Long distance sucks

From the time I wake up, I need to essentially wait 5 hours before I can talk to anyone on the east coast, and 8 hours before anyone on the west coast. (6 hours for you, Tim!) but seriously, I guess I need to make more friends in my time zone. Though I guess... I should really be concentrating in class during those times.

The wait is terrible :( Waits are always hard, good to build up anticipation, but tough when the wait time is unknown.

I'm directionally challenged

In an effort to try to improve my communication skills through drawing, I've decided to try to draw some of my stories. If I keep this up... maybe I can see improvement... sometime... not too far from the future. Apologies that my drawings suck, and the composition is not great. Believe it or not... these are after many attempts.

Life of the Directionally Challenged

Hiking Along the Levadas

(Wow. I realized that I can't write either... I meant *Carefully watching out for rocks*)

The Grocery Store is Still Struggles

Last night my roomie and I tried to have a steak and wine night. I'm not a huge wine drinker... or any alcohol for that matter... but I live in Portugal! Where you can get decent wine for 3 euros! Basically, you can get decent wine for less than water.  Finally, it was such a struggle for the two of us to reaching our goal of finishing... half a wine bottle between the two of us. STRUGGLES. But really... I thought I figured out the grocery store in Portugal... but both me and my roomie got too confident. We meant to buy beef steak, but bought pork steak instead. :( Need to learn to translate all signs. Meal was still good! It just wasn't beef steak.

Now I can say I've really been to Portugal

Yes, Madeira is part of Portugal, but its an autonomous region of Portugal so it has its own local government. But last week...

I traveled from... Funchal (capital of Madeira where I'm staying)  to Porto by plane, took the bus to Braga, took the bus to Guimares, took the bus back to Porto, took the train to Evora, took the bus to Portalgre, took the taxi to Castelo de Vide, took the taxi to Marvao, took the bus back to Lisbon, and flew back to Madeira.

My roommate and I did this all in just 7 days, 6 nights!

Some patterns that I noticed, people seemed to ask if we were Japanese a lot, strange since all the asian tourists we did see were Chinese. All the food we ate contained was accompanied with bread. The bread was good, but by the end of the trip, both my roommate and I were craving rice. Also, since its the winter, there were very few tourists. Some of the hostels we stayed at were empty except for us (for one of them we got a free upgrade to a very nice room!). Let me tell you some highlights from our trip :) we ran into some very nice people, and also some not so nice people, but mostly nice people!

Cork Farm Tour

Our guide for our farm tour was very knowledgeable and super nice. He taught us all about cork trees including how to strip the cork bark from the tree without hurting the tree. He was also really knowledgeable about the current industry of cork and that it is unfortunately dwindling :( Here's a recap. Cork trees need to be close to fifty years old before they can be stripped from their cork the first time. After that, cork strippers wait nine years which is marked by a number painted onto the bark. Nine year is quite a long time to wait... Also, the cork strippers no longer train newbies, because traditionally, newbies had to trim cork trees for a couple of years before they would be trained how to properly strip cork. Nowadays, all the trimming is done by machines, but cork stripping is still done manually because machines can't do the job without harming the trees. Cork bark varies in width around the tree, so its a very exact skill. Hopefully cork strippers will pass on the trade or else it may become a lost skill. At the end of the tour, our guide was kind enough to recommend a bifana (traditional Portuguese pork sandwich) place for us to try since... we had tried one at McDonald's one day and he told us that is pretty much the worst place to get one.

Free Tour

For our taxi ride to Castelo de Vide, our taxi driver pretty much gave us a free tour in addition to the ride. He let us choose a detour route through the mountains to see some beautiful views. At one vista point he stopped and let us take in the view. To the side there was a fountain where he said some of the freshest spring water comes! And sure enough, there was an older couple there drinking some of the water. We tried it and it was very fresh! He also pulled off some bark off a cork tree to give to use a souvenir (this may have hurt the tree... but it was a tiny piece!) Our free tour went for so long that he ended up being late to his next appointment. (Whoops!)

