actually looks small compared to what the last couple of weeks have done. I guess we will have to do another one soon.

Paris in Springtime

Well we have been quite busy lately. I was off to Paris to meet my good friend Antonia for a few days in mid-April, leaving Dan at home to care for our invalid cat and the pups. That was followed by a quick week at home and then we were both off to Greece (will post that trip report soon!) In Paris, Tone and I had a fabulous time sight-seeing, shopping, eating wonderful food that was in no way good for us, and generally wandering some of the lovely Parisian neighborhoods.

We had a museum pass for our first two days, so we were quite busy trying to fit in all of the sights that we wanted to see that it covered. We managed to hit the Louvre, Orsay, Orangerie, Rodin, and Army museums, plus the Arc de Triomphe, the Conciergerie, Saint Chappelle, Notre Dame, and possibly some others I have forgotten to list! We were very tired but happy girls at the end of each day. One of the highlights for both of us was climbing the tower of Notre Dame and walking amongst the gargoyles while looking out over all of the city.

The next two days we were able to slow down and enjoy Paris at a more leisurely pace. We strolled through the neighborhoods of Montmartre and the Marais, sat and observed life from several parks, cafes, and pastry shops, and made the required stop at the Eiffel Tower.

We had a fabulous time, all over Paris flowers were in full bloom, and it was so great to get to see Antonia again! For some quick photographic highlights, click here.