Tom's Place – a sort of blog by a British resident of Albufeira
Photos and words mainly on Albufeira and the Algarve, and more.
This appeared a few days ago and other related ‘objects’ seem to have been dumped at various locations around town. All the big stores have cleared an aisle for the plastic reindeer antlers, Father Christmas hats and the other traditional things that everyone must buy at this time of year.
There is a giant Christmas box in the old town by the pier. Pictures also of some of the other lights in the area.
A few pictures taken last night. Walking up Rua do MFA, around the car park opposite the town hall and a couple of hours later back along the main road towards home. Not the best quality I’m afraid. The streetlights affect the colours and I am not adept enough to have figured out which of the three million settings on the camera will work best!
Monday here was very wet. 42mm (1.65″) of rain was recorded in five hours. We were the scond wettest place in the country on that day. That’s about half the total for an average winter month. There was some minor flooding in town. Other towns in the eastern part of the Algave were more seriously affected. As ever, the problem is that the infrastructure is not designed to cope with such volumes of surface water.
On a brighter note (literally) the Christmas lights in Albufeira are now shining down on the largely empty streets. I took some pictures last night. Here’s a sample. I will look at the rest later and post any that are reasonable. No tripod and the street lights don’t help.
Not the best quality. These are the lights at my end of town (the western end) plus down in the old town. I will try improve over the next few days.
Our local council has spent a lot of money decorating the town. Here are a few from the old town centre and my end of town. The first three are inside a bar, obviously! I will try to get some from the other part of town over the next few days.
Switched on last week. Yes, Christmas starts in November here as well, with all the stuff out front and centre in the supermarkets since last weekend.
These are some of the lights at my end of town. I am going to try to get some of the others over the weekend. Spot the trees and lamp-posts well wrapped. And the half-painted dolphins! I hope they will be properly re-painted.
Managed to get a few pictures of the very ornate lights at the other end of town. Here though the street lighting and other lighting from commercial premises makes it difficult to find good angles. Managed to get the mouse working again, sort of. The insides were a bit mucky after two or three years use! A good clean out and it seems to be working so i could edit these a bit to remove orange glow!
So, here are a few pictures from the ‘new town’ end of Albufeira taken on the evening of 23rd December.
Below – Avenida dos Descobrimentos between bullring and strip – click to see larger size.
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A little more practice and I have managed to get a few better quality pictures of the lights at the old town end. Click below to view. The pictures were taken between 1845 and 1915hrs – note how quiet the streets are. Most of the big tourist restaurants and bars are closed, awaiting the hordes next week. I went to the small bar called the Cavern to meet with a few of the other old miseries that live here, drink Old Speckled Hen, watch football and darts on TV. What an exciting life!
I do have a problem though in that my optical mouse is faulty so I cannot use the photo editing facility as well as I might. I cannot ‘sweep’ to select across text and images. Some pictures do have some unwanted instrusions. I will buy a new mouse.
An article on the local council website informs that 17.9 million LED bulbs were required to construct the various displays. I wonder who counted?
Tomorrow I will be at the other end of town and wil try for some more of their decorations.
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Our local council have spent a fair amount of money of stringing Christmas lights along the main road across town, plus a few others and also around the old town square. A few small pictures below, some didn’t come out too well using small camera so will try again later this week using the other, larger one. Click a picture to see it larger
I digress slightly perhaps, but they do have lights in the window. This is the popular leather bag shop called Kitanda, just off the square and a place I know that of lot of you like to visit!
Tom's Place - a sort of blog by a British resident of Albufeira 