Well quite a bit has happened since our last post. First off, the Tomatina tomato fight in Spain. Let’s just say we didn’t want to eat, see, or smell a tomato for quite a while afterward. Next up we headed to Barcelona and made our couchsurfing debut. If you don’t know what it is, go to couchsurfing.com and check it out (our username is “lisa & greg”). It has been the coolest experience and has basically made our trip twice as much fun. The guys in Barcelona were running an adventure company, but let people from the couchsurfing website stay for free. It was awesome. We also checked out the Salvador Dali museum which was quite an experience.
Next up was Portugal. In Porto we went to one of my Port houses. We tried such amazing Ports that Lisa went from hating Port to loving it now. Then we traveled down the coast of Portugal hitting up about 5 towns and couchsurfing the whole way. Then to Lisbon where we saw the Portugal vs. Denmark football game, and ate the best deserts either of us has ever tasted (Pasteis de Nata). Finally it was off to Lagos which was quite the little party town.
Then we made the last minute decision to head to Morocco. We almost skipped it because we didn’t have much time, but we ended up liking Marrakech the best of anyplace we have been thus far. To start, we caught a 20 hour bus-ferry-bus ride where we were the only non Moroccan people on it. The driver didn’t actually have our name on his list or anything, but with a couple of close calls (especially getting on the ferry into the country as Eva and Marrian, the names that were on the tickets they gave us), and help from the other passengers we made it through in one piece. There was one thing about the ride that we did feel a bit bad about. So the Muslims do something called Ramadan for one month every year where they don’t eat or drink from sun up to sun down, then have a huge feast at night. Well little did we know, it is very rude to eat or drink water in front of them during this period. Well lets just say that 20 hours on a bus made us pretty hungry and thirsty and we were basically pigging out the whole time, completely oblivious the whole time until sundown when everyone started breaking out the food and offering it to us. Oops. Morocco itself is basically how you would imagine it with crazy markets, crazy food, snake charmers, and people constantly trying to rip you off, but it was so busy and full of life that we would have loved to have stayed for much longer. You basically never knew what you were going to see next. We also did some hiking outside of the city in the mountains which were beautiful and actually snow capped (who would have thought in the desert).
After Morocco, we spent a couple of days in Madrid, then met up with our friends Emily and Gerry and headed off to Munich for Oktoberfest. I am sure everyone knows what Oktoberfest is all about. May I be the first to say that the Mustache talent was spectacular and I did the Mustachios proud (see pics). That is about it for now.
Here is a link to some of the crazier pictures:
http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=508281222632965870/l=428313246/g=7367679/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB
Until next time
XOXO
Gregorio and Lisa
