Sunday, August 15, 2004

A lazy and uneventful day. Isabel, Bob, and I took the kids to the public pool in Monte Carvalho in the morning for a couple of hours, then went back for lunch. Isabel spent the early part of the afternoon packing because they were going home the next day, so everybody just kind of hung around.

Today was also the big holy day, the Feast of the Assumption. This is the highlight of the yearly festival in Sao Salvador. At around 4:00pm there was a mass (which we skipped), followed by a procession through the streets of Sao Salvador (both of them!). During the procession, they take the statues of Mary and Jesus out of the church, decorate them with flowers, and parade them around for 45 minutes or so. We joined in the procession for a while, but I dropped out after a while because Kevin was insisting on being caried and he was too heavy and it was too hot for me to do that for too long.

Some photos from the parade.

In the evening, we went into Spain (only about 10km from Sao Salvador) into Valencia de Alcantara just for something to do. Got some drinks for the adults and some ice cream for the kids, not much else to do there on a Sunday evening.

The boys at the border of Portugal and Spain.

Yum, ice cream!

That night was the last night of the festival, so Maria, John, and I went after we got Kevin to bed. There was a group of old men in costumes singing some old, local traditional songs from the Marvao region. Now maybe if I understood the language I would have been to have some sort of appreciation for this, but the truth was that I found it quite dreadfully awful. We turned in early after that was done (around 11:15pm) to get some sleep seeing that we had to get up early on Monday to take Isabel and family to Lisbon for their flight home.

Maria's dad.