Mi Vida en España: Glimpses of my life in Spain: Portugal and Feria

Well, as you´ve noticed, I´m a little behind on the blog. It´s been really busy here with all the end of my time here and wanting to fit everything in. Also the festival Ferria here took up a lot of time - a lot of fun time! :)

The first weekend of May (Saturday-Monday) I went on a trip to the beaches of Portugal - los largos - with the school. Our weekend was suppose to consist of mostly free days on the beautiful beaches, but sadly it rained every day. This changed our plans for the trip. We still had a fun time - making the most of it. We were able to spend a little time on the beach for part of the first day, with only one time where we had to run into a cave for shelter. The sun did come out for a little bit. We also enjoyed our time in the little town where we found a fun restaurant and made a friend with the waiter. We ate the biggest and best hamburgers we´ve had here and also met two men from London when we went out to sing karoke. The second day it was raining as well and since we couldn´t be on the beach - we went for a visit to a nearby town that had castle. The castle was interesting, but pretty small. We also ate lunch in this town which turned out to be a lot of fun because my group of friends and I found a cute little family owned restaurant. The family was actually have their Sunday dinner in the restaurant and we were the only other people there. The food was AMAZING and we found out really cheap as well. The mother was our waitress and was just so kind. We had a lot of fun peaking over at the cute family together. They also gave us a free dessert after we had said we were okay without a dessert - so sweet! Right before we were going to leave, it began to downpour so we had to wait. The family then brought us out these little classes of liquor to "warm us in the rain". It was such a sweet and touching gesture - we definitely experienced some wonderful hospitatlity there and we all left with smiles on our faces and just the special/happy feeling you have after something like that happens. Our streak of free dessert continued when we were able to convice the waiter we met the night before that we deserved free dessert this second night because we recommended the place to a lot of the other students and almost everyone came the second night - free ice cream sundaes! :)

Monday we headed to another town called Albuferia where we had most of the day free for the beach (or as it turned out eating and shopping because it rained again for most of the time) We started on the beach, but we were sitting with our umbrellas because it kept sprinkling on and off. That was a new sight - large groups of people, sitting on their towels on the beach with umbrellas :) To pass some time a friend and I who are in the dance class learning Sevillianas (the tradiation dance that is danced at the festival Ferria) began teaching some of our friends how to do that dance on the beach. It was funny because there was a couple people who actually stopped to watch us! ha ha. We had to make sure we were prepared for Ferria!

Something interesting we noticed in both places we visited in Portugal is that we hardly ever if never heard Portuguese. They are such well known tourist places (expecially for the British) that everyone spoke English. We even met a waiter for one of the restaurants that was from London and only spoke English - yet he was able to get a job there even though he didn´t know Portuguese. Something interesting.

La Feria

You can read a good description of this at this website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Fair
"Feria" means "Fair" in Spanish and that is what it is for a week here. They have the rides and attractions like we have at fairs, but the main part of Ferria are the tents that are all set up. There are public and private tents. The public tents anyone can enter, but the private tents are owned by families or businesses and you have to know someone of the tent (or sometimes have tickets) to enter. In the tents there are bars where you can buy food and the drink of Feria is a strong white wine called "manzanilla" that is mixed with 7up and the drink is called "rebujito". In the tents people sit, eat/drink, talk, and dance Sevillianas. There is sometimes live music or otherwise it is played over a stereo. Many of the women are dressed in flamenco dresses where are pretty funky dresses, but are so beautiful at Ferria. Some of the men dress in a traditional dress as well, but many do not - many will be in suits or collared shirts. I was able to go to Feria Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. Monday I only went to see the lighting of the door of Feria that symbolized the start. Tuesday and Wednesday night were a lot longer for me, but a lot of fun. I was lucky that Rosario´s daughter had a dress I could wear, so I got to get all dressed up in the flamenco dress with a flower in my hair. Many of my friends were able to get dresses too, so we had a lot of fun going out together. Another luck that I had, is my language partner Juanlu´s family had a private tent (this is not super common) and some of his friends had tents as well. We were able to hang out with him and his friends so that we were able to go to the private tents which are smaller, but more fun because you can actually sit down and dance and such. I am so glad that I took the dance class so that I was able to dance a lot! VERY FUN! I also got a lot of compliments about my dancing which made me feel good :) I really did the Spanish thing Tuesday and Wednesday night as I did get home until 3:30am Tuesday night (and had to wake up at 7:30 for class in the morning) and 2.30 on Wednesday night (and Grace and I had to wake up at 4am to leave for our flight to Rome the next day). I was able to run on the energy of Spain and Rome and of course the little naps I could fit in :)

Pictures!!