Portugal

From the North to the South, Douro Valley to the Algarve, we spent almost 3 weeks exploring Portugal and meeting some wonderful people. We found the Portuguese people incredibly open and willing to share their thoughts and feelings about life in Portugal with us. More so than many other countries we’ve visited. They speak fantastic English which is great because Portuguese is notoriously difficult to learn! When English didn’t work we could resort to Spanish so thank goodness Paul can speak some, (he learnt more each day)!

My biggest frustration was not being able to read a menu. I can decipher fairly well a French or Italian menu and am getting better at Spanish, but Portuguese had me lost. We started to use google translate and a bit of lucky guessing. Despite this we had some lovely food, and the portions were often huge!