Portugal pt.3

I'm now realizing how much I will have to work to update everyone on the Portugal trip.  In two posts I've covered two days.  I'm going to try and move faster while still keeping the blog fun, or at least free of tears of depression/boredom.  So moving on, although the beautiful locations were seemingly without limit the time we spent with skilled tour guides was extremely limited.  Specifically it was limited from the time we entered the Mosque of Cordoba to the time we left the Mosque of Cordoba.  The next guide was no exception, she was worse than Buzzkillington, and he's really really bad.  At one point a student tried to help her out by telling the following joke: Question from the guide; 'Who knows why the palace was built so close to the ocean?'  Student; 'So they could party on the beach every night?' Alright, so maybe the joke would not have made it on Last Comic Standing, but we were desperate, the kid received a nice hearty laugh from the other Rotary students and this from the tour guide, 'Actually the beach was too cold to be much fun.  Also swimsuits had not yet been invented, and there was no way they could have had enough light to go to the shore line during the nighttime.'  And cue the awkward silence.  So saying she was tough to listen to is a bit of an understatement, sure I caught some fun facts but for the most part I spent my time expertly wandering much how I do in San Sebastian.  The location in question were Reales Alcazaras, architecture similar to that of Alhambra but on a smaller, more modest scale.  This palace would only take about six hours to see entirely which rests comfortably above my minimum time for home tours of three hours.  Move aside MTV Cribs, people are done touring your houses after an hour, go out and buy some more shit.  Just look at the royalty of the past, now they knew how to live.

Also knew how to starve all the ugly poor people

The rest of the day was free time spent exploring the city for hookers and cocaine.  But that's a story for another time, that time being when I'm apprehended by Spain's national authority and have to retrace my steps looking for a lost friend.


This friend

 Day number four, March 5th, my nineteenth birthday, also the birthday of a friend of mine on the trip, she too was turning nineteen.  Like most mornings we pile onto the bus which I was disappointed to find out had not been converted into a battle tank for my birthday, a little saddening, but bearable.  Five minutes into the bus ride it began to rain and would not let up for the rest of the day, a day that was spent almost entirely on a narrow seat trying to work out a butt cramp.  There was one stop on our journey, a place along the lines of a Columbus Museum which featured three ships which were supposedly the ones that had made the trip to America.  The issue was never addressed if they were real or not, but their ambiguity gave me confidence that they were the real deal, and that I would be kind of a douche if I questioned it.  I use the term museum loosely as a description of the location, it would be like a museum for the worlds largest matching set of furniture where you could see normal sized furniture, a few tools that may have been used to make furniture at one point, and a gift shop that has almost nothing to do with furniture.  Because really, who'd be interested in that?  However, the highlight of the trip had to be the video describing Columbus and his band of merry-genius-humanitarian-genius-good looking-super genius-probably well endowed crew men, and the video also decided to mention they were geniuses another fifteen times, because everyone knows, if you say the same thing over and over it makes it true.  Also, the video was told from three points of view, specifically the three ships.  Yeah, that's not a joke, whoever owns the museum had such a hard-on for Columbus that they created a full video fantasy where they could be ridden by him for a full thirty minutes.  The museum also featured the classic display full of leaves, sticks, and pinecones.  After another long bus ride we stopped in Algrave where the Pamplonians and I wandered into the wrong restaurant where we stayed for five minutes before trying to leave, got yelled at in Portuguese, and were threatened with a fine.  My birthday friend and I decided that our birthday would be the combined average of March 4th and March 6th while having nothing to do with March 5th.  But from this point on my adventures in Portugal are of a nineteen year old, not that kid that some people knew before I left on the Rotary trip, now I'm a man... but for realsies this time.