We had a wonderful weekend of exploring, eating, hiking, swimming, eating some more, and sleeping in whatever cracks of time were left between. I couldn't do justice to all that we saw and did by myself, so I recruited (one offered and I forced the other, I'll let them fight over who is who) the best help out ! So, as you read this, please imagine a combination of our voices telling you the story (I'll be sticking mostly to the captions), most likely talking over each other and interrupting with uncontrollable laughter! Here they are!
Hola! Victoria and Addy here, taking over for Lauren so she can rest up her sarcasm. We present you this two-part weekend special. Victoria will kick us off…
All I can say is wow. What a weekend. We had a spectacular and crazy time this weekend traveling to Porto, Vigo, and the Islas Cies.
Our adventure began Friday afternoon at 3:15 PM when all of us met at the train station. We were 8 in total – the 5 Coloradans and 1 Californian, along with our 2 super cool program coordinators. It was an epic group, guaranteed to lead to an awesome weekend of many laughs, which it most definitely was.
Side note: Addy got bit by a bug and her arm swelled up to the size of a watermelon. Being the stubborn person she is, she refused any ointment or Benadryl. Enjoy these pictures of her in pain because she deserve every minute of it for being stubborn and not listening to her moms.
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| Peep Victoria with her face in her palm. |
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| Her arm looks like Harry Potter's when his bones are made into Jell-O. |
After everyone arrived, we all hopped on the train and settled in – Lauren and I took some epic, much needed naps. After a two-hour long train ride we arrived in Vigo, a city on the western coast of the Galician province. We had an hour and a half layover before catching our next train, so being sleepy and hungry we went to scavenge for food. We walked what felt like miles (probably only like 15 minutes) in search of food but could find nowhere with a kitchen open. Siesta time is very real in Vigo. We had finally decided to walk to the nearest Burger King when all of a sudden we found an arepas place (Venezuelan sandwich like thing). Soraida, our Venezuelan program coordinator, was ecstatic. We enjoyed our arepas and the hangryness was gone. Happy again, we walked back to the train station and boarded our train to Porto. It was a beautiful train ride that followed the coast with lots of beautiful scenery. We arrived in Porto around 10PM and from there ventured to our hostel. It was called the “Sports Hostel,” but we are not really sure why because the only sporty thing about it where the room numbers that had tennis ball pictures replacing the zeros.
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| Our favorite gangster napper. |
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| One does not simply ride to Portugal and stay awake. |
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| Areeeeepas! |
After dropping our stuff off, we went out to once again look for food. If you haven’t figured it out yet, food basically runs our lives here. My boss, who is from Porto, recommended a place to us, but unfortunately when we got there they didn’t have any tables for us. The struggle was very real. So, we wandered a bit, admiring the beautiful city and nightlife. At this point we were getting hangry again (it's a common occurrence), so in an attempt to help Soraida find a place for us to eat, I started looking around and came upon a small little restaurant called the Petiscaria Santo Antonio. After a rough exchange in Portuguese with the owner, he agreed to serve us, but he said he was out of a few things so he would just bring us what he had. While one of the more questionable decisions we made, we were not disappointed. That was by far one of the coolest experiences we had in Porto. The owner was super awesome and nice and came to be known as Super Chef. And yes, we actually called him that. And yes, he responded to it. And yes, he took a picture with us. As I said, Super Chef. We were all kind of in love. He brought us some olives, beans and carrots to start and then the food just kept coming. Literally endless amounts of different tapa-like plates. Some of the things we had: goat cheese and ham, chicken, sausage, sardine salad, mushroom empanada, beef, sausage, fried fish patties, cod casserole, rice and beans etc. I’m sure that doesn’t even cover half of all the food we had. By the end we were stuffed and could go no more. But it was so, so worth it. 10/10 would recommend for all in Porto. After thanking him for our delicious meal, we paid and walked back to the hostel and then proceeded to pass out.
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| Just looking for Maxwell Smart or the Doctor. Don't mind us. |
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| The adored home of Super Chef. |
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| Vic got distracted by more food. That's Bret's normal. |
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| This is Super Chef. He is a fire bender by nature. |
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| Our crew <3 |
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| Food comas are real and dangerous. |
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| Teamwork makes the dream work. |
Our Saturday began at 8:15AM when we were all awoken by a choir of alarms. We got ready, packed up and left the hostel to go get breakfast. The only thing that got us out of bed that early was the promise of life-changing croissants. We walked about 15 minutes to a small bakery. It was packed, and for an obvious reason – the pastries. We stared, drooling, at the pastries in the window as we waited to get into the bakery, trying very hard to decide what to get. In the end, we decided one croissant would not be enough, so Addy and I got 2 regular croissants, 1 éclair, and 1 powder sugar covered, cream filled croissant and coffee and Lauren got a ham sandwich. It was a lot, and we struggled at the end to finish it all, but it was so worth it. No regrets whatsoever, the sugar coma and all.
