Madeira, Portugal Summery

this post is a quick summary of what we have been doing in the past few days. Unfortunately, I haven’t posted much recently, as I’ve been too busy. So, I hope you will enjoy this sum up of what we enjoyed here in Madeira island off of Portugal. This island is actually a part of Africa, instead of Europe. And, to get us started here today, I’m going to put a load of fun facts together here. Did you know that Madeira was discovered in 1419 by Portuguese explorers, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira. The name rMadeira literally means “wood” in Portuguese because the whole island was once covered in dense forests. But sometimes too much wood isn’t really good for building on. So, early settlers burned down tons of trees. The fire stayed burning for years and years. Madeira has one of largest new years firework display in the world. And also, yes, people really do ride basket toboggans down roads In Funchal. It’s called Carros de cesto and it’s been around since the 1800’s. Now, enough fun facts and let’s catch up on what we have been doing in the past few weeks. So, let’s talk about the time we tried to go to a botanical garden. So, we drove like an hour into town to go to one of the top 10 botanical gardens in the whole, wide world! So, we went there, to the botanical garden, we went in and were like, “okay, this is like, not really that cool.” And then, we realized that we went to the entire wrong one. 😅 So, we left and went over to a Japanese/Indian food restaurant. That was really good. The next day, we decided to go back and go to the real botanical garden. So, we went there and it was truly stunning. The palace on the grounds used to be home to the queen and king of Madeira, but now it’s just a garden and UNESCO World Heritage Site. The garden was really nice and cool. They had like toboggan rides (which I talked about earlier.) that you can slide down the road speeding in a sled. We didn’t do that though, because it was like $40 per person. There was also like a really cool part in the garden where you walk on like a little trail surrounding a big pond. And, there’s like a bunch of waterfalls and water spraying into your face and all over you and you got to run through because you will get very wet. And there was like an Asian garden part that had stepping stones over the water and you can walk across the pond on them. 😃 the botanical garden was really cool.

And now we are going to talk about how we tried to go to a really popular cool trail. So, we drove like an hour (as usual.) to get here. Wait, sorry, not an hour. A hour and 11 minutes. A big difference. So. Yeah, we drove there and finally when we were there, we noticed there were no parking spots at all and everyone was just parking on the side of the road and it was very crowded. So, we drove on down to a different Japanese restaurant. (One that we went to the day we got here, after we left the airport.) at this one, I got spicy ramen,🍜 which was very good, yeah, I also got ramen last time we went there too. Ramen is so good. 👍 So, we didn’t do much in Madeira, except for random grocery runs and park vists. So, I’m gonna leave you here, but still, I will try to post stuff more often, like I used to. So bye. ✌️

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