Suprise, its Porto..
Trip Start
Jan 03, 1976
1
103
167
Trip End
Ongoing
Porto,
Portugal
Friday, September 9, 2005
Pretty tiled Buildings, bridges galore, Port (not that i drink it) many many beautiful churches..
Our plane out was delayed an hour so we ended up at Porto airport around 10pm. Fussing around trying to figure out how to get into town, we hopped on a bus about 30 minutes later, relieved we were on our way.
Until the bus stopped
Dog deposit box
. And the driver got out. We stared at each other. The other passengers (a few elderly Portuguese people) starting babbling excitedly to each other. We looked out the window and we were in the middle of nowhere. And the driver was nowhere to be seen. And then he got back on the bus and we realised, the driver had stopped on the side of the road to go to the toilet! There's something that would never happen in London! So again we were on our way, and we got to our stop and started looking for the hotel. It was around midnight and it was dark and looking at the map we thought it would be a bit of a hike to the hotel, so we flagged a cab. "Hotel Fenix"! The can driver started talking very excitedly in Portuguese (remember I didn't even know we were going here, so I spoke not a word of the language) and to our blank looks he kept saying Sorry Sorry no English. And then he took off. And pulled over about a two metres later - "Hotel Fenix Hotel Fenix". Yes we were right under our hotel when we called the cab..
Without much of an idea of what was around, the next morning we wandered into town. Adrian took us on a long trek and eventually we landed at tourist info. We picked up some maps and such things and headed on our way, on foot again.
Wandered around to look at many beautiful churches, mostly decorated on the outside with pretty blue and white tiles
Golden Church
. We wandered around a palace and went to a church which was decorated on the inside with gilt so it looked like a sparkling gold church. The same sparkly church had a burial area underneath it. Rooms and rooms of people buried in the walls, and then after we had been wandering around for quite some time I looked down to notice we were standing on even more graves, the floor was entirely made of graves too! Except for one room where they had a bit of Perspex in the floor and you looked down to see nothing but peoples bones for miles.
As the day got later we decided to walk to a bus stop, and then kept heading and heading to what we (OK well Adrian, I wasn't saying much by this stage) thought was a better bus stop, or the hotel was "just around the corner" we finally stumbled up to the hotel after around an hour and a half of mostly aimless wanderings, shame that the city is on a hill, and our hotel was up hill..
After a relax and a change we headed back into town for dinner by the waterfront, and found (among many similar looking restaurants) a charming little restaurant built like a cellar, (but not underground) and we got a nice table by the window underneath a sandstone arch (I had to sit on the wall side of the table as Adrian's head would have hit the arch) and just as we ordered our meal we realised that we were both exhausted. Walking around all day will do that to a person! So under orders from me, we ate our meals quick smart and headed home to sleep. Unfortunately we both forgot our cameras so no pretty night time views of the waterside for us!
