Portugal

I've been home for about a month.  I can't say if my lack of updates have been due to lack of motivation or lack of free time (lack, lack, lack, lack, annnd the meaning is gone), but I would still very much like to succinctly describe the last couple weeks of my time overseas, before the memories lose their freshness and become jumbled together as one. 

Portugal.  Awesome place.  Before I delve into exactly why, I want to say that I 100% value diversity and am by no means anti-immigration.  But one of the reasons why I liked Portugal so much was that it seemed like almost everyone there was Portuguese.  This may seem like it'd be obvious, but, when compared to Spain, where Chinos (don't worry – it's not an offensive term) dot every popular street corner (and there are muchísimos in Madrid) selling cans of beer and invading your personal space advertising worthless doohickeys which may or may not light up and/or spin, that is, of course, when they're not peddling more generally undesirable shit out of their nondescript, murky-windowed Chino shops (the Spanish version of the dollar store), Portugal's purity was a beautiful thing.  There were less tourists, too.  All in all, Portugal seems to have done well to resist the degeneration of quaint, attractive spots at the expense of tourists seeking out the non-tourist route, which, naturally, turns such discoveries into a tarnished tourist spot.  Lisbon was rich with reminders of Portugal's impressive history of conquest and exploration.  It seemed like a terrific place to live – beautiful, active but calm, and full of the ever-desired, oft-inexplicable good vibes.  Our hotel was in Cascais, about 30 minutes north of Lisbon.  Such a lovely place.  Charmingly quiet, but not lacking a dynamic, intriguing downtown strip.  Oh, and tremendous beaches.  I got lost on my own walking around a marina at one point, but the experience served only to improve my lofty opinion of the country and its people.  One beach, in particular, was the 2nd best beach I've ever been on, behind only Positano in Italy.  It was so vast, so deep, with such beautiful sand – some points steep sand-dune-like slopes even – all surrounded by a gorgeous red cliff which looked westward out into the seemingly endless Atlantic.  That day was a hard one to top.  The Portuguese are very friendly, and their language is intriguing – it looks almost identical to Spanish and is structured accordingly, but it sounds nothing like it.  I thought it sounded quite like Russian, in fact.  It was kind of strange, alien-sounding really, with lots of sh's and ch's which gave the flow a curious timbre.  Then, I went to Amsterdam.  Now that's a language.  The problem was that, unlike Portugal and much of Spain, the Dutch are essentially all fluent English speakers.  Well, it's a problem when you forget that, anyway.