Over a month ago now I went on a spontaneous trip to Portugal with my momma. She called me up asking if I wanted to go, I said yes, five days later we landed in Lisbon.
The first thing we did was get the metro to the coach station to check out times of coaches to Leiria. Opposite the coach station was Lisbon Zoo, the oldest zoo in Europe. Oddly you can see quite a few animals before you get to the payment gate so for a good half hour me and mum thought we had broken in!
The zoo was interesting however a lot of the animals seemed in a very sad condition. The facilities all seemed quite old, apart from the dolphin pool. We went to the dolphin show which was amazing due to the audience being full of little Portuguese school kids in matching outfits!
The main purpose of the trip was to visit our Portuguese friend’s English schools situated in Leiria, Nazare andMarinaa Grande – http://www.inglesfuncional.com/ as I am hoping to teach English as part of my year abroad 2015-2016. The experience was enlightening and made me confident I wanted to enrol on a TEFL scheme. I sat in on classes and even got to take charge of one class whilst the teacher did individual oral exam – I only dropped the whiteboard pen once… I must be a natural!
However we also had a great time doing the usual holiday stuff. We went to San Pedro beach for an afternoon and soaked up some rays. Sadly the outside pool with huge diving board I remember from my visits year ago was closed so we had to make do with paddling in the cold water!
We also went to Nazare for the day and went up the Funicular railway to have the best sardines around. The view was fantastic and the weather sublime. The walk down was much more enjoyable than I imagine the walk up would have been!
One of the best things about the holiday was to catch up with our family friends. I was 11 last time I went to Portugal and so don’t have the clearest memories. It was brilliant to create new ones and build on the fuzzy ones.
It was a fantastic holiday and I can’t wait to go back and cement the relationships I re-made and explore some more!
p.s – Apologies for the extremelt late posting on this. The camera went to Lancaster and I went back to Durham. The problems of having two homes…
bexcapades 