Stay in Spain

While on the trip, we get two free weekends. Well, we didn't find these out until the first Monday of classes aka we had four or so days to plan the first one. The majority of the group agreed that we wanted to go to Portugal for the beach for one and Barcelona for the second one. Since Barcelona is a much bigger undertaking, we decided on Portugal for the first one. We were having trouble figuring it out since it isn't the biggest tourist spot, so there are not a million websites with recommendations. Harriette's host mom is a whiz at traveling, so she helped us work up a plan. She recommended Porto (or Oporto as they call it here) and a couple of other cities because they have nice beaches, are less expensive, and the quickest to get to from Salamanca. Porto was chosen solely because the bookstore from Harry Potter is located there. Everyone from our group including our professor except one person joined in on the trip.

Friday morning at 4:15 am, we meet at the train station (a 40 minute walk from our house- ugh) to catch our 4:30 train. We had one switch at the border, and then arrived in Porto at 9:30ish. On the second train, Harriette was sitting next to a middle-aged guy researching Rockport, Texas so she struck up a conversation. Apparently, he was from Germany but had spent some time in the States, but was now studying in Portugal. He wanted to go to some concert in Rockport, even though we're not sure why he'd pick there over all places. Once the train arrived, he showed us how to get to the closest metro station, recommended which tickets to buy, and which stop we should stop at. What a nice man! Once we got off the metro we followed the map to our hotel (from the hotel website) to find ourselves at the public library. Luckily, there were signs pointing us in the direction of our hotel. After leading us in a giant circle, we found ourselves three blocks down from the public library.

The lobby of the hotel seems very nice, especially since each person was only paying 13 euros per night. We left our luggage, went and ate lunch, and then returned to take a quick nap before hitting the town. Our rooms are on the third floor, and as we are walking up we can see the different floors becoming worse and worse, more and more deteriorated. Maybe every third light worked in the hallway. The floor and the stairs were uneven. I was in the best room. Four beds and a balcony. The only thing wrong with it was sometimes when you turned the sink on, the shower would come on and viceversa. Another room only had three beds, but it was tiny. Then there was our favorite, five-bed room. The door was metal and looked like it was made for a bomb shelter. We believe there were blood stains on the floor. There were definitely several holes in the wall. It looked like a balcony had been walled in and carpeted. If you looked out the window of the "sun room" at the balcony below, there were no walls or railing of any sort. After seeing this, we decided we had to check out the fourth and final floor. It looked like an abandoned house. There were holes in the walls, floor, and ceiling. None of the lights worked. It was covered in dust and mold. Every step caused the whole floor to creak. Several people were probably murdered there, and we told everyone it was haunted.

We decided to take the tour bus to get a general feel for the city. For only 19 euros we got 48 hours of use of the tour bus, a boat tour titles "The Six Bridge Water Tour," and a free port tasting. After seeing almost all of the city in less then two hours and only stopping at the Harry Potter bookstore, we decided to go back and get ready for dinner. After eating dinner in a mall because we had asked about a good place to buy ice cream (some of the girls on the trip are obsessed), we stumbled upon a concert being out on by several groups from Mexico. We, being very excited at being able to understand their non-Spain accent, knew we had to stay. We ended up staying until it ended several hours later and we had started the dance movement that made the concert enjoyable for everyone else.

The next day we set out to the beach, but soon realized that our idea to use the tour bus system as transportation was an awful idea because it took forever to get anywhere, but the metro system wasn't very good and it would have taken forever to figure out the city bus system. Finally, we made it to the beach. It was beautiful and we left after a few hours to get lunch. Then we hopped back on the bus to see the last 2/3 of the tour again only to get back to our hotel. Only this time, there was a road blocked, so we had to take a detour through the ghetto of the town. There was a lot of poverty, screaming at our bus, drug deals, and interesting people/ We then went back to the mall to have dinner, after shopping, because most people on our trip aren't as excepting of the food and have an addiction to shopping. Afterward we went back to the hotel to tell ghost stories and then went ghost hunting on the fourth floor of the hotel.

The final day we planned to take our "cruise" and do the port tasting. A bus driver had told us the day before where to go to for each, but when we arrived at where the cruise was suppose to be the other driver said no it's on the other side of the river, so we had to get back on and ride the blue line for the first time, all the way around to the other side of the river. Almost every time we were on the bus, there were two girls that fell asleep. One day when it was pretty full, two men needed seats, so they proceeded to wake both of them up since they were each taking up two seats. I've never seen two more confused faces. Eventually, ee found out that the boat tours were full until two, so we put out names down and then walked back to the other side of the river and up a giant hill to find the port cellar. I learned a lot, especially since I knew nothing about it other than the name. We quickly left to make it over to our "cruise." While on it, we saw exactly what we saw from the bus, only from the water. The only fun from it came from meeting two different couples from Canada with whom we discussed ghost sitings and hockey. After that we had to get back on the bus and see the city tour one more time before we got back to the hotel to leave and get on our train.

The city was really dirty, but we were coming from a city that gets cleaned three times a day. We had a blast on the weekend trip, but most of it came from bonding in misery together. Because of these incidents, we have created the motto "Stay in Spain." While there we could kind of communicate with the people that only spoke Portuguese because of its similarities to Spanish, but many of the words were different, which made ordering food difficult. For instance at one place someone thought they ordered a burger, but it came out as a beef patty with an egg over easy on top. We made it through the trip though, have some unforgettable memories, even though we may want to with some of them, and returned safely at 12:30 am to make it home for some sleep before class the next day.