Wednesday, October 28

Travel days are a bit tough for me so I have a quiet morning at our apartment and Bob goes exploring,  He returns to tell me that the beach here is amazing. We decide we will go explore it tomorrow. This is the view from our apartment balconey today.

Thursdsay, October 29

Today we drive to the Praia de Roche Beach as it is at least a half hour walk and I don’t feel up to that today.

There is a long cement pier at the far end of the beach so we make our way there and walk out to the end of it where there is a little lighthouse.The view of the beach area with all the buildings behind it is very pretty when the sun shines.

These colours and shapes of these condos remind of us Hurghada in Egypt.

The waves are crashing against the pier and we do get a little bit wet.On the way back we watch a few fishermen.  One of them caught a flat fish but he wasn’t too talkative and pretty much ignored us so we didn’t learn much. This is the first person we have encountered who hasn’t been very friendly. The fishermen here are using the very long poles we have seen elsewhere.

A few minutes later Bob spots this fishing boat returning along with its many friends!  It was hilarious, all the noise and so many gulls all trying to get something to eat.  We had quite a few laughs watching this boat go by, with its parade of very noisy gulls.There were lots of these little fish in the water, some of them were over a foot long, but no one seemed the least bit interested in them.  There must be someone out there who knows what they are and why no one was fishing them?I thought it was quite cool today, but this little guy was having so much fun running in and out of the waves that he didn’t seem bothered by the cold water at all!  Europeans seem much more accepting of children running about without bathing suits which I think is great. It is getting to be late afternoon and the sun is sinking so we head back to our apartment, after stopping at the grocery store to stock up for the week.  

We seem to  spend a lot of time in the grocery stores, but both of us find it quite interesting. Of course most of the brands are different, the writing is usually all in Portuguese or Spanish and we see things we have never seen in the food stores before. One thing I find quite surprising is the lack of choice in fresh fruits and vegetables.  It is definitely a case of what is available in season and there doesn’t seem to be very many imported fruits and vegetables.  Often the bins aren’t refrigerated either, so the quality of the fresh produce is not as good as back home.  Peppers are often wrinkly, there are usually only red peppers, occasionally some green, but rarely yellow or orange peppers, and when I have found them they are crazy expensive and not very fresh.  The other thing we have discovered is that you don’t want to go the last hour or so in the evening because everything is very picked over, and many of the fruits and vegetables bins are completely empty. One item that is very hard to find is herbal teas. There are very few choices but some of them just aren’t very appealing.  I’m still looking for plain old mint tea!