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| Life-changing croissants lived up to their name. |
After indulging in endless pastries, we walked to Livraria Lello. This bookstore is famous for being the oldest in Portugal and one of the oldest in Europe, opening for business in 1869. It is also famous because it inspired the Hogwarts library in Harry Potter. When J.K. Rowling was writing the book, she lived in Porto while teaching English and drew her inspiration for the famous Hogwarts library from the gorgeous bookstore. The line to get in to the library is always long, but luckily we had bought tickets for a specific time. We were amazed by the library and almost all immediately drawn to the Harry Potter section, which featured limited edition, 20th anniversary copies of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. There was a lot of fan-girling and excitement. We then wandered, browsing the covers of endless books, took some pictures and proceeded on to the rest of our packed day. But first, we of course had to stop by the cute artisanal market and shop around. So many cool things to buy, but our priority is still food…
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| Nerds in every country. |
Our next stop was a famous church! I wish I could remember what it was called, but it was on a hill and it was pretty and there were lots of nice views from the top. We enjoyed stopping by. However, by this point the sugar highs were wearing off and everyone was getting hungry again, so we stopped and had a quick lunch and then headed down to the Riviera.
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| The organ music was killer. The piece was probably called "Dracula's Entrance in D minor." Beautiful, but eerie. |
The Riviera was very beautiful and lively, filled with people, and there were many incredible bridges spanning across the river. We crossed one of these bridges to the other side of the river and made our way to Sandeman – a port winery. The winery has been around since 1790, which is crazy to think about. We enjoyed a really awesome tour, learning about the different kind of ports and then even got to taste some. The two samples we tried, a red and a white, were delicious, but very sweet.
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| Truss me, it was beautiful. |
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| The Sandeman can. |
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| "The question would be: to swim or to drink." - Tour guide, talking about if the barrels were to break. |
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| Vic found love in a peculiar place. |
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| When your love replaces you with wine. |
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| Addy and I were having a weird face battle. Luckily I picked Vic's side of the table. |
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| The moment we walked out a guy proposed to his girlfriend. This place was seriously like a dream. |
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| Addy's either practicing her proposal or demonstrating her old age. There's no way to be sure. |
Unfortunately, after the tour, we had to book it back to our hostel to catch the train back to Vigo. We were sad to go and wish we could’ve had more time in the beautiful city, but thoroughly enjoyed our visit!
Some more Porto Pics:
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| "Que?" |
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| Every day is a happy one when Crayola is your decorator. |
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| The painted tiles were incredible. |
This concludes this week’s segment of “Victoria Takes Blogging,” but we will see you next time! Heeeeeere's Addy!
Wasssuuuppp! Addy here with your bi-monthly update! Things are going swimmingly here, and I literally mean swimmingly - the weather has been so incredible it’s impossible to resists a dip in the giant pool that is the ocean. I do believe my writing prompt is about the Islas Cies, so I guess we can get started with that!
I’m not really sure where Vic left off in her story, and she’s not answering my desperate attempts to FaceTime her (bitter shout out), so I’m just going to pick it off from the train from Porto to Vigo! The train ride was absolutely wonderful. Due to the fact we had walked miles and drank some beloved vino, it’s safe to say that we all had pretty enjoyable siestas on that train ride. Now I know what you’re going to ask, and I just want to say don’t worry, as trip photographer I, of course, got pictures of Lauren and Vic sleeping. We arrived in Vigo for the second time that weekend late in the evening. Vigo is more of an industrial city compared to La Coruña, but similarly beautiful! For dinner we went to a sort of tapas restaurant, where I ordered a sandwich, Lauren ate some ribs and Victoria ate her own mini feast, the contents of which yo no recuerdo. Just assume it was delicious (which it was) and that she ate all of it (which she did).
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| What goes around, comes around, my dear. |
After that killer meal, we walked back to our hotel room where Lauren, Vic and I all shared one room. It was pretty much a dream come true since living so far away from each other in this city has given us a little seperanxion (our new word to describe separation anxiety; even the words have separation anxiety from each other). We had a great time at our slumber party, consisting of Vic and I making fun of Lauren, who seemed to misunderstand that there are in fact two knobs for a shower to control the temperature, not just the cold knob (it was a quick shower). I am also proud to say I scared Victoria as she came out of the bathroom, but karma came back when I came out of the bathroom to find all the lights turned off and Victoria and Lauren had abandoned me alone in the room (fortunately the mastermind, Lauren, and I have the same mind so I saw it coming). It was quite the fiesta. I realize I’m ranting now about pretty much nothing so I am now going to move onto the next morning.
