Sun, sea and beach

It has been a while since I last updated my blog, so let me tell you what I have been doing the past few days and weeks.

My 4th week in Lisbon has started and the weather this weekend was fantastic! Spend my entire weekend on the beach, enjoying the sun. Definitely an improvement when you compare it to the weather of the last few weeks. Unfortunately I saw on the weather forecast that the weather will get bad again by the end of the week. But I don’t let myself get down by this, because this is still a lot better than the Belgian weather!

This Saturday we visited Cascais, it is a village west of Lisbon which is located by the Atlantic Ocean. Very beautiful place and it really gives you a holiday feeling. There my roommate and I found an unpopulated place on the cliffs where we could enjoy the sun and away from the tourists. It wasn’t easy to reach it, especially with slippers on. 

 

There I noticed that the ocean is pretty dangerous near the cliffs, because the current is very strong. Still that didn’t stop me to do a swim. Beside the cold temperature of the water and the dangerous current, it was very nice to be able to go swimming for the first time in Portugal.

Sunday we went to Carcavelos, a place with a larger beach and a lot of surfers. After seeing the people surf, I  decided that I really want to learn this. I’m planning to go and make an appointment with a surf school somewhere this week. It was a really lazy day, because we didn’t anything else besides enjoying the sun and swimming in the sea.

In the evening we mostly go to Bairro Alto, this is a name given to a number of streets that is in the center of Lisbon. In the day, most of these streets are empty, but at night is really comes alive and transforms into an open air festival. This is a great way to spend your evening in Lisbon and really shows you that the people are used to living outside (when the weather is warm and dry).

OK, enough about what I do in my past time, it is not only partying and relaxing. You may not believe it, but we also work here in Portugal. My project had a very difficult start, because it is made by other people and difficult to understand by someone who is inexperienced like me. But I’m starting to understand my project better now, so the amount of work I can get done is improving. Unfortunately this doesn’t make the problems go away faster, because new problems keep on popping up every day. I hope we can find a good solution this week, so I can achieve some good results by the end of this week. (Sorry for being so vague, but I can’t say what I’m doing exactly because my project has to stay a secret until it is published).