Here are we are, six weeks from Christmas and the lights are going up around the city. The stores have had Christmas stock for weeks, but what’s more interesting to me is the decorative arts and gussied-up buildings like this one (it’s by Cavalinho, a ‘Made in Portugal’ fashion accessories brand).
As one of those Grinchy folks who make an annual ritual of avoiding Christmas, I wasn’t sure how this year would pan out. After two Christmases in Portugal, I traveled to Vancouver last December to visit my family and friends, spending two and a half weeks in the Lower Mainland of BC with side trips to the Seattle area. But Porto to Vancouver is an expensive trip and one I don’t expect to repeat for probably another year or two.
Christmas 2016
As it turns out, we’ll be away half of December. We’ll be visiting Madeira for nine days, a new place for me and a place Paulo hasn’t been to since he was 15. That was a plan we’d made months ago, when EasyJet announced they would fly to Funchal and advertised a really cheap fare (less than €50 each, total).
Our original plan was to use the PayPal trip to France that I won in the spring (it was a contest for Euro Cup) sometime this month, but work got in the way for Paulo and he couldn’t go anywhere in November. Contest rules state the trip must happen in 2016 and we were running short of days, so we ended up booking France for Christmas Day to Christmas Eve. The original plan also included staying with some friends, but because we moved it to Christmas, we’ll only see the friends in the second half of the week. But hey, it was a free trip, and this makes Christmas more interesting because we’ll be heading to the airport on the quietest day of the year.
Next stop: Madeira!
November 13, 2016
Album: Portugal [Autumn 2016]
