After spending one last afternoon and night in Lisbon, Lindsay and I hesitantly said farewell to Portugal and hello to our summer trip. We left on an Alitalia flight through Milan and got into Istanbul at 1:00 in the morning. We don’t usually like to arrive in a new place when most normal people have already been sleeping for 2 hours, but it was a good deal, and we made arrangements with our hostel to get picked up by a driver, which made the whole thing a lot easier. We stayed at the Antique Hostel, which turned out to be [View Full Entry]

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And... we're off! But first, a few last pictures from Coimbra Europe » Portugal » Coimbra By L and J in Portugal June 9th 2007 Lindsay & JasonJust posting a few last pictures from Portugal. Leaving Coimbra and saying goodbye to our friends was kind of hard, but we're excited to be on to the next adventure. We're currentl [View Full Entry]

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Hi all! Well, our time here in Portugal is quickly coming to an end (just a few days now), but luckily we don’t have to go back and face reality quite yet, as we’re planning to travel around Europe for six or seven weeks before going back at the end of July. We thought it would be fun to let everyone know what our itinerary is, and also to let you know that we are planning to update our blog a lot more frequently while we’re on the road, so check back often! Now, without further ado, here are the [View Full Entry]

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Last weekend our school organized a field trip to the Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in continental Portugal, a couple of hours inland from Coimbra. We were kind of excited about it because it was one of the last parts of Portugal that we'd really wanted to see and hadn't yet. The Serra da Estrela is known for producing serra cheese, some of the best and most expensive in Portugal. We left from the university at the somewhat inhumane hour of 7:45am and headed first to a dam about half an hour away. It was actually a lot [View Full Entry]

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Two weekends ago (man, we're behind on this blog!) my parents came to visit us in Portugal - my mom for the second time and my dad for the first. They had been on a hiking trip in Tuscany the previous week (they lead very rough lives) and were able to arrange their flights so they came through Lisbon on the way home. Jason and I rented a car in Coimbra and met my parents at the airport in Lisbon on Saturday. We drove south from the airport to the Algarve and stayed in Lagos again, this time at a [View Full Entry]

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Two weeks ago, my parents, my brother, and my Grandpa and his wife Loretta came to visit. We covered a lot of ground in Portugal during their week here. Lindsay and I picked everyone up at the airport in a big “Transporter” 9-person Volkswagen Van, so we had plenty of room for the 7 of us plus luggage and lots of car snacks. We were happy everyone made it to Portugal on time despite all of the storms and short flight connections they had in the States. We took the 2.5 hour drive down to Lagos, in the Algarve, and [View Full Entry]

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This has been another lively week here in Coimbra. We got back from Lisbon last Saturday after spending a week with Jason's family (blog is coming on that - we’ve been getting behind!), and the city felt a little different. It is currently the Queima das Fitas, or Burning of the Ribbons, the biggest student festival of the year and apparently second only to Oktoberfest in terms of beer consumption. The Queima is basically a celebration of the end of the year, a final hurrah for graduating students, and a full welcoming of the poor freshman who have been getting [View Full Entry]

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After saying goodbye to half of our California friends in Lisbon, Lindsay and I left for Paris. It was my first time in Paris and Lindsay hadn’t been there since her freshman year of college (before we even started dating, 8 years ago, wow). We stayed at a nice hotel called Grand Hotel Leveque about a 20 minute walk away from the Eiffel Tower, which was nice because we were right in the center of all of the major sights. The street our hotel was on was pedestrian only and made up of a mix of small grocery stores, restaurants, [View Full Entry]

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During the first week of our Easter break, five of our friends (Tom, Tina, Emily, Jason, and his friend Jason - yes, three Jasons) came to visit from California. It was great to see them after so long and we somehow managed to squeeze seven people into our 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom apartment without too much trouble (although it did take some serious strategizing to get into the bathroom in the morning). Everyone flew into Lisbon on Monday and they rented a Peugeot minivan (how stylish) and drove up to Coimbra. It was kind of funny seeing all of these familiar faces [View Full Entry]

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Last weekend we took another day trip to Porto. It has been one of our favorite places to visit in Portugal, and we knew we were going to have a pretty busy schedule starting next week, so we decided to take advantage of having a quiet weekend and also of the good weather. We started our day by visiting the Casa de Musica, a concert hall built by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in 2005. The building is very cool and modern-looking and to go in you climb some stairs that look like the entrance to a flying saucer or something. [View Full Entry]

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