Friday: MORE OPORTO!!

Today we slept in until around 10:30, and then headed down to breakfast. I really like breakfast in this part of the world, because I've never been a huge breakfast eater. Some of the other students complain about not being fed enough, but I've never been hungry in the mornings, so I'm pretty content with my cup off coffee and bread with butter :) Plus, almost all the bread here is freshly baked and DELICIOUS! After eating, we all got ready to head over to the beach! We stopped by a drugstore to buy some sunscreen (I definitely DON'T want to get burned), and then hopped the bus like the guy from the hostel told us too. I felt very independent! Luckily, the one of the guys from the hostel (they are all so great!) gave us a list of Portuguese phrases, so I was able to say 'muito obrigado!' (thank you very much) to the bus driver when I paid for my ticket! :) We rode the bus for about 20 minutes, and then got off once we saw the beach. It was very windy! You can tell you the locals are on the beach because they all bring these barriers that stop the wind from blowing sand on you while you lay out. We just got covered with sand. O well! The water was freezing, but I played around in it a little bit. Mostly we just relaxed on the beach all day. We bumped into some other people from our program who are spending the weekend here too. They are staying at another hostel. We got pretty hungry, so we went over to a little restaurant on the beach and ordered burgers. We all tried the 'tango', which is beer (here, the local beer is Super Bock) with currant in it. It was very interesting, and bright pink! haha when the burgers came, we realized that a burger here is a meat patty, which was seasoned more like meatloaf, with lettuce, tomato, and a fried egg on top. Almost everything here comes with a fried egg on top!! No joke! It also came with a rolled up piece of ham (also included in almost every meal), and a rolled up piece of cheese. No bun, at all. Very interesting!!

We left the beach in the late afternoon to go back to the hostel and shower. On the bus trip back to the hostel, we were almost in a serious accident! It was very scary! A car pulled out right in front of the bus, so the driver had to slam on the breaks. Luckily we were all sitting down, but there were a lot of people standing, and one teenage kid was flung from the back of the bus and hit the windshield! Then the bus driver got up and they started yelling at each other in Portuguese about who's fault it was (I can only assume), and then he checked to see if everyone was ok. No one was seriously hurt, but a lot of people had been banged around pretty hard! Honestly, at first I thought we'd really been in an accident because of the noise the bus made! WOW! What an adventure...

We finally made it back to the hostel alive. Luckily you can rent towels here for a euro, because the beach towels we brought are covered in sand! Showering felt so great! There was sand EVERYWHERE!

After a thorough de-sanding, we went down to a cocktail hour that the hostel was hosting. We tried this really yummy Brazilian drink call Caipirinha, which is basically sugar, lime, and some Brazilian alcohol. It was very good, but very strong! You'd definitely have to be careful with that stuff! At this point we were hungry again, so we decided to walk around and find somewhere to eat. We went to a restaurant where no one spoke any English, but I'd seen a picture in my guide book about a popular dish here called Francesinha, so we pointed at the menu and ordered 3! Apparently it translates to 'little french girl'. Who knew. It literally had at least 5 kinds of meat on it. Probably 3 of them were variations of pork, but there was also some sort of steak, and maybe roast beef or pastrami...very different. It was covered with melted cheese, and then smothered in a sort of corn-starchy tomato sauce. It was certainly an experience. It's supposed to come surrounded by french fries (batatas fritas!), but somehow we managed to order it without. I think it would have been better with them, because it was pretty strongly flavored by itself!

After leaving the restaurant, we had a sweet tooth, so we went to a little sweet shop and had some delicious crepes! Then we sort of wandered around a little bit. We saw some live music outside a restaurant, and this father and daughter started doing the salsa. It was pretty cool! We followed the crowd to a street where there were a lot of people our age just sort of hanging out. We bumped into these guys we'd seen earlier at the hostel. Their names are Christian and Alessandro, and they are from Italy! They seem pretty nice. We got some drinks from the window of a bar. Basically, everyone just stands in the street and orders drinks that way. In the US it would be illegal to drink the street like that! Very different. After a while, the Italians wanted to go for a walk with us, but I said no sir to that! I'm not gonna go off with some guys were barely know, no matter how nice they seem! We told them we were tired and walked back to the hostel. The sun really takes it out of you, and it's about 1:30am, so we're tired!! Maybe tomorrow we'll stay out later.