Casa Parroquial Santo Condestavel Monsaraz

We left Lisboa and travelled through miles and miles of open country in which grew cork and olive trees and lots and lots of vines. We visited Evora which is a World Heritage site. It is a walled city with lots of churches, narrow cobbled lanes and Roman ruins.

As we were becoming used to in Portugal, there are quite a few Chinese Bazaars-selling clothes, household goods,electical goods and the sort of stuff you find in Pound Shops in England. Even in a ...

On Saturday my Gap adventure tour began. We headed to Evora, Portugal on the afternoon of May 8th. Evora is a sleepy little town in central Portugal. We walked through some of the medevil streets and admired the ruins of a roman forum which included a temple to Diana, we also explord a ghoulish church decorated with the bones of over 1000 bodies and enjoyed a sleep in a hotel room bed. Since I do not have much to dicuss about Evora I will take an opportunity to ...

So with nothing to do in Beja, we all caught the bus to Evora, famous for a chapel that is made completely of human bones. The whole town only took a few hours to see and the chapel was CREE-PY, yes, made of the bones of 5,000 people! After seeing the chapel, Anna and I wandered around town and found a small cafe to sit, read, and sip port in. We were watching the time and checking the bus schedule to make sure ...

... tolls, and...very strange...a pair of Ryan's travel pants... It was a very painful way to start a morning. Our first task: make our way to the tourism police office in the center of this very old and winding city without the GPS. It took us an hour. Then, we sat with a very nice, but somewhat uncaring police officer who took our report. As we sat with him, three other people lined up behind us, claiming that their cars had been broken into on the same street ...

if portugal had a version of bath-spa, evora would probably be it. a tiny walled-town of roman origins, it's a fun place to walk around, grab some of the many local dishes, and get lost in the narrow alley-way streets that have discovery after discovery everywhere one turns. of note, the intercity buses here have stewardesses on ...

... Shopping down the Rue 5 de Outubro was next on our list and a few items made of cork found their way into our bag. The bonus here is that this should not put us over our weight limit on the plane!! Lunch was next and we found a small typical Alentejo style restaurant. We had wine out of the HUGE wine vats - you will see in the photo - and then we had a very different Tomato Soup with Pork Sausage on the side and then a plate of Wild 'Peeeeeeg' with salad ...

... that the bus is leaving from the terminal that I am in front of. Hmm.. No bus, I go back inside the station (the doors in are outside the bus terminal I'm at, so I feel safe doing so) and look at the departure/arrivals board. My bus isn't even listed. What the?? I find some other people looking at their ticket, at the terminal number sign, back at the ticket. I start to feel a little better. I end up talking to this woman from ...

... country. it's so out of the ordinary, but really a must see....oh and veryt cheap, 5 euros a night at my hostel! there was also a lot of shopping to be done, but i had to stop myself...imagine having to carry around a rug for another 6months! morocco, however amazing it was though - it managed to get me sick....so, i don't know what the equivalent of delhi belly is there, but i'm going to call it fez belly (that's the town i went to).

... ages, but since there wasn´t much material to go by, it is still to early to give exact time periods. Since we haven´t hit bottom yet, we are hoping that we will still find somewhat older layers. During the afternoon, the weather had cleared a bit but smaller storms keep chasing through the landscape. So we decided to do a little prospecting instead at a Chalcolithic settlement on a levels escarpement a couple of kilometers up river from the mine. It ...

... pitcher. Our meals of strip steak and mushrooms and fries was plain and perfect. We sat and listened to the family behind us out for dinner. We watched the kids come and go, opening the ice cream cooler, leaning in, sorting around, and paying the lady for their selection before leaving again. We wandered the area afterwards, admiring the diamond shaped patterns on the Evora sidewalks. Next we were off to Sintra for 2 nights, a little place east of Lisbon.