I was dying for some sunshine, aching to bury my feet in some gorgeous sand, pining for sunset wanders in a town I didn’t know.
So I spent a few days at the start of June in Faro, Portugal.
It was gorgeous, exactly what I needed. The town is so quiet, a lot of tourists fly to the airport there and leave immediately for one of the big resorts along the coast nearby. The recession has hit the town pretty badly from what I could see. The only young people I saw were tourists, a lot of buildings are empty and yeah, I know it wasn’t high tourist season, but the place just seemed a bit toooo quiet. But I didn’t mind! It was all I was looking for and more.
See, I thought I was going solo. But then on my second night there, as I’m sitting after dinner hearing this poor little twenty year old’s sob story involving her boyfriend, his ex, facebook and a case of apendicitis and wondering how the hell I’m going to get out of it and back to my room, I turn around and there’s Moe. Standing right there! I’ll be honest, I uttered some rather unladylike language in my surprise and gave him a million hugs. We spent the next two days on the beach and the last day with his pal who just so happened to have arrived the day before and was staying just a bit out of town.
We went to a ‘deserted’ island – there’s just one building on it, a restaurant. The beach was almost empty apart from 3 or 4 others all day and it was so incredibly vivid.
We took a bird watching boat out the island, and although I’m not much of a bird watcher I really appreciated learning a little about the marine biology of the coast and the spoon bills who were hanging around. 
The streets were almost empty. Not so great for Faro but super for me! 
We had dinner while listening to some Fado music – traditional Portugese songs. Gorgeous.
The town is pretty small so I got to know it really quickly, there were lots of interesting walls! 
On the last morning we went to see a chapel of bones. The bones of monks used to build an ediface to remind us of how short human life really is. I’d coincidentally worn a very appropriate tshirt! The channels for the blood vessels fascinate me. Nature is mesmerising.
We came home after a lovely 4 days and went straight to see some friends launch a single off the album they’re going to release at the end of the summer, I took some not so great photos but they’re launching two more singles before the album so I’ll get some more another night!
*picks up hairdresser’s comb and scissors*
“So have you any holidays planned yourself for the summer?”