The apartments of Quarteira

Quarteira is our temporary home, probably for the next couple of months. We landed here because we didn't intend to live in the Algarve (south coast of Portugal). We needed to land somewhere, to get to work learning Portuguese and try to figure out where we wanted to live for at least the next year if not longer. While we were doing those things it seemed perhaps our only chance to get to know the Algarve as more than a vacation spot. To have some time living in a beach town with the Atlantic ocean a couple of blocks away. So what does it look like?

Well, it mostly looks like apartments. If you walk out on the jetty and look across the harbor to Quarteira, this is what you see:

If you look on the other side of the jetty, you see Vilamoura, also apartments:

I really like the design of some of the apartments. Here a couple of my favorites in the immediate vicinity:

Here are some others. These are out the balcony window from my bedroom:

Across from the driveway that's the entrance into these condos:

There's a sushi take away shop in the bottom of this one - we ate there a couple of nights ago, first time we ate out since we got here. Even though it says "take-away," it has tables out front where we ate outside. It was delicious. Except for that time, we cook, so we're learning where the grocery stores are and which have what things.

Sometimes the streets lined with apartments are pretty boring:

Here's a busy main street lined with unremarkable (but probably quite nice) apartments made prettier by a tree looking like Springtime:

Finally, here's our apartment. Its the one in the middle, second floor (American system of numbering floors, where ground floor = 1st floor, in Europe, they're numbered Ground, 1st, 2nd - so here, we're on the 1st floor). Anyway, there's our balcony with our laundry and we're extremely happy about having an apartment on the end. Look at the extra windows! 

Até já...