A closed restaurant and nice night lights...

Trip Start Sep 06, 2010

Trip End Apr 13, 2011

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Where I stayed

Low Cost Inn

(Faro hotels)

Flag of Portugal Faro, Algarve, Portugal
Thursday, December 2, 2010

I had read a few reviews of the Portuguese town of Faro and by all accounts, it sounded like a nice little place and worth a visit on the way through from Seville to Lisbon (if we hadn't gone this way, we would have had to go from Seville, back to Madrid and then out to Lisbon which if you look at a map is totally insane...). When we first pulled into Faro, however, it looked as if the people writing those reviews must have been a bit confused because the place was dirty, messy and looked scarily unkempt – kind of like the areas you just somehow 'know’ to avoid. We found our hostel, which was only a short walk from the bus station and noticed that the area around our hostel didn’t look much better than that around the station. I must admit to being a little nervous!

The guy at our hostel, though, seemed nice and quite eager to please. He ended up giving us a room with a private bathroom and the rooms were OK

Docks at Faro #1

. Neat and clean – no mints on the pillows or 5 star service, but pretty good for the price we were paying. He gave us a leaflet and told us that we would get a discount if we went to ‘his family’s’ restaurant down the road. We were a bit used to this by now, so we just put it politely in our pocket and then walked into town, first to organise the train ticket to Lisbon and then to get some chow.

The train ticket was surprisingly easy to get once we’d actually found the station (it was in the opposite direction to the way we’d been walking of course!) and we headed into the town centre. This area was miles nicer than the one around the train and bus stations and our hostel. There were all these nice lights up everywhere and it was a very festive atmosphere. I was actually glad we’d come to Faro! Whilst we were walking around the town centre and doing some window shopping, we kept on the lookout for food. We didn’t find anything that came close to the prices on the flyer that the hostel man had given us, so we decided we would head back there for something to eat. When we got there, however, it was closed and didn’t look at all occupied. We thought it was so strange because the hostel man had been so keen for us to go there! We ended up finding a small cafe-restaurant place relatively nearby and ate there instead, breathing in cigarette fumes from the tables around us (apparently smoking inside with food is OK in Spain) and watching soccer on the big, flat-screen TVs.

The next morning we went to the station to catch our 9:30 train and sat on the train for ages. It didn't go anywhere and we got more and more concerned. Finally I realised there was an hour time difference between Spain and Portugal (our clocks were still on Spain time of course) and that we were sitting on a 9:30 train at 8:30. So we got off, found some brekkie and got back on again before it left on time!

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