Porto Tonico!

Well I totally lied in my last post regarding when I was going to write about our Porto, Portugal trip. So it's two weeks later than I intended, it's not like I'm getting paid for or graded on this, right? (Side note: I do accept donations)

I'm not feeling very wordy today, but I did want to share our pictures before I head off on my next adventure. Miss Miki arrives in three days! and boy do we ever have plans: a couple days at Oktoberfest, followed by trips to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, and, of course, around beautiful Bavaria.

To summarize our trip to Porto: the food was incredible, obviously the port was fantastic, the city has a great ambiance which falls into the category of "well-loved but too poor for preservation", and we discovered a delicious new drink.

Perfect for  warm, sunny days

 Porto Tonico 

1 part white port
2 parts tonic water
ice cubes
lemon

 Pour port and tonic into a highball glass over ice. Muddle lemon and give the drink a fast stir, you want to create some fizz action. Not required, but we noticed that the best ones were prepared with a wooden stirring stick. Stirring stick? Is that what they're called...this sounds weird to me at the moment...

 Link to Photo Album: Porto, Portugal

The lackluster effort put into this post in no way reflects my enthusiasm about this city. I would return and stay indefinitely in a heartbeat.

German Drinking Uniforms

 This is just a quick little post about a life situation that I never thought I'd find myself in. Meanwhile, I have been working on a post about our trip to Porto, Portugal that we took over Labor Day weekend. And by "working on", I mean to say that I have uploaded the photos from our camera and glanced through them. It will be up by the end of the week however. I promise. I'm kind of bad about keeping promises though...

Anyway, let us move on.

 Now that I have a couple proms and the wedding under my belt, I thought that the agonizing process of choosing just the right dress was behind me. Not so. Apparently shopping for a drindl was in my future. For me, this was a strenuous exercise in patience. Personally, I had it easy because I only liked a few of them and had I the freedom to go in and out of the dressing rooms at will it could have all been over in about a half an hour. However, for a young German girl this process is akin to shopping for her wedding, prom, christening, funeral, and father's second marriage bridesmaid dress all rolled into one. She will monopolize the dressing room for a good hour. The signs on the doors say "only five items", but the mothers and sisters of these girls read that as "at a time" and are frantically searching the racks for different drindls to swap in for the discarded rags.

After a drindl has made it's way on to the body, the young fraulein steps out of the dressing room and her mother spends at least ten minutes making sure the apron is tied just so which is followed by another ten minutes of hoisting the breasts into ample perfection. While all this time, there is a line of girls with armfuls of dresses waiting to do the same thing. And a sweaty American woman waiting so she can just make sure the damn thing fits. Air conditioning is not frequently found in Germany and it was about 85 degrees that day.  At least I didn't have to stand there holding 50 lbs of leather pants to try on. Poor Josh.

The good news is that I maintained my "cool" and didn't flip out at anyone. Which I think we all know is a real possibility if I sense inefficiency in public settings (for example: stroller blockades at the Shamrock Run. If you and your friends think that it is okay to have 4 Cadillac-sized strollers side-by-side on a 10 ft wide path then you're all dickheads). Everyone's triggers are different. 

Oktoberfest opens on Saturday!