Travels: Porto edition

Phew! It's been difficult getting back into the swing of things...kind of. Mostly it's been difficult to go to class, but I can deal. Well, okay, it's also only have 1 euro and 70 cents to my name after losing my debit card and spending all my money in Marrakech, but I will get to that later.

So, my travels! Let me tell you them.

I left on Friday with my friend Naomi, for our plane from Marseille to Porto, where we were going to stay with a friend of a friend of hers, or whatever. I'm not going to go into the details of getting there at 9pm and having to find our way to the bar where her friend works and then waiting around until 2am until he got off work, because that's not important. Anyway, we arrived in Porto on the 12th and stayed until Monday morning. Although it was raining (everywhere, throughout my entire trip), we did get one magnificent day with clear skies and gorgeous weather, which was the day after our arrival. Although we didn't do much when we first got there, on Saturday (the 13th), we took advantage of the lovely weather and wandered around the waterfront. We didn't really see much in the way of sights except for the S. Francisco Church (which was pretty spectacular, but we did get to really experience Porto. After wandering one side of the river, we crossed it via the Luis II bridge to go for some free port tastings--and let me tell you, it was delicious. We were able to go to various wine caves where we were given little glassfuls of different wines, and although I don't think I'd be able to drink port every day, it was a nice experience.
Anyway, I'm terrible at explanations, so here are some pictures:

Me in front of Ponte Dom Luis I
See those boots? I bought those boots freshman year of college off of eBay for $15. Pure leather, vintage, and after getting them re-soled in Montreal they have served me well. Sadly, they weren't able to stave off the massive amounts of rain during my trip, and although I may need to take a trip to the cobblers to get them re-re-soled, I feel this trip may have manhandled them a bit too much. I'm sorry, boots.


The crooked streets of Porto--Portugal is fairly hilly, and Porto is built into various cliffs and hillsides, creating lots of steep and jagged hills. Also, tiles are very popular in Portugal: the hallmark of Portuguese buildings seems to be a facade of brightly painted tiles in various states of maintenance or disarray. I kept on looking for a newly-fallen tile to take with me, but I never saw one.


View from where we stayed--note the lemon trees in the foreground.

Portugal was amazingly cheap, as I said--we ate at a lot of little diners, which served a steady stream of french fries, cheese and ham sandwiches, rice, and vegetable soup--the Portuguese are all about the vegetable soup--and even at a fancy restaurant in Lisbon I never paid more than 11euros for a meal. I'm pretty sure the average was about 5euros, and I never had to pay more than 2 euros for a drink. Even taxis, which are totally taboo for me to take back home in NY, were a viable form of transportation (and much needed during the cold after we would find ourselves on the other side of Porto and soaked feet), never costing more than 5 euros. And, although the language barrier was a little...much (I was so happy to go to Morocco because it meant I could communicate in French/at all), we mostly got by with a combination of gestures, pointing, English, and saying "Obligada!" (thank you!) constantly. Luckily, the Portuguese immediately proved themselves polite, warm, and understanding to us silly Americans, even though they're more conservative than, say, the Spanish--we didn't get any surly looks like I do in France when I stumbled over what I wanted to order at a restaurant (although English/French versions of menus seem to be du jour nowadays).

Alright, I think that's enough writing for right now--I'll post this ish so that I won't get anymore emails/phone calls from my dad telling me I HAAAVE to write another blog entry, WHEEEERE is my blog entry, WHYYYY haven't I written one yet blah blah. Up next: Lisbon! Stay tuned!