This weekend was euro road trip weekend. What better makings of a story than 5 broke students, limited money, and one rental car while dealing with the supposedly worse drivers on the planet? Well, I have to say that we did leave out mark on the northern part of that country...

It started when all of us couldn´t afford the school trip to Lisboa for the weekend. I´ve already been there, and it wasn´t worth the 135€, so it wasn´t that big a deal for me, but I wasn´t too psyched for spending another weekend in Salamanca while there are so many things to go out and see. So me and a group of friends dicided to rent a car for the weekend. My spanish is now to the level where I can negotiate car rental prices and insurance, so that was cool;however we did end up getting a tini Nissan Micra for us 5 (which really wasn´t that bad). Saturday at 9 we left Salamanca headed for Porto Portugal, or just mainly the beach.
So we stopped for lunch in Guarda, which the guide book says is cold, and ugly, but I thought it was alright. Nothing much to do there besides eat, its cool, but a little too slow for me. Then we headed for Aviera which is close to the Atlantic Coast. Aviera is a very cool place, canals and cheap booze can be a dangerous combination. We were there at 12.oo noon and there were already drunks roaming the streets. After this, we headed north to find San Jacinto, which is obviously some cool nature preserve. I don´t know because we got lost trying to find it. Some advice for future travelers to this part of Portugal: Murtosa, Estrreja, and Monte all look the same, and there are no road signs to point you in the right direction. So instead of us going to the nice nature preserve beach, we ended up getting lost somewhere in between Murtosa and Estrreja. Here we had encounters with Portuguese goats, and a crazy horses. After an hour or so wandering in circles, we settled for the closest beach which was Ribbeira. There is something about a beach that always tends to amaze us folk from Colorado. We were on a windy, cold beach in Febuary, but all of us still had an amazing time. Here we hung out, and rallied our rental car in the sand dunes..... good times.
From here I did the driving. I drove from Ribbiera to Espinho, and I think that it was the funnest thing I´ve ever done in europe. Driving on european roads must be the equivalent to a fix of speed. Driving down little, narrow, cobble stone roads, dodging humans and goats is quite an experience. I made it to Espinho without any trouble, and we had and awesome dinner on the beach watching the sunset. Well, I had a nice dinner anyway. None of us in the group spoke portuguese, so obviousy we had problems from the begining. *note for future travelers, Polvo means octopus in Portugese. I had a nice plate of bacalau, but my friends (not liking fish) opted for the polvo which means dust in spanish, but is simmilar to Pavo=turkey, or pollo= chicken. Yeah, you can guess the rest of the story. Now I know why the waitress was laughing when they asked for polvo....
We arrived in Porto late that night. Arriving at any city at dark will screw over your sence of direction, even more so with us, because we didn´t have a map to begin with. So we took the first exit from the autovia into the city we could find, which turned out to be the ghetto. Let me tell you that the city planners to Porto were smoking crack when they disigned the street lay-out of the city. The streets dead end randomly, and turn to one ways magically. It´s as if they did it to make our lives horrible. We drove around randomly untill we found the first hostle we came to,gota nice room for 30 €, and went out on the town;however, we didn´t find much because everybody we´d ask would tell us that it wasn´t a good idea to head out at night. But being a big group we did anyway. The building around our hostal looked as if they were in Berlin after WWII. The walls were gone, the roofs were caved in, the windows all broken...It was crack den central. We finnaly found a non threatening looking bar and went in for some Port wine in Porto. (It is essential to say that you have had Port in Porto, even though it tastes like souped up Robitussen. ) From here we Headed back and went to bed. Primero vez, Porto no me cayó muy bien.
The day treated us much better. Having a map now, we headed for the Ribbiera district of Porto. It is a very cool looking city with the bridges and the old city.