Other pieces of Portugal.

Lisbon. The first night, Miguel and I found a fado house [Luso] and spent a few hours splitting an expensive bottle of wine and listening to beautiful traditional Portuguese music. Fado is full of emotion, mostly sorrow, but beautiful sorrow. It can really hit hard if you have the right fadistas singing - and we definitely had some very good fadistas. Beautiful evening. The second night, we bar hopped with Jorge and Nelson, two CouchSurfers from Sintra who I had hosted in Freiburg. The guys had great fun making me order inappropriately named drinks in Portuguese...

Meu Fado Meu by Mariza. This is usually how fadistas sing [from what I've seen, at least] - eyes at least half-closed, really focused on the music and the emotion, hands in front of them - often they're wearing a kind of shawl and twisting it in their hands as they sing.

Two songs sung by Amália Rodrigues, the "queen of fado."

Cascais. The second day in Lisbon, I took a short train ride to Cascais for a luncheon put on by the Americans in Portugal group - I don't want to get too involved in the expat community [which won't be too hard, since they all live in southern Portugal because they like the sun or something silly like that], but it's still nice to know some of your fellow countrymen in a strange country. Cascais itself was great - right on the ocean - and the luncheon itself was livened up a little by the British man next to me who told me all about his Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. The highlight, of course, was the guest speaker, a representative from the American embassy in Lisbon. Ooh, yes, please do tell me more about the hours when I can go to the embassy to renew my passport!

Cascais!

Aveiro. The more I see of this city, the more I like it [although I think that's true for almost every city I go to]. A lot of fun bars, both student-y and traditional, and culture - they'll have a TEDx event there next week! It has canals going through it and is just a few kilometers from the beach. Costa Nova do Prado, a beach town not too far away, has fun beach-y architecture. And...have I mentioned...beach?

One of the highlights of my time there this time was definitely the carnival. As you can probably guess, the Feira de Março [March Fair] happens around the last week of March and then most of April [okay, I can't make fun of it too much, since Oktoberfest mostly takes place in September]. After veal sandwiches washed down with wine [totally what you'd eat at a carnival in the US...yeah...], we went on the rides. Many of the rides had naked women painted on them - that's how I knew I was in Europe. The haunted house ride was even cheesier and more non-scary than I could have hoped for. It also had a few naked women in it, since, I guess, naked women are horrifying and might potentially haunt your nightmares? After a ride that seemed specifically designed to shake your brains out through your ears, we decided to call it quits. I had a fartura [also known in some circles as a churro], a very satisfactory funnel cake replacement, and on our way out we bought some mountain goat cheese and tried shots of cherry liqueur in chocolate cups...sometimes it felt a little too classy to be a real carnival. Then I remembered the naked ladies on the rides.

The brain shaker.