Portugal!

Portugal is the most BEAUTIFUL place. We docked in Lisbon on Wednesday and a group of us took a train to the southern part of Portugal called Lagos. We stayed at a really nice and surprisingly cheap hotel right on the beach. The weather was amazing too. The train to get to Lagos was about 4 hours which wasn't that bad. We got to Lagos around 2 the first day and went to the beach right away. 

The waves were SO intense! I was even afraid to go in the water because the current was so strong. The water was so clear...unlike the Long Island Sound...after we went to the beach we headed back to our hotel and hung out by the pool for a while. Lagos is definitely a touristy town. It was really nice and clean too. Mostly everyone spoke english which was refreshing because it seemed like in Lisbon they only spoke Portuguese. We had dinner in town and then walked around for a bit trying to find a fun place to go for the rest of the night. Everything in Portugal starts SO LATE. People don't even go out until 1am! 

The next day we just hung out at the beach for a majority of the day. It was really nice to just relax instead of having to try to squeeze everything into such a short period of time. Then we went into town and walked around. A few people wanted to go cliff jumping (which we then found out is illegal so we didn't end up doing it) so we went to this hidden beach and swam through a bunch of hidden caves to find this secret beach. It was SO amazing!! I'll post pictures about it later. My friend used her GoPro so we have a lot of it video taped. We had dinner on the beach and then went out to some local bars.

The next morning me and a few people out of the group woke up at 5:45am (brutal) and got on the train to get back to Lisbon. At first I was hesitant about going to Lagos because I heard how amazing Lisbon is. I wanted to have a full day in the capital of Portugal so I had to take the earliest train. It wasn't too bad, I passed out the whole time which was sweeeeet.

We arrived in Lisbon at 10am which was perfect timing. We walked around the town and got on a hop on/hop off tour and went to the Castelo de S. Jorge. The view from the castle was breathtaking. It was looking over the whole city and the ocean. We explored the castle and then headed back into town. We had to be on the ship before 6 so we kind of had to rush when we were shopping in the town.

We were about to disembark from Lisbon when there was an announcement on the loud speaker telling all of the student body to go the auditorium. We knew it had to be about Morocco because of all the horrible things going on there right now. Last week they told us that they were looking into the situation and would let us know if we were changing our itinerary after Portugal. In the meeting we found out that SAS and UVA decided it would be best if we didn't go to Morocco. We are now staying 2 more days in Spain and then heading over to the Canary Islands which is right off the coast of Morocco. I'm actually really bummed about this because I was going to go on a Camel ride! Also I think that Morocco would have been an amazing experience. Oh well, everything happens for a reason.