The Soton Times - Portsmouth

Portsmouth - Saturday 21 Mar 2009

This past Saturday i went to Portsmouth with Rocio, a friend from Mexico. Portsmouth a nice and beautiful city just 15 - 20 minutes by train from here. But, because there is always lots of service done in the railroads over the weekends, the trip was a bit longer and complicated. To start with we went normally to our local Southampton train station, where we got in a bus to Netley, a city nearby. From there we got the train to Portsmouth. We did some good walking in town towards the outlet they have down there. it is by the Portsmoutgh harbour, in a place called Gunwharf Quays http://www.gunwharf-quays.com/ well, as predicted, we did do lots of shopping. I had my field day. I bought lots of things for great prices:

- sunglasses £ 8

- Calvin Klein t-shirt £ 10

- Sweater: £ 14.50

I bought two beautiful and comfortable pair of shoes, plus a rain gard protector and a leather stretcher to go with them, since they look nice but are in fact a bit tight in my feet :-)

. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

We come back from there around 6pm. we knew we were going to change train for again (hoping it would be Netley again), but this time things got a bit complicated, as the our train actually was going in a different direction and we missed the city to get off it. We had already passed it when the train lady came to us and said we should have gotten off in the previous station and that THAT train was actually going somewhere else, completely out of our way. We had no choice but to get off in the next station, which was in a tiny city called Romsey. There were four of us: a chinese girl with a guy, and Rocio and I. The train station was closed. So, we had to just stand ther for more than 20 minutes waiting for the next train back to Eastleigh, so that we could finally find our way back home. it was freezing cold. empty and closed station, only with the little shelter where we could sit and wait, and the announcement that went off everytime a train approached the station. On the way to Eastleigh the man in the train announced three times 'next station: Eastleigh, Eastleigh, Eastleigh'. we smiled and got off there to rush and get a bus leaving 5 minutes later to Southampton. we were back here at 7.30pm, too late for the theatre we had planned, but safe and happy about the nice shopping. ah, we had a Chinese 'all you can eat' for lunch. that was also nice.

"Tudo eh uma questao de manter

a mente quieta

a espinha ereta

e o coracao tranquilo"

Leila Pinheiro (Serra do Luar)