Well, that's the nicest looking Virgin Megastore we know!
First day that wasn't either a bank holiday or a weekend.
Took the tram again to the city centre, and went to the Virgin Megastore, shopped for postcards, and looked for a Post Office. We walked around a bit because we had some time to pass; it was quite sunny with a couple of rain clouds. Laure got soles for her shoes, and we bought a dictionary for our future lessons! Stopped for breakfast in a cafeteria. Ian complained that the lady at the table next to us was staring at him as if he was a piece of dirt. Nice orange juice as always.
Then we got to the fluvial station. We needed to get a small ferry from there to go to Barreiro Station on the other side of the estuary. It still took a full half hour. The boat arrived right at the train station, which was convenient. From there, we got the train to Faro. It wasn't busy at all and it had nice green seats. It was also quite slow, and yes, it rained all the way, never mind.
In Faro we booked the coach tickets for our onward trip to Sevilla, the next day at 8:00am. It had started raining really badly, and we didn't know where the hotel was, though this time at least we had the address. A street map should have helped us, we even wrote the name of the streets down, but still got lost in lots of small streets with no name (I do like that song BUT!). We stopped, tried to have people help us, but failed (which proves with a badly-designed road system, even the natives get confused!). We saw a restaurant that looked nice and we decided to go back there later. Ian left Laure on a square to go look for a map and put us back on track. Nice but stupid town, badly designed.
The receptionist at the hotel was very friendly, and he felt he had to mention he knew Hervé Christiani [Editor's note : Who?? Must ask Laure to remind me]. Still no complaints to make about the room, we even had a remote control. The receptionist gave us an umbrella for us to go the restaurant, which was nice because we stayed under the rain more than we should have. We felt like Mulder and Scully, searching for someone in the dark and the rain! We just kept coming back to the same square, and there again it was like being in the X-files or the Twilight zone. I was looking for a green tiled building and Ian was trying to retrace his steps. We finally found it, on the last street there was to check.
We had a very nice meal. Ian had stuffed eggs with shrimp sauce and lettuce, pork with clams and chips, I had a shrimp cocktail, grilled squids with potatoes and salad. Of course we had cheese and olives as appetisers, as well as sardine spread, and we ate it with a bottle of very nice white sparkling wine, which came in frosted glasses and had a wine cooler. Saw Italy beat Portugal 2-0 at football on the telly.
Got back to the hotel all right, and it wasn't raining. We saw "Who wants to be a millionaire" in Portugese, with exactly the same set. The top prize was 50,000,000 Escudos (£150,000), and the guy took about 40 minutes to answer 5 questions – Reunion – McCartney – Poet Bruage or something like that - there seemed to be a lot of casual conversation between the contestant and the host.
We fell asleep very quickly afterwards (single beds?), Ian had a nosebleed.