I got a lot of negative feedback from my last post. Here are my responses.
1) coffee - it isn't that the Portugese have different names for coffee drinks compared to every other country in the world, it's that even from village to village they aren't the same.
2) real estate. I'm not a member of the 100km club. In fact, I am a biker escorting two hikers from Lisbon to Santiago 600+km, and the hikers do about 25-30km per day, I do closer to 50km, exploring almost every village and town we go through, and often going on little exploratory side treks. Needless to say, the Portugal that I see is NOT the Portugal the 100km club sees.
I didn't mean my post in a negative way. I wasn't complaining, just remarking with a healthy dose of sarcasm.
Listen up you 100kmers. You see a little tiny drop of Portugal on your 4 day trip. We've had three times as much of it and haven't even hit the half way point yet.
Painting Portugal in a purely positive light doesn't do justice to the country or its inhabitants. Is airbnb having a negative effect on city centers? Quite possibly. Are there thousands of derelict properties in the villages and towns that are priced out of the market for locals? Yes. Is their coffee ☕ ordering system inconsistent form village to village? Yes.
Do all these things make it a bad place? No, of course not. It's a beautiful country, and even more beautiful if you see the parts that were not whitewashed just for tourists.
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