Olive Mishap

This was pretty much my fault and I deserved it completely. When we were leaving the castle in Castelo de Vide, we saw an olive tree with olives pretty much within reach. We just had to step over this bush... So I decided to do it. I stepped over the bush, and then my jacket got caught up in some thorns and it ripped my jacket! :( My awesome Uniqlo jacket! I'll be forever sad and never step over a bush again. The olives didn't taste that great either. I don't think they were ripe :( And I realized later that there were olive trees galore in the backyard of the hostel we were staying at... Could have just tried the olives there.. On a different note, purple juice came out of it! I've never seen a fresh olive before.

Check out the rest of my trip here (there are captions! I may or may not have spent a long time on them): https://goo.gl/photos/ee34UAz45etbPqMc7

Google Voice's update

Last night I was so happy to find that Google Voice had been updated to fit Material Design guidelines :) To be honest I never use Google Voice when I'm living in the States, but its a lifesaver when I'm international. It's only when I arrived in Portugal and needed to make some State bound calls that I noticed that the interface had pretty much not been updated since my college years. I was also reading some articles about Google's messaging vision which has been criticized as all over the place. When I first got my Pixel XL, I was pretty confused because Hangouts wasn't preinstalled. I've heard rumors that they're deprecating the app sometime soon which is sad :( I loved the idea having accounts that don't link to your phone number, but maybe thats a thing of the past with iMessage & WhatsApp.. not that these apps are new. They've been around for years, so not sure why Google is keeps changing their mind about how messaging should work.

Now if only Google would update Blogger...

My door doesn't leak light

I really like my Madeiran apartment :) It's got the best view out of all the places I lived at including the apartment I almost moved into in the Pacific Heights where I could technically see the Marina, but it was about 2 inches of Marina. Also, if you walk out onto the edge of the balcony theres a bit of ocean view too! If you look out over the balcony, you're greeted with banana trees!!! I love bananas, I'll be eating a lot of bananas this year. I also noticed that although the apartment is on the older side, its so well kept. The doors all fit perfectly and don't leak any light. I didn't know doors could actually do that. I feel like the doors in America are maybe made so that there is some space at the bottom at least. It's so strange living here after living in my sf apartment with what I like to call the crooked bathroom.. The door was crooked, the shower door was crooked and the door to the storage area beneath the bathroom sink was also crooked. Basically anything that had to close in the bathroom was crooked. And all that crookedness makes me appreciate my current well kept apartment so much more now :)

Pork ribs are much smaller in Europe

Continuing on my journey of market stories... I decided to buy some pork ribs to make some pork rib soup. I pointed at what was pork ribs, and asked the butcher to cut the ribs piece by piece. He obliged, but when he cut them each piece looked like a pork belly, so I asked him to stop and again asked for pork ribs. I realized that I was confused for two reasons. First, the rib was tiny and second, the cut included the belly too. I still bought it and made my soup.

I'm thankful I can find ginger at the local supermarket, without ginger my soup wouldn't taste right at all!

Also, I've mostly finished planning my trip to Portugal next week. We're gonna be on the move for pretty much the entire week, but I'm excited for all the places we're going. Our plans include seven cities in seven days and a cork farm tour!

I can now order a kg of ground pork

I'm planning a lunar new year dinner tomorrow and I had planned to make pork dumplings. So I got to the local market and realized that there wasn't any ground pork on display. I had a slight heart attack.. My brain literally went through some other scenarios. Maybe I should walk the 40 minutes downtown to the bigger market to get the ground pork? In the end I decided to fumble my way through Portuguese. There was ground beef available, so I pointed at the ground beef, then said "porc" (thats how you say pork in Portuguese so not that different haha) and pointed at some cut up pork, then said "moída" which means "ground" which I got from the ground beef sign. He understood me! Then he proceeded to say "how much" ...in English. Well... at least he understood me and I got my ground pork successfully!