Day 11 - Lisbon to Lagos

We were all a bit sad to have to leave our hostel so soon, especially since the owner´s son (who I´d largely based my decision that Portuguese are better looking than Spanairds on, along with Ronaldo of course) had ever so kindly offered for Nico to watch the All Blacks game on his computer and had watched the whole game with Nico, rooting for the AB´s the whole way. I´d managed to catch the last 10 minutes or so of the game and I have to say it was all fairly surreal watching an All Black game in a Portugal hostel and to top it off the guy from the hostel was playing Fat Freddies as we watched the game as he is a big fan of them. Who knew Fat Freddies would make it as far as Portugal huh!

We had the morning to kill before our bus so we decided to head up the hill toward the castle. In an effort to save some money I decided to flag paying to go inside the castle unlike Nico and Kelly so I just went on a hunt for some good views of the city that didn´t cost anything and I ended up being successful a number of times, getting good views out over a a few different areas of the city and also getting a close look at another impressive cathedral so I was happy with myself for deciding to save my money.

Lagos is a cute little beach town with whitewashed houses scattered around the bay. Unfortunately we were too late in the afternoon to hit the beach so we headed downstairs from our hostel to the bar to watch the Portugal vs Czech Republic football game while having dinner. We had to order fairly blindly not knowing much Portuguese and I ended up getting whole squids which I couldn´t quite stomach sadly. It was great being among the Portuguese though as they started to score goals against the Czechs which caused them to get more and more animated. I do love how passionate the Europeans are about their football and it seems to be in a far less arrogant way than the Brits and the Scots (in my limited experience that is) but as I´ve said before, you can´t help but get caught up in it all when you´re over here.

We headed down into town for a wander and stumbled upon an impromptu parade of sorts in celebration of Portugal winning the game. There were cars, scooters and even a random beach buggy doing laps of the main street honking their horns and flying their Portugal flags about much to our delight. The town was alive after that so we couldn´t surpass having a few celebratory drinks on behalf of Portugal before heading home, ready for the beach first thing in the morn.