TO: Carys Marderosian and Ms. Adair's 1st grade class
Henry Barnard School, Providence RI
Dear Carys and Miss Adair’s class:
One thing that Portugal has, is a lot of old buildings. There are churches and buildings in Portugal that were built over a thousand years ago, in communities that themselves had been populated for several thousand years before that. Historical spaces and archaeological sites are found all over Portugal including prehistoric sites, bronze age obelisks and tombs, medieval castles and monastaries and feudal Quintas and aristocratic estates. Many of the castles were a part of walled cities that were centers of trade and contact around the region and the world. Many of the castles, monasteries and quintas are in now in ruins, and some have been well cared for, or have been rebuilt, but are quite beautiful.
I love taking walks in these old places to imagine what life was like for the people who lived there. Queens and Kings must have had a lot of fun. But most of the people who worked in the castles had a very hard life.
Its amazing to see something so beautiful and big built in an ancient era by people who used simple tools compared to our times, even as the technology they developed to make these buildings was and is still quite complex.
I have been doing a lot of hiking with Tio Miguel and Tia Jes. It is nice to get out into nature. You don't really see a lot of animals this time of year around Lisbon besides pigeons. But in the wild I saw a big Brown Snake. I did not take a selfie, because Tio Miguel and I were running very fast away from the snake.
I saw a caterpillar that I took on a hike to a waterfall.
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