Weekend.

This weekend was good. Today I went to the hotel Montebelo buffet for lunch and ate sooo much great food. I just want to comment on the food here in detail. I´ll go by meal. Breakfast is usually bread, fresh bread from the bakers, there are bakers everywhere and cafés aswell. This is a huge part of the portuguese culture, but I´ll get to that later. Anyways, breakfast is bread, sometimes with jam, marmelade(real marmelade made from quince) meat and cheese. We also have cornflakes. Chocolate milk is a staple for breakfast as well. Fruit is common too. Then lunch. Lunch is a lot like dinner in the states. There will usually be a meat, Steak, chicken or something. Sometimes breaded or prepared otherwise. Rice, french fries and a salad. The salads here only come one way, no dressing but with oil and vinegar I think. If served with an egg this combination is called bitoque (pronounced bitok). Also really common lunches include jardineira, a sort of beef stew with patatoes and veggies, Spaghetti, other noodles, pizza, mCdonalds, and not much else. Then there is tea, called Lunche from the verb lunchar. This meal is between lunch and dinner and is a very important part of the portuguese culture. At this time most people head to the nearest café or bakery (Seriously located on every corner)where they sit, mostly outside, and smoke cigarettes, talk/gossip, read the paper, drink portuguese coffee and eat portuguese pasteries. Now one thing that any self-respecting portuguese will tell you is that non-portuguese coffee is really brown colored water or coffee flavored tea. When you order coffee in portugal it comes in a cup no bigger than a thimble, steaming and, for lack of a better word, writhing in it´s place. It looks like tar and smells just as strong. It is usually mixed with a little bit of sugar and enjoyed as is. I have actually yet to try one, not that I lack bravery or anything... Ok. Well the portuguese pasteries are a different story entirely. There are soooo many various types I can´t tell you about them all. I´ll just say I like them a lot and it´s something to experience. Well to bring a touch of the west to portugal I made pancakes this morning. On saturday I woke up and had tennis lessons from nine until noon. After that I went for a run and worked up an appettite. When I arrived back at home there was really good pizza waiting for me. After lunch I went to the mall and saw Mamma Mia. I actually really liked it. After that I helped Kika give Lisa a bath. That was really entertaining, and we got some pictures. After lisas bath we went out for dinner at Piazza Roma, a really good Italian joint with prime calzones. Well, that´s all for know, Até Já.

More Time.

I´m sorry I haven´t blogged in a while. Well, a lot has happened since my last post. Firstly, this last weekend was really fun. I traveled to Oporto for an orientation with AFS. I left Viseu on Friday at about 3:30. I had to prepare some things for this orientation like traditional food from the states (I made choclate chip cookies, which everyone at the camp asked the recipe for) and other things like a song and a story. After school I walked down to the bus stop with all my stuff and caught a bus to Oporto. The drive was fine, about and hour, and the views from the bus were grand. I didn´t have any batteries left in my camera so I didn´t get any pictures. Other people at the orientation had cameras though and many pictures were taken so I assume I can find some of myself. The whole trip was paid for by AFS and my bus ticket was only 9,50 euros. After I got off the bus in Oporto I really had no idea what to do. I was under the impresion that an AFS staff member would meet me at the end of the line since I was travelling alone but I didn´t see any AFS schwag so I decided to take a walk. I walked out on the street and went around a little square for a while. I saw some local skaters hanging around and skating some sweet jibs (rails and the sort) under an old church in the square, I really wish I had had my camera it was so cool looking. After moseying around for a bit confused I headed back to the bus stop to try and figure out where to go when, by chance, I ran into a familiar face. It just so happened to be an AFS staff member and he was there to get me. Well I waited with him as we rounded up all the other AFSérs coming by bus to the orientation. It was then that I found out how isolated I am. All the other AFS kids had each other to travel with and were all on the same bus. For example a friend of mine in Lisbon goes to school with three other AFS students and I think there is a total of 11 students in Lisbon, 2 in Braga and 3 in Oporto. Everyone else had met up with one another at least once before this camp and I had not heard mention of even AFS until then. I´m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, it´s different, unique and an experience any way you look at it. Well after all meeting at the bus station we were hearded down the street to a trainstation where we caught multiple trains through the city to our final destination. We stayed in this old creepy seminary that would be perfect for a horror film, we were not allowed to leave the grounds of the place the whole weekend and on top of that we were fed tons of sugary things. If you can imagine roughly 40 excited AFS teens crammed into that building, wired on sugar, desperate for sleep and anxious to express their feeling, emotions and stories to people who are in the same boat as themselves, that is what the scene was like. It was really fun. Once the camp was done(sunday evening) Sofia, Louis and two teachers from Fun Languages came to pick me up. We went and toured Oporto for a bit, we went to the beach and drove around the city. It was cool to see the Atlantic coast for the first time up close, and I could totally feel a different vibe there. This week in school is election week for the new party who will be ruling the school. Here they are called ``Listas´´ or ``Lists´´ in enlish. It´s basically a group of students in the 12th grade who get together and elect themselves into various positions. Each ``List´´ has a president, V.P. and secretaries and stuff. Some have people assigned for parties, others for music, and some have art/design staff. This whole week is bassically a contest of who can be louder and give out the most free stuff. All the ``Lists´´ have sponsors and so far I´ve gotten tons of food and drinks, pens, beach balls and other random things like stickers and whatnot. Each day there are speakers as tall and about three times as wide as I am (6 feet tall, 6 feet wide, not me the speakers) bumping eurotechno as loud as possible. It´s a big party and super cool. In the states the class elections are way more formal and policy based, it´s really cool seeing the difference. I just finished my first big project in art class, we had to design an album for our group of choice. The album had to include aspects from all the groups previous albums and had to pertain aesthetically to their music. I chose Rage Against the Machine and painted this life size poster for part of the project.

