After getting acquainted with our “hotel”, which is a guesthouse that only has 2 guests (us!), we went for a stroll through the town and to the beach. This is on the road to our hotel:

Of course we went to every convenience store and grocery store looking for fun Azores snackies. We wound up at a place that gave us samples of different cheese from around the islands, all of which have completely different flavours. We bought 2 drinks for our walk, one orange soda and one passion fruit drink – apparently passion fruit is a big thing here!

We walked for about 15 minutes to get to a gorgeous black sand beach next to 2 huge cliffs:

There were a ton of amazing surfers, and the waves were so big and fun to jump around in. Michael had a lovely nap on the beach:

One of the weirdest things in this town is that there appear to be no tourists from North America here. I have no idea why, considering this is the “high season” and everyone keeps talking about how busy it is. Makes me wonder how quiet things are the rest of the year. I have to say though, it’s really nice not being accosted by anyone to buy things or being leered at. No one seems to care about you here, in a good way!

After getting a bit of sun exhaustion, we went back to the hotel, sat outside in the shade, and then went for pizza. We couldn’t eat another heavy buttery meal again but we weren’t alone – lots of locals at the pizza place too! Here’s our pizza with chorizo, mushrooms, and pineapple. Nothing special but hey, I have to blog about what I ate.

While at the pizza place, we heard marching bands come through the town. There was some festival with lots of different marching bands; some with drums, some with bagpipes. I think the festival is still going on but we’re completely exhausted so it’s bed time.

There’s no air conditioning where we’re staying (or anywhere really). I’m not sure how we’re going to sleep tonight but hopefully our exhaustion is so powerful that it won’t matter!