Day Eight – at the Azores
Today we arrived at our first port stop – Ponta del Gada in
the Azores! This is a beautiful island owned by Portugal and we were given
pretty much all day to explore! We all got up to watch the sunrise at 6:30 but
the clouds were in the way L
So we grabbed breakfast and were off to explore the island!
We didn’t have to be back to the boat until 2 and we had no
idea where anything was or what there was to do so we just started wandering
around. We ended up connecting with a guy we met on the first day of the cruise
who is from Mississippi and is going to go backpacking across Europe for three
months! (Shout out to you, Mark, if you’re reading this!) He’s really cool and
he helped us navigate our way through the city.
The first place we really found was called Jardim Jose do
Canto which is a Botanical Gardens-like scene with some of the most amazing
plants/trees I’ve ever seen. You’ll have to see the pictures to fully
appreciate it…dad, it was a botanist’s dream!! Even I appreciated it haha. They
had rubber trees, magnolia trees, huge stalks of bamboo, and more. Then we kept
walking around and saw a few cool random things here and there. The city is
definitely heavily European influenced and much less developed than America – I
would compare it to Brazil. The exotic plants were absolutely stunning, though.
We stopped in a cemetery and that was interesting to see because they are
buried above ground – and since the island is Portuguese and thus predominately
Catholic, there were many rosary beads hung on crosses above the graves.
After that we stumbled into a mall so we went in there for a
while and they actually had really really cute clothes for great prices so I
got a cute little top J
We all got Coke too since you have to pay for it on the ship and we were going
through withdrawals :P Something interesting that we noticed was that the
“large” drink sizes on this island were the equivalent of “smalls” in the U.S. I’m sure that will be
true across Europe - that’s probably why
Americans aren’t the smallest people in the world.
The city was setting up for its biggest event of the year,
Santo Christo, so it was cool to see a lot of those decorations. We went inside
a beautiful Catholic church named St. Sebastian and that was neat to see. After
that, we went and saw an active military fort that the Portuguese still used and
most of the guys went inside but a few of us went and found some wi-fi to try
and connect with everyone back home J
When we got back on the ship, we all napped since were
pretty exhausted, then we went to dinner. After dinner we went to a magic show
that was absolutely amazing. Eric and I were getting so frustrated trying to
figure out how they were doing everything – I’ve never seen anything like it!
Chip, I thought of you and your old magic days. Drew was so excited because he
loves magic and he got to go on stage once to closely examine the “sawing a
woman in half” trick so he was happy. After dinner we all kind of just wandered
around and hung out and ate.
Until next time,
MC
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