Partied out ..... and it's not over yet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last week our village, Montes Da Senhora, held its annual August Festa, a 4 day event which had a programme of two nights with pop bands, a traditional music/dancing night then ending with the Open-Air All-night Summer Dance Party! Quite a hectic schedule for two ageing "have been" party animals!!! (hahaha). Mid-week we invited our good friends John and Luisa, and Julie and Barry (who are from our neck of the woods in Nottingham) round to ours to have a walk down to the village to watch the religious procession and then back to ours for a good old curry supper!

Sunday last saw us round at Luisa and John's with Julie and Barry where Luisa (a wonderful cook) made us a tradional Portuguese dish of Bacalhau which is cod fish. You may have seen this fish which is sold in supermarkets in Portugal and Spain in its dried out form, stiff as a board and salted, which looks very unappetising! When bought like this this fish has to be left in water to soak for many hours to remove the salt. It can also be bought "frozen" which makes the job much simpler. According to the Portuguese there are as many as 1001 recipes for Bacalhau, many are simply recipes made up by the cook of the house! Luisa used her own recipe which is bacalhau, onions, potatoes, spinach, (a secret ingredient), topped with breadcrumbs and is baked in the oven. It was simply delicious! Luisa is also famous for her deserts, this time we had stewed pears soaked in red wine and cinnamon with ice cream and also her own-style traditional Portuguese rice pudding. Very creamy and very scrummy!!

We had planned on taking a full week's rest from work but did that happen? No!!! The slave-master (Rob) could not resist the lure of the cement mixer and had to crack on with laying the marble footpath in the garden so a few hours were achieved, the results of which you will see later.

Things are so laid back here that as you would expect when an event is scheduled to come on at say, 11 pm, you can be sure it will be at least an hour later when they appear! Not good news for us I'm afraid so we never got to see much later than 1.30 am in the morning, which is quite disconcerting when you have to crawl to bed leaving young children and the older end of the spectrum dancing and having fun! Tuesday night featured a band called "Friends of the President" who were very good. The following night was another band called "Banda T" who got the party going! We did, however, manage to pull out all the stops for the finale party nite, and stayed out jigging about to the music till 4 am in the morning (with the help of copious amount of you know what).

Thursday night's entertainment is a very traditional night. Lots of families were out, enjoying the ambience of meeting up with their friends and families who they maybe only see at Festa time as they live in the cities, it was lovely to see the children having a ball running round and having fun.

We kicked the night off by having dinner in the square which was a simple fare of bread, salad, chips and chicken (but absolutely loads of it and lovely). Later on (after midnight) were a group of dancers from the village dancing to the music provided by the village's musicians! There was lots of very traditional dances and music and they had everyone up on their feet dancing the night away. We are absolutely stunned at how many hours of partying the Portuguese can put in on a night, with the music still on till sometimes 8 am in the morning! Late night open-air dance parties with good DJ's on (which do go on all night) are very popular here, which does seem bizarre to us deep in the heart of rural Central Portugal.

I did take lots of photographs but sadly they didn't come out too well so have only posted a few.

And just when we thought it was all over, we have an invite tonight to a Portuguese friend's party who lives in the next village who are currently having their Festa and a birthday party on Friday at some English friends, so for us another week of eating, drinking and making fools of ourselves!!!!!!!