Prepped and Pampered

The weather has been pretty great the past week, I even had a beach day! It's perfect in the sun but as soon as you go in the shade its too cold for shorts (unless your a Viking like Evan). We celebrated valentines day last Saturday instead of Tuesday. Evan had his connections get me a deal on a spa package. It was green tea themed, I got a body scrub, (I thought I wasn't going to have any skin left by the time they were done with me) a relaxing massage and a green tea-infused bath. I have never felt so pampered in my life! Then that night we had supper at the restaurant. It was the kind of fancy meal that you see in the movies but rarely get to experience. It was complete with a confusing number of forks and spoons, many courses but all of them small, and a new aquatic creature that I don't plan on eating again. On a more serious note, in was a really good meal, and they even brought Evan some French fries. He didn't ask for them and it didn't fit with the facy meal at all but they know he loves them :).

In other news, we finally made it to Portugal! One of the teachers that Blae works with took us and showed us some great sites.... including but not limited to a large market where you could buy anything from a carpet to pots and pans, to a puppy. I got a belt that they added holes to right there at the stall. It's still a bit big though... (a problem I would like to remedy with chocolate). A lot of things were similar to galicia, like the streets and an old walled town but the food was more like Canadian food. We had steak for lunch and it was glorious! (It's easy to get steak in Galicia but they use different spices). It was a really fun day, going to lots of different touristy places.

I am plowing through Harry Potter! I forgot how ridiculous the book is... Maybe that's why I love it so much...  Now on to more important things!.... Pictures!

I don't know if any of you have heard of 'Carnival' but its basically a week of holidays where there are parties all over the place (different towns  have things happening different days) and people dress up, kind of like Halloween... except Carnival is way more important than Halloween to these people.  One day we heard music coming from outside and this is what i found:  (a bunch of kids on a stage, in costumes, dancing around to music.  It was pretty cute!)

The rest of the pictures are from Portugal.  The next three are of the fort with a little (Portuguese version of modern) town inside.

The view here is looking across the river into Spain.  It was absolutely beautiful.

Fairly self-explanatory...

This was a really cool catholic (church/cathedral?) at the top of a big hill, you could see it from really far away.  We drove up and looked inside.  The inside was beautiful but we didn't take pictures because a mass was going on.