Catch up Time from Portugal

I have been very slack on the blogging but I have many good excuses:

1) My 'wireless' lap top will not bring up the internet which is very, very annoying as I have no internet/I.T friends over here to help

2) There is one internet cafe around so I must rely on that and it does not let me use the memory stick thus the reason there will be photos from Portugal once I am back in Italy

3) My most important distraction was that my bel ragazzo has been and gone

4) My birthday has been and gone too (A BIG AND BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY TWIN SISTER MELANIE WHO CELEBRATED HER BIRTHDAY BEFORE MINE AS AUSTRALIA IS AHEAD OF PORTUGAL...11 HOURS I THINK IT IS NOW)

So you can see I have been busy and have good excuses for my lack of writing. As I mentioned my bel ragazzo has been and gone and we spent a lovely 10 days together travelling around a lot of the Algarve. We drove up to Lisbon the capital which was beautiful once you got over the dodgy men who approach you trying to sell you hash (in broad daylight.) With all of them coming up to us I was a little scared at first and to make matters worse there was a street off the main square with prositutes hanging around, thankfully not trying to sell their wares to us! Then I remember that all capital and big cities have their 'seedy' parts, and once we moved on we were delighted by all we saw and wished we had more time to exlpore.

Now however my bel ragazzo is back in Italy and I cannot wait to finish here and head back there myself. It is still so quiet here and boring but I cannot complain as the weather (up until yesterday) has been very warm and sunny all the time. I am a little sick of the food here however and crave a decent meal...have told the bel ragazzo that it would be so lovely to have a bowl of home made pasta waiting for me when I get back to his village...