A Weekend in Lagos

Thursday was a big day of tests, my first two test here in Spain. I was pretty worried, but it ended up great. My hand was pretty dead after writing pages in Spanish for history and paragraphs for grammar but it was so satisfying to be able to do it! I have passed the three week mark here in Spain and “they say” after that everything starts to fall into place with language learning—I guess we'll see!
Friday I headed off to Lagos, Portugal with six of my friends. The bus left at 7:30am (still dark here in Spain) and was five hours. Needless to saw we were ready to be there. But it was so worth it, Lagos is preciosa, absolutely beautiful. Gorgeous blue water with giant rock formations jutting out from the land, palm trees, and lovely breezes. We spent about forty minutes wandering the cobble stone streets looking for our hotel getting very different directions from every person we asked. It was exciting that people in Lagos speak more English than Spanish so we had a mini-break from language learning as well. And thankfully Portuguese is close enough to Spanish that we could read most the signs!
Saturday we took a boat to take us out around the cliffs and caves. Our tour guide, Luis, was wonderful. He was pointing out all sorts of rock formations to make us laugh like elephants, camels, and even Michael Jackson's face! We spent about an hour an a half admiring the beauty! The water was magnificent blues and turquoise. We were even able to swim! I was the first to dive off the boat and find out just how cold the water was! A few of us swam to the rocks to climb up into one of the caves where we saw crabs, sea urchins etc. The water was so clear we could see our toes and a probably about 3 meters down. Luis jumped in too after taking pictures for us. It was wonderful.
I would like to say that we explored a lot of the town but really we were so captivated with the beach that most the time was spent there. Swimming, reading in the sand, looking for purple and orange shells, or just staring at the beautiful creation before us. If you get the chance go to Lagos.