June 1, 2007

PORTO, Portugal -

By: Jasmine McCullough

Portugal Day 5 -- Aveiro and Costa Nova, Portugal Photo Gallery

We made it to Portugal! After a six-hour bus ride from Salamanca, Spain, early this morning we arrived in Porto, Portugal just after 5 p.m., Portugal time.

The bus ride wasn't that bad. We traveled for three hours to Averio and stopped there for a couple hours, and then finished the rest of the trip.

On the bus we passed the time by watching DVD's that Dave from Basketball Travelers picked up for the ride. We started the ride off with watching My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I thought it was funny, however our coaches thought otherwise. One said she got dumber for watching that movie. I fell asleep halfway through it so I guess I missed out on "getting dumber."

Averio was pretty cool. It is called the Venice of Portugal because of its canals that run through the city. I thought it was really neat to see these canals. I know the readers are wondering if we took a gondola ride, we did not.

When we got there we basically had two hours to eat lunch and do what we wanted. We were really hungry and every restaurant we went to was packed, so there was nowhere for the six of us to sit (myself, Nelly, V, Marissa, Krystal and Q).

So this one guy comes out and sees we are tourists and asked if we needed help. We started speaking Spanish but realized we weren't in Spain any more. We tried some Portuguese and he replied to us in three different languages; English, Spanish and Portuguese what do you want to speak. I was thinking of course we want to speak English. He asked if we were Americans, but V had her Portuguese cheat sheet with her out so he might have thought otherwise. I finally had to tell her to put it away. At last he directed us to a restaurant that was around the corner. I had steak and eggs and V had cod. The rest of them went and at pizza.

After we filled our stomachs, we did some window shopping then got back on the bus and drove a couple minutes to Costa Nova -- Portuguese for the new coast. We ran to the beach and threw Terri in the ocean. Terri is convinced that she is going to get back at us the next time we are at the beach. We had a lot of fun jumping the waves. One wave we tried to jump was too big to jump and soaked over half of our bodies. Then we had to get back on the bus full of salt water and sand to drive another hour to our final destination of the evening, Porto, Portugal.

Now that we are here it is time to nap and eat, and be in bed by 11 p.m.

Peace out!

Jasmine

P.S. Hi Mama!