So we woke up and went scavenging for food. Trying to find a cafe open on a Sunday in this country is like finding a tortilla chip in a bag of Lays - it’s a challenge. But we stumbled upon a saintly woman whose beautiful cafe was open with pastries and coffee and bread and all other necessary aspects of life. So we settled in and had some breakfast there (Victoria and I again went overboard in the amount of food to eat, shockingly enough, but also we have 0 regrets). We also bought some fresh bread from the bakery to make our lunches, and we set off on the adventure to the Islas Cies. Now before you keep reading, I want you to look up pictures of this place. Go on, do it, I’m in no rush.
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| "Addy, where did our breakfast go?" |
Beautiful right? Now if you’re like me, you just think that whoever took these pictures has a really great camera and is a photoshop wizard because no way does a paradise like that exist in this world. Well, let me tell you, my camera is my phone and I don’t know the first thing about photoshop, so please believe the following photos are real.
I know right? Like dayum! My true reaction right there. And sorry, I got off track. Let me take a couple steps back.
So from Vigo we rode the ferry to the Islas de Cies. Lauren passed out (again) and Vic and I wandered the boat. Alright I think we’re all caught up again. Back to Las Islas.
As you can see from the pictures, it was a really excellent day. There was not a cloud in the sky (got sun in my eyes and I won’t be surprised if it’s a dream → that’s a carpenters song for those who don’t know), so we decided to start the day off with a short hike! As Coloradans, it was a bit closer to a walk and perhaps it wasn’t as short for others as it was for us, but we can safely say the landscape was a tad bit different. The hike in total took us around 2.5 hours, where we slowly made our way up to the top of the island and wound up the stairs to the top of a lighthouse, and from there we could see all around the island and the coast of Spain that we had just left that morning. On the way up, we ventured off the path to some lookout points, and kept finding some rocks to scramble up trying to find the perfect views (which wasn’t too difficult since we were wandering around paradise). Soraida and I climbed some rocks and were accompanied by some ridiculously sharp plants, and terrifyingly aggressive seagulls. There was a point where we got to the top of these rocks that we had been climbing for 15 minutes, and a seagull kept trying to attack us by dive bombing as close as he could get to us. Let’s just say we got a picture really quick and pretty much jumped down out of fear.
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| Nicki and Vicki. |
The hike was truly beautiful and unlike anything any of us have seen! One of the more entertaining parts was the mistake Victoria made, which was not leaving her two bottles of Port at the hotel in Vigo, and instead lugging it around in her backpack for the whole day, including through the very warm and uphill hike. But hey, it made her stronger and was a good workout for Lauren and I too since we got to work on our core by laughing at the situation.
After enjoying our sandwiches at the top of the lighthouse with a view that cannot be beat, we made our way back down the mountain. We had a couple more hours before our ferry came to take us back to reality, so we spent some time on the beach. We arrived at this small beach where the sand was as soft as a baby’s butt and the water was as blue as...honestly there’s nothing I can even compare it with! Just imagine the most beautiful blue possible and BAM! That’s what we swam/peed in. The water was a perfect chilly temperature that made you appreciate the sun a little bit more. Our time at the beach consisted of applying sunscreen, swimming, sleeping, and laughing at each other’s sunburns (@Victoria). A day like no other.
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| Our favorite photo bombers. |
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| She's so cute. |
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| So are we...in a puffer fish don't-poke-or-they-might-pop kind of way. |
We eventually had to run to our departure ferry by the end of the day since it was about to leave us (which I don’t fully disapprove of, we could’ve made a nice life there). Then we grabbed dinner in Vigo (our favorite Venezuelan dwelling with some more arepas) and ended with ice cream, of course, and jumped on the train to take us back to A Coruña!
So that is the end of our weekend long journey. Obviously everyday's an adventure with my two bestest friends by my side, buuuut this one is sure to be one we will not forget. I would like to apologize for my terrible writing skills. I’m going to blame the fact that I’ve been thinking in Spanish for the past four weeks, but also I sucked at writing before arriving here soooo...Don’t worry, Lauren is coming back for you all.
Signing off *finger guns*
-Addy
Quote of the weekend:
"Oh damn I'm the color of toast." - Addy
"But like a perfectly toasted toast." - Victoria, unknowingly paying Addy a very sweet compliment.
Locations slept in: Train, Hostel, Boat, Hotel, Beach, Middle of Sidewalk.
Lesson Learned: Shower first.
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