Sunday, July 29, 2007 Another beautiful (but really hot) day in Obidos

We decided to stay three nights in this beautiful town. Our two night plan, combined with the long travel days has turned out to feel like travel one whole day, sightsee the next, then repeat. Adding an extra night here gives us the chance to rest up a bit before we hit the road again. After our previous experience with long travel days we have checked into alternatives like renting a car for a day. We enjoy the small towns of Portugal that are not well served by the trains which probably means we take a bus to a big city then out again to the next small town we have decided to visit. We are heading north and want to visit Tomar next, the town recommended so highly by the Mormon kid we met on the train. Our guide book says that it is the home for the Nights of Templar and is in close range to Fatima, the Catholic pilgrimage site. It looks like a small Portuguese car rental agency has offices in the next town over from here and in Tomar, so we may rent a small car for the day, drive it up to Tomar then turn it back in. To paraphrase that great philosopher, Scarlett O’Hara, “ I’ll worry about that tomorrow”. As for today, it is too hot here to worry or do much of anything.

Se started out this morning with our full spread breakfast. This is definitely Mike’s favorite spot for breakfast, where the buffet table is spread with a variety of homemade pastries, both Portuguese (of the custard/flan and fruit tart variety) and French (croissants and chocolate croissants). Like all of the other places we have been, there is always a basket of white rolls, a platter of ham and cheese and lots of yogurt. For whatever reason, they are big on Tang rather than real juice so we forgo juice. Morning coffee is consistently served side by side with warm milk and we have come to enjoy our couple of cups each morning. We have become friendly with the waiter, Antonio after meeting him yesterday at breakfast. He spent two years as a waiter on Princess cruises to the Caribbean and Alaska, so he has great multi-lingual skills and is very outgoing. He encouraged us to return to the hotel dining room (a lavish room all decorated in velvet draperies, coats of arms, candelabras and white linens) for dinner last night, where he again served and entertained us. While eating a good dinner of local cod (Deanne) and a horrible dinner of black grouper covered in cheese (Mike) accompanied by wonderful “rural” soup (vegetable bean) and delicious mint sorbet he talked to us about his life on the cruise ships and here in his hometown of Obidos. He invited us to a free community Fado concert being held tonight in the town square. He says that one of the townspeople is a musician who put this show together for the town. The concert, complete with Sangria supported audience participation sounds like lots of fun so we plan on going. Consistent with the late dinner hour (7:30 is the earliest you can be seated for dinner) the concert starts at 10:00 PM and ends at midnight, so it will require a stretch on our part to be awake for it. We will have to nap first (this is when our children laugh).

We have been enjoying siesta time in the early afternoon when the sun is hottest and the cooling breezes of the morning and afternoon are gone. It is early afternoon as I write this and we are sitting in our darkened hotel room with a fan on. Mike is reading a mediocre mystery that I have passed along while I work on this. In a while we will eat our lunch of fresh peaches (we eat these every day and love them), tiny local apples and bananas. The light lunch helps to let us feel less guilty about the sweet breakfast and the late, heavy dinners (which we only indulge in probably every third night). Yesterday we went out again about 3:30 and it was starting to cool down.

Internet access is not as widely available as our guidebooks had suggested, so we have taken to working on the blog off-line, then cutting and pasting our new input when we do have access. The hotel where we are staying now has nothing available so we went to the town square earlier today and used wifi sitting in front of the 16th century church. Similar to using wifi in an airport or a Starbucks there is a charge, in this case 2 Eurors ($2.70) for ½ hour, so we downloaded e-mail, updated the blog with yesterday’s writing, sent a quick message to Dana who is handling our financial affairs at home, reserved a hotel in Tomar for a couple of nights then logged off.

Before we left Seattle, I had mapped out an itinerary using the Rick Steves guide to Portugal and Spain. After we got here, we decided to spend more time in Portugal than originally planned so we went back to planning on the fly. Some Australian kids on the train gave us their Lonely Planet guide to Spain as they were leaving the country, and we bought a similar guide to Portugal for the outrageous sum of 25 Euros ($32), but that has been quite helpful in locating hotels. Booking.com continues to be a great way to see photos of the hotels and reviews by previous guests, so when we have access to the internet that is where we tend to look. Twice we have seen that the prices quoted on the website are exactly the same as the price quoted directly by the hotel, so we are confident that it is a good source.

Portugal and Spain both have a network of hotels that are built inside of historical landmarks. The pousadas of Portugal and the paradors of Spain are similarly high end accommodations (200-400 Euros per night) that are built in old convents or castles. We have a few Spanish parador reservations that we are deciding whether to keep or not (depending on our schedule) but we did not make any reservations in the pousadas. As I mapped out our itinerary prior to arriving in Portugal they seemed to be in small towns that were difficult to access by train, which turned out to be the exact places we decided to visit. Yesterday while we were wandering around Obidos we stopped in to look around the pousada here, a hotel built in the 900 year old castle at the highest point within the walled town. After walking up the hill toward the castle, you enter the castle walls and a stone courtyard. Up some shallow, broad steps to the front door which opens to a small room overtaken with a desk. The woman manning the desk was part of a music convention/piano masterclass taking place in town. She offered us the chance to look around. Unlike modern hotels with huge lobbies, this place was a series of smallish rooms leading one to another. The first room was a lounge complete with chairs and a couch, and at one end, a suit of armor. Decorating the wall was a beautiful tapestry. Magazines (none in English) covered the table top. At the far end of the room, the doorway opened up to the next room, a bar, which opened up to the next doorway leading up some stairs. As we wandered around, a couple came down the stairs to depart the hotel. It turns out that they were seated next to us the previous night at dinner in town and we had spent some time talking to Philip and Ziggy from England. Ziggy invited us up to see their 300 Euro per night room in the pousada while Philip went outside to sit in the courtyard. We hiked up the stairs with Ziggy and across a horribly decorated lounge (purple velvet couch and a light-up coffee table), through a door out onto the castle wall, across the wall making up one wall of the courtyard, into a castle tower and into their suite. It was very tiny and narrow, with a red velvet sofa and a formica desk downstairs with a ladder leading upstairs to a bed. The bathroom was downstairs behind the couch. All in all, the room had none of the charm of our converted convent. Our room, at one third the price, has a charming private patio that we use for drying our laundry in private. Our furnishings are less modern, with wrought iron bedframes and beautiful old tiles in the bathroom. So, we aren’t in a castle but we are happy with our choice, especially now that we have seen the alternative.

Because we have chosen hotels at the 50 Euro or so per night minimum, all of them have en-suite bathrooms and televisions. Most have air conditioning, although we don’t have it here. The televisions have all been unable to access CNN so what news we get either comes from the little time we get on the internet to access news or the BBC. We have seen lots of coverage of the flooding in mid-England and the heat wave though Italy and Greece. We have seen a little about the US, but for the most part the European news stations don’t seem to follow our news any more than we follow theirs. When we worked with Europeans we found them quite well informed about our political situation and news, so it must either be the difference between the big cities and the countryside or between the printed newspapers and the television coverage.