Where are we? I’ll get to that in moment. How did we get here? Through London, of course. More accurately, through Heathrow – the airport we have this love/hate relationship with. Okay, I don’t mind most things about Heathrow – it’s their security that hates me. Kudos to them for being so very…very…very…thorough…as I should have an award for most consistently being pulled over into the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad queue and have every item examined. Sigh. Usually it’s my liquids that are never right – I will be interested to see how I fare once the UK (Heathrow in particular) does away with the liquids restriction next year. We spent the night at the Doubletree at Heathrow (thank you daughterly unit, for the Hilton discounts!) as yours truly still fights motion sickness, before continuing on to…Porto, Portugal.
Once Heathrow security deemed me acceptable (while the Husband waited patiently per the norm) – they didn’t lose my shoe this time! – we joined the A gate chaos and were finally on our way to Porto.
We are delighted with our apartment – although a small part of us questions if we should have stayed in Porto proper, rather than Gaia across the river. The ease of living over here is nice though, plus we got one month unlimited passes for the Metro (not cheap but worth it), so we can easily cross over to Porto.
We have already taken a historical walking tour and a Porto food/wine tour. While both were outstanding and highly enjoyable, our food and wine tour through Taste Porto was, hands down, the most hilarious afternoon we have spent in a long time. Our guide, Miguel, was wonderful and the group of people we were with were hilarious!
Other than the tours we have just done a lot of walking around town. One place we have come across but not tried yet is a Mexican restaurant that looks to be pretty authentically Mexican – pretty excited about that! We have tried a few traditional Portuguese foods, including the famous pastel da nata (this was as good as I anticipated it being). Some we have liked more than others.
One place we visited right after arriving was the Porto Cathedral and the Bishop’s palace. Both were beautiful and we very much appreciated that the cathedral had not been overly baroqued! Construction began in the mid – 1100s, but seeing as this was my first exposure to medieval Iberian Peninsula, I wasn’t entirely certain of what to expect. The main body of the church was original stone (which I appreciated), with only the altar being of baroque style (think Palace of Versailles in Paris – if a little gold is good A LOT must be better). The bishop’s palace was surprisingly restrained. We loved the main staircase!
Some scenes from around Porto:
