Hi Guys,

How was your week? Mine was very interesting, to say the least. I was still in Portugal at the beginning of this week and it was fun. We went to the beach on Sunday, Lisbon Monday, and the Zoo Tuesday.

It was H O T at the beach.   It was 97° Fahrenheit and about 36° Celcius. Since it was hot out you might think the water would be a bit warm or refreshing. Wrong. It was freezing cold it was so cold my heels went numb. It’s safe to say I didn’t go swimming that day. I brought my camera to the beach but was too afraid to take it out because of the sand and getting sand stuck in it. Instead, I took photos on my phone and actually got some nice photos. I took this nice panorama but you can sort of see this guy’s leg disappearing (?) oops. The beach was fun but very tiring and I was excited to go to Lisbon the next day. 

We traveled three hours to get to Lisbon and then took a tram to travel around. I was really excited since it was supposed to be filled with amazing architecture and cool structures. Which it was, don’t get me wrong, but my camera stopped working. Well, it didn’t stop working but the view finder got lint in it. Then I, dumbly, tried to clean it. I never should have tried cleaning it. I only ended up scratching the piece and making the viewfinder hazy. Needless to say, I didn’t take many photos. My camera and I had a lot of fights the next day as well.

At the zoo I literally thought, wow this will be the perfect place to photograph. I was completely right, I had never seen some of these animals as close as I did at the zoo.  I went to the Santo Inácio Zoo in Porto. It’s not your typical zoo. It has animal demonstrations, a lion tunnel, and many other unique features. The coolest thing about this zoo was that there weren’t cages, the animals had a pretty big pen to roam around in. Well, some of the more dangerous animals were obviously in cages, such as the lions and snakes but the zebras and giraffes weren’t. It was cool as I was literally ten feet away from a zebra, and five feet from a penguin. As I mentioned there was a lion tunnel, which is basically a glass tunnel under the lion pen. Luckily for us, there was a lion sleeping on the glass – as we walked under a lion. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture because my mom was in the way and kept putting her hand up so I couldn’t get a clear shot.

At the zoo, I took pictures of lions, snakes, and giraffes then my camera stopped taking photos. For no reason why, whenever I took a photo, it just wouldn’t show up. I figured out rather quickly that my SD card was full, in the middle of the day. *insert dramatic sigh here* What could I do? I ended up taking most of the photos on my phone and got some pretty good shots (not going to lie). It was all good though because when I came back to England my uncle ordered me a 64 GB SD card.

When I got back to England many things happened and most of it was bad news. The first thing I did when I got back was trying to get my camera fixed, considering my camera is my life. We went to Curry’s PC World and asked there if they fixed it and they said no they’d have to send it to the manufacturer and it’d take 2-3 weeks. Weeks. I don’t have that time I leave on Thursday so we said no can do and left. Now I needed my camera fixed it, so I researched camera cleaning places and Fixation came up. I researched heavily into them considering I was giving my camera to them. I found all good things about them so I showed it to my mom and cousin and we went the following day. It took about a 30-minute train ride and then it took us 30 minutes to find the place but when we finally did I was grateful. I gave it to them and they said I had scratched the mirror and it would need to be replaced and they recommended a sensor cleaning. Cool, as long as it was fixed I was happy. It took about an hour or so since the technician was on lunch. We had lunch while waiting and once it was done I was so shocked at how clear it was. It’s like clearing your glasses after going next to something hot or cleaning the mirror after taking a shower. It was amazing and I couldn’t have been happier.

The other thing that happened to me when we got back from Portugal was that I got sick. I had a sore throat, runny nose and I was coughing not a good thing. I had this until yesterday, now I only have a cough and a slightly runny nose. Not fun at all. I think I got sick because of the change in temperature, England is really cold where as Portugal is as hot as can be. Causing me to get sick, this could all be a lie but I think it’s what happened.

Now enough of my rambling. I hope you enjoy this week’s pictures, there’s a lot of them. 🙂

See you next week!

Carissa ?