That´s all for now, QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS REALLY SPARK MY MEMORY, so if you can think of any let me know. It helpes me as much as you! Thanks for reading, Até Já!

Days.

Abandoned Cinema.

The Old Center of the City. That is a statue of one of the old kings of Portugal and behind is an ancient cathedral.

Derilict Aristocrat.

Hole in the wall Tabern 18.

Cluster.

Old Gate.

Old Stairs.

An old house over the mouth of a parking garage.

This House is situated off of an alley way in the middle of the old center of Viseu, the amazing thing about this house is that to get to it you litterally have to walk through a maze of alley ways only about five maybe six feet wide for about three blocks. Two get the whole house in view, and actually I didn´t get it all, I had to put the zoom on my camera all the way out and hold it against the wall on the opposite side of the alley. Here is an attempt at a panorama.

These past few days have been great. On Saturday I woke up met a girl here in Viseu on exchange from Massachussettes, went to tennis, left tennis early and went on a tour of Viseu for Fun Languages (My parents language school) with the girl and english students from the school. We talked with the students in english and used the tour as the inspiration for discussion. It was fun but I had already seen all the monuments. After that I went on a run. I ran pretty far, I´ve been running semi-often because it´s good exercise, get´s me out of the house, and I can see a lot of things. I have been looking for a used road bike to buy and fix up so I can cruise around faster and farther than by foot and biking is good exercise. I´m not really willing to pay more than 1oo euros for one and a new bike would cost over 200. On top of that I haven´t even found a used one. But running has been fine, it´s harder to motivate myself to run than I think it would be to bike. Well after that I came home and prepared for dinner. We went out to a big restaurant outside of Viseu, it was very good and I ate more than I should have. By then I was really tired and just went to bed. Today I went out to Villa Nova, a town outside Viseu where my Grandmother lives. She owns a farm there that dates back to around the 1880´s. I think that is my favorite place I´ve been so far. There are three buildings, two of them houses and one of them an old traditional kitchen with a huge granite oven, that surround a courtyard with an ancient tree in the middle whose branches stretch over the entire courtyard. The courtyard opens out onto the farm on one side. The farm is more like a mix of yummy fruit and nut trees laced with fun little games and paths and what not. For example, there is one path that circum-navigates the entire property, it ducks and weaves between fig tree´s that are dripping with perfect figs, chestnut trees, and is almost always walled on once side by grapevines complete with fat juicy grapes; the path makes stops at little shelters housing games such as ping-pong and foosball. The farm also has it´s own soccer and vollyball field. Another part I really like about the farm is that their is a giant dog who lives there. I can´t remember his name but I think he is an Estrela. He is very nice and gentle, just like Rocket. I like him very much. Well I´m sure there are things I´ve forgotten and it annoys me, but oh well. I hope you enjoy the pictures and question´s and comments always spark my memory and such. Até Já.

Month.

As of today, October 3rd, I have been away from Ashland for a month and two days. I left Ashland on the first of September, F.Y.I. ;) I have been in Portugal since the 5th of September and with my family since the 7th. This is by 10 days the longest I´ve been away from Ashland. An interesting thing that happened to me today that reminded me of home happened when I was reading a book/atlas with my cousin and I wanted to show him my state. We flipped to the Western United States page and I went to put my finger on the general area of Ashland. Then stopped. Now realize this is a childs atlas and has every country in the world in it, along with little facts about each one. Well why I stopped my finger was because right at the spot I was about to put my finger was a dot, and that dot was labeled Ashland. Medford was next to it, and it even had Crescent City, Yreka and other small obscure towns that I was suprised to find in this childrens book. By the way, this picture is in my blog because I am experimenting with a new way to upload photos/videos and it is a good example of a very cool portuguese practice. No one here uses dryers. On nearly every building, minus offices, there are clothlines stretching all over them. School was fine today. I went walking through the old part of Viseu yesterday and got some pictures and had an amazing time. I´ll put them up soon.