Algarve, Portugal

Apr 2-5

After Nice, I headed out to the south of Portugal to meet up with a group of friends. We rented a nice condo in a small city called Albufeira. This place was interesting to say the least, it felt like a Niagara falls meant for British tourists. Albufeira was a ton of fun, but not somewhere I would recommend a family, or people actually there to sightsee to go to.

We had some great memories here, singing "Don't Look Back in Anger" drunk at the karaoke bar, canoeing in the caves near Lagos, helping the all you can eat ribs guy bring sales in to his restaurant, half off strawberry daquiris, and probably a few other things that wouldn't be appropriate to write on here. The Albufeira strip was one of the funniest places ever, every bar was a knock-off British pub with guys offering you free shots to come in.

The Algarve is a beautiful region of Portugal, amazing weather, stunning coastline. But it's hard not to sense that something has been lost. Over tourism has caused places like Albufeira to lose their Portuguese Charm. You see it happen a lot in Europe, places so beautiful they attract so many people that the beauty slowly gets buried under the infrastructure built to accommodate them. The area hasn't been ruined exactly, but it's been smoothed out, made convenient, stripped of whatever edge it once had. You get the feeling you're experiencing a postcard version of a place rather than the place itself."