The bit before Portugal

Well, I´m in Portugal. There is a beautiful beach, a beautiful pool, and lots of beautiful sun! But rather than describing a beautiful beach town to all of you who are stuck in winter (except to mention that there seems to be no such thing as takeaway food here! No fish and chips on the beach for me), I´ll skip that and tell you about how I got here.

We left London on Monday. I had a fun weekend that weekend - went out to a goth thing with Jamie and his cool girlfriend Soraya on Friday night, and on Saturday I had some drinks with Lisa, the Kiwi nurse I met on the Contiki trip. Tony and I woke up early on the Monday and caught the bus to Paris. We thought we would be taking the ferry across, but when we got to Calais the bus turned away from where the ferries are and drove into a tunnel. The tunnel then magically turned into a train. So confusing! And then, about an hour later, we were in France. Without leaving the bus!

We got off in the city and promptly realised that our hotel was not in the central city as hostelbookers.com had shown it as being, but rather out in the Lincoln Road, Henderson of Paris. It was terrible! But highly amusing. Well, it was once I´d found food. We´d kinda counted on getting food on the ferry, but of course that never materialised... It took us two hours to get to the suburban area our hotel was in from Paris, via about four different trains. At least between the two of us we speak enough French to get by.

Anyway, we stayed the night in this hideous hotel then got up early and went in to Paris proper. We got off at Gare Du Nord, and booked our tickets there. We hadn´t really decided what our train route was going to be, but after some back-and-forth with train-booking ladies and pamphlets and thinking, we decided to go to Bordeaux for a day and a night, then to Madrid for the same, then on to Portugal the next day. And two of the trains were TGVs!

Once we´d finished booking trains we went in and had a look around. Paris was as pretty as always, even though it was raining. Tony hadn´t seen the Louvre so we went and saw (the outside of) that, looking at all the neat stone famous dead dudes who line the eaves of the first floor. Then it was lunchtime.

I wanted crepes, so we went and found a little place not far from the Louvre which speciualised. It was full of French people, which is always a good omen, so we sat down contentedly to eat. Tony had a crepe savoyeuse, I think it was called. I wanted something appropriately cream-filled, so, given the lack of creamy mushroom-based formulations, I went for a crepe with potato, cream, mustard, white wine and... pig´s intestines. It'll be fine, I thought. It'll just taste like pork, and nothing that is cooked in cream, mustard and white wine can possibly taste bad.

Wrong.

It wasn´t awful... well, no, actually it was. It had that earthy, strong taste that only offal has. I ate half of it, telling myself that it was "just different", and that I should be open-minded about my food. Then my brain rebelled and told me that I was probably poisoning myself. So I stopped, admitting defeat and hoping that the waitress wouldn´t laugh at me. She didn´t, so I got an awesome dessert crepe to fill me up and, more importantly, to take away the flavour in my mouth!

Later that afternoon we caught our TGV to Bordeaux. Now for those of you who aren´t aware, TGV stands for "Train a Grande Vitesse": in English, "Train of Great Speed". Simple people, the French. The train reaches speeds of up to 300 km/h. I had learnt about them in French class at school, and ever since then I had thought they were cool. Ever since I had thought about actually going to France, I have had a secret ambition to go on one. And I got to go on two! Actually, it was a bit of an anticlimax - they were so smooth that I didn't notice I was going that fast, until I looked out the window and noticed something on the edge of my vision... it was power-lines, flicking past so quickly that I could hardly see them!

We arrived in Bordeaux to a much better hotel - just a chain place - and promptly went out exploring. It´s a pretty place - definitely somewhere I´d reccommend. Just avoid ordering the "Monaco" beer, eh Tony.

The next evening we caught the second TGV to connect with our overnight train to Spain. It was a three-tier, six berth carriage with officials bursting in every five minutes as you were just getting to sleep, but I slept fine. I´m good at sleeping through stuff though.

We piled off in Madrid and realised that we really had no idea where we were going to stay, or what we were going to do, or what the point of going to Madrid was anyway. I bought a guide book and, on its advice, we went into the central city to find an internet cafe to book a place to stay and our onward travel. We got a flight (a cop-out, I know, but cheaper than train-ing and I had definitely had enough of trains at that point!) to Porto booked, and then decided to use the guide book to find somewhere to stay. It recommended this fabulous little place above the Puerta del Sol (not Plaza del Sol or whatever I called it in my last post!), which is the centre point of the city. They just happened to have only one room left, which was a twin as we needed, and it was fabulous! Madrid was hot and dusty but much cooler (figuratively only!) than Barcelona. It just seemed a bit... classier, I guess. It's definitely worth seeing.

So a day there, then we flew to Porto in Portugal yesterday, then trained north to Vila Praia de Ancora, which is in the very north on the coast of Portugal above Viana do Costelo and below Caminha. It's a beautiful beach town with a beautiful beach, a beautiful pool, and lots of beautiful sun! Muahaha!