Arvi ja Leah aeg reisimiseks: P-P-P-Porto

A view of Porto.

Our last stop of Portugal, Porto. Porto is the home of port wine and a loud Brazilian snorer in our dorm room! You could even hear the guy through earplugs! On the up-side, our hostel was really cool with personal electronic wrist bands to get into the hostel, your room and your locker.

This was a toasted ham and cheese sandwich topped with more cheese, sauce and a fried egg, healthy!

View from our hostel window

Recently, we have been getting a bit sick of visiting countless churches, viewpoints and hearing about the history of different rulers, wars, wins and loses. So our walking tour with cheery Portuguese Marco was a breath of fresh air. He got everyone involved, chatting and asking questions aswell as keeping us entertained throughout our 3 hour walking tour of the eastern quadrant of the old city.

Being a Sunday, Porto was about 80% closed but Marco gave us some good tips on what to visit:

-The old city wall that was hard to get to if you didn’t know how.

-A street where a lot of old (70+) strippers dance in some little Taverns.

-A couple of port cellars to visit that won’t rip you off

-Some good places to eat a Francesinha (a what you say?)

-Churches of gold

-Awesome view points of the city

-He also rattled off 4 dozen things in Porto that are apparently the 3^rd best or 2 biggest or 4^th most famous etc. Never number 1 hmmmmm....

the goldest church I've ever seen

Church near our hostel (which is actually two churches with a skinny apartment in between)

Later that afternoon, Leah and I got together a little group from our walking tour and our hostel to join us for some port tasting. We ventured off to the other side of the river to take our pick from the dozen port cellars. We went to Taylors and for 3 euros we tried 3 delicious ports (chip dry white, ruby and a tawny) and had a tour around the cellars, learning how port is made and then transported and aged in Porto.

an abundance of Port barrels

Leah tasting a Ruby port her favorite.

Rafiki (Real name Henrique) who we worked with in Tallinn also recommended that we eat a Francesinha. Ok so what is a Francesinha? Well it means young French girl. Hmmm now a story of how the Francesinha was created. A Portuguese chef living in France came back home and found that he didn’t have that much luck with the Portuguese ladies as he did with the French ladies. He thought maybe it was because they wear too much clothing and are quite reserved. So what better way than to create a sandwich that can fix these problems. Start with a toasted pieces of bread then add cured ham, roast meat or steak and a chipolata type sausage called linguica, close the sandwich and top with a fried egg and cheese slices on top. Not finished. Surround with chips and douse with the hot special sauce (it has to be hot so it melts the cheese). Everyone has their own version of the special sauce mostly containing beer and chilli. Serve with a cold draught beer. The story goes that when women eat this they say, ‘Oh the sauce is making me hot, I should take off a layer of clothing.' Followed by, 'Oh the hot sauce is making me thirty, I should order another beer.’ Well-played sir. make the women show more skin and become inebriated.

Francesinha

During our run the next day we ventured to the old city wall. We had the whole wall to ourselves to explore. We could see other tourists wondering how we got there, mwahaha!

Run along the Douro River

Old city wall

oh yeah just a lazy 200+ stairs to run up.

On our afternoon tour with Pedro we heard more about the Western side of the city and its landmarks. He took us to the bookstore where ‘apparently’ J.K.Rowling the author of Harry Potter got inspiration for the moving staircases in her novels. She lived in Porto for a few years and Livraria Lello bookstore has an amazing staircase to prove the point.

Livraria Lello staircase

Pedro took us to some amazing view points and through some beautiful gardens. He also pointed out some really cool sounding places that sadly we missed out on visiting because we were leaving at 4am the next morning but oh well, next time.