Travel Journal, Part 6

December 31. We spent our last day in Almancil taking it easy. It rained off and on all day. Coffee and bolo (cake) for pequen almoco (breakfast) at a tiny coffee shop, a stop at the Western Union to check email, a stroll around the neighborhood. Lunch at Gamboa's, the same place we went on our first day in Almancil. The owner recognized us and gave us a warm handshake. Spent the afternoon packing our bags, napping, reading (I got most of the way through Julia Cameron's "Walking in the World" over the course of our trip).

Dinner at Ferriera's, the restaurant run by the Brazilian lady. It was New Year's Eve, and we didn't have reservations, but she remembered us and she had an open table. She had prepared a very elegant multicourse dinner that night, and some of the patrons were dressed in their holiday finery. We hadn't brought any realy dressy clothing, but we did our best, and we fit in with some of the more casually dressed patrons. We enjoyed a lovely dinner, and we left fairly early so we could make a last visit to Rumours.

There wasn't much going on at Rumours, but we sat at the bar and ordered drinks. A Portugese man sat next to us at the bar. He kept staring at us, but he never did try to talk to us. Another Portugese man, there with a couple of buddies, struck up a conversation, mostly with Carole (I had trouble following the conversation over the music). He had long, graying hair, and half of his teeth were missing, but he spoke passable English and he seemed very knowledgeable about American politics. We couldn't convince him that Los Angeles wasn't the capital of California, but he knew about Nixon and Reagan, and he had been following this year's election race. But the guy was sloshed, so the conversation was a little erratic. The bartender (who owned the bar with his sister, the one we talked to the other night) stopped by a couple of times to see if the guy was pestering us, but he seemed pretty harmless. I saw a schoolteacher and her son, expats from Newcastle (UK) we had talked to a couple of nights before. She was there with a couple of friends, and I wandered over to join their conversation. One of her friends went over to the karaoke machine, where he was joined by the bartender. They struck up an off-key version of "American Pie" and they were joined by Carole's toothless Portugese friend. The schoolteacher's other friend was visiting from Sunderland, a coastal town southeast of Newcastle. He thought it was a great novelty to be talking to Americans while he was in the Algarve. We all talked together until the bar closed, around 11:00.

We went back to the condo and watched part of "Blazing Saddles" on the TV movie channel (Portugese subtitles), then we went out on the balcony to watch the New Year's fireworks. There was supposed to be a big show on the Quarteira bridge, to the south of us, and I think that's what we saw. It was kind of an odd effect, seeing distant fireworks filtered through fog.

Happy 2009! Tomorrow, we drive to Lisbon.