Portugal: morning number one

We watched a woman feed the pigeons in the plaza across from the hostel.  The circling seagulls made us all a little nervous.  

Portuguese food is delicious.

Something interesting about Portugal is that despite the fact that they speak Portuguese there, I thought it was almost easier to communicate there than in Spain.  Nearly everyone spoke either English or Spanish, and so we were able to understand what we needed to understand and also be understood.  In addition, Portuguese spanish speakers speak more slowly than Spanish spanish speakers, since it is a second language.  As a result of this, their spanish is almost easier to understand than "pure Castilian  here.  

I actually thought that it was really cool just how easy it was to communicate in Portugal.  None of us could understand Portuguese; the pronunciation is completely different from Spanish.  However, we found that we could read Portuguese just fine, or at least enough to get the idea of what signs meant.  We also watched a lot of Portuguese television while waiting on people in the hostel lobby, and while the words look different, the sentence structure is similar, and by sounding the words out we could all translate them in to their spanish equivalent.  Cool!