Enjoying the ancient walled village of Evora

It is an awesome feeling to view ruins that were built by the Romans during their rule of this area and to sit in an active working church that has had been in existence for 500 years. It makes you re-experience just how young our history is in the US. We went for a walk last night down these narrow little cobblestone streets and you could just picture how it was years ago before electricity.

This little tiny walled city has churches everywhere. We are still so early into our trip that churches hold fascination. I've heard the stories of people that can't stand to see another BFC (Big Friggin Church), but we haven't hit that point. Although last night Mike was ready to turn off the church bells. As if in contest with each other, all of the churches in listening distance have competing bells that start ringing every fifteen minutes. They are all off synch too, so that one set starts and does its thing then the next set starts in, etc. until three or four neighboring churches have weighed in. Not bad during the day, but way too much when you are trying to sleep at 3:00 in the morning.

We have been going to bed about 10:00 or 11:00 every night after an evening of computer time and reading, but last night was Saturday so we decided to live it up. Caitie has been enjoying the Spanish night life so we decided to check out the Portuguese night life in this little town. After walking around to see the churches all lit up for the evening, we walked to the town square to be part of the scene. To get the lay of the land, we grabbed a bench and sat down to see where the action was. The town square for this little town is 500 years old, a plaza paved in small rock cobblestones surrounded by three story buildings with shops on the ground floor and aprtments above and small, one lane roads leading off the square. Because it is so old, the roads are very narrow, requiring that traffic be one-way only. So, traffic entered the sguare to our left in a single lane, drove across the road in front of us and exited the square to our right, with occasional cars going up one of the lanescoming off the square. We watched cars cruise the square just like cars cruising everywhere on a Saturday. The little Smart cars are very popular here, so imagine teenagers in these tiny little cars cruising by trying to look cool in cars that look like toys. Mostly the teenagers walked around in groups, guys and girls separated, but looking at each other while trying not to make it obvious.
In addition to crowd watching, we had live entertainment in the form of a multi-talented dude dressed in clownish clothes who alternated between building balloon animals, riding a unicycle (poorly) and juggling flaming batons. His audience seemed to mostly be the relatively large number of children in the below ten year old range who were also cruising the square at 10:00 PM. As for us, we sat for half an hour on a bench and watched all of this excitement until the 70 to 80 year old men who normally inhabit the bench, and who occupied all of the surrounding benches made us feel guilty for taking their front row seat. As we walked back to our hotel, we figured that Saturday nights in Spain must be more exciting that in Evora, Portugal to hold Caitie's attention.

Every day at 10:00 AM a walking tour of the town leaves the town square for a multilingual tour of the ancient sights. We intended to participate today, but were told by the unfriendly information desk clerk that the tour guide had called in sick today and the tour was off. So, instead he handed us a brochure for a self-guided tour (something we had asked for the previously day and not received)and we set out to see them ourselves. The first few hours of traipsing around were great, until the heat became too much (our first hot day) and we returned once again to the town square to have lunch in an outdoor cafe at an umbrella covered table.

Tomorrow we have a long bus ride to the Algarve region in the South, so we may not write in. We'll touch base later.

Deanne