Last weekend we got together with our American classmates for another road trip. This time we went to the Algarve region in southern Portugal, and also made a stop-off along the way in the town of Évora. We left Coimbra on Friday morning and arrived in Évora around lunch time. We had lunch near the main square in town and then made our way to one of the more famous (or infamous) sights in town, the Capela dos Ossos, or Bone Chapel. Lindsay and I had heard about this chapel a year ago from one of Lindsay’s classmates in Monterey (thanks [View Full Entry]

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We decided to take a trip to Switzerland because we wanted to check out the Alps during the winter and maybe do a little bit of skiing. We also found a good deal on a flight to Geneva with Easyjet and it was my birthday weekend, so I figured I could get Lindsay to go anywhere I wanted to. After checking into hotel prices in downtown Geneva, we decided it wasn’t worth selling any of our organs to stay there, and so we stayed in Annecy, France, which was about 45 minutes away by car. We picked up our rental car [View Full Entry]

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A couple of weeks ago my mom and her friend Cathy came to visit. My mom got in on a Friday, and we rented a car and picked her up from the airport in Lisbon. On Saturday we drove up to the north of Portugal, which Jason and I had really been wanting to see. Our first stop was Braga, which is sometimes called the Rome of Portugal because it has so many churches. I'm not sure if I would go that far, but there were a lot of churches there. We had a hard time figuring out where we were [View Full Entry]

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Jason and I finally made it to Lisbon for the first time (after six months in Portugal!) a couple of weekends ago. We took a day trip, as it’s only a two hour train ride from Coimbra, and we hit some of the major highlights. We spent the morning walking through the quaint Alfama neighborhood, which has winding streets and buildings covered in colorful tiles. Near the top of the hill is the old city castle, built originally in the 5th century by the Visigoths and altered by the Moors and the Christians as control over the city switched hands over [View Full Entry]

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Earlier this week there was a pretty cool sunset with some interesting clouds. I took a few photos down by the park and the pedestrian bridge. - Jason [View Full Entry]

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This weekend we went on a field trip organized by our university. We went to four smaller towns south of Coimbra: Batalha, Alcobaça, São Martinho do Porto, and Óbidos. It was a fun trip because most of our classmates and friends went (there were around 60 of us on a big double-decker bus) and so there was lots of time to hang out and goof around with them while checking out some new places in Portugal. Our teachers/tour guides also did an awesome job organizing the trip - we had just about the right amount of time at each location and [View Full Entry]

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On our way back to Portugal after Christmas we stopped over in Dublin for a few nights. Plane tickets from Detroit to Lisbon were fairly expensive (it was cheaper to fly to Dublin and then take a budget airline to Portugal, or at least it should have been… more on that later) and anyway we were happy to have an excuse to take another little trip. In Dublin we met up with our friend Megan, which was fun because she had studied abroad there in college and still had some friends there. We were also joined for a couple of nights [View Full Entry]

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Lindsay and I took a trip back to the US for Christmas break, and we had a two night, one day stop-over in London on the way. We did a little Christmas window shopping, went to the free National Gallery and a few bookstores, and later in the afternoon we came across a group of drunken signing Santas at Trafalgar Square. There were probably about a hundred of them, and they were singing alcohol-themed versions of Christmas carols. We’re pretty sure it was a flash mob - a group of people who get a text message/email telling them to be at [View Full Entry]

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Here’s a few photos of the Christmas decorations that they just put up downtown. Also, Lindsay just found an article about Coimbra that just came out a few days ago in a British newspaper . There’s a lot of good info about Coimbra and the author even mentions the new bridge and the steep stairs in our neighborhood. http://travel.independent.co.uk/europe/article2056538.ece - Jason [View Full Entry]

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Last weekend, we went to Nuremberg, Germany to go to the Christmas Market. Every December there are Christmas markets in many German and Austrian cities with traditional food, drinks, and decorations for sale. We chose Nuremberg because it has one of the most famous Christmas markets and because we found a great flight deal to Stuttgart, only a two hour train ride away. When we arrived the first night, we found out that our hotel was celebrating its one year anniversary. They had free drinks and “science experiment” type appetizers prepared by a team of chefs. One of the [View Full Entry]

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