Porto, Portugal - Found the Blog!!!

Blog lost in cyber space! Stay tuned for recovery. In the meantime a few pics ...

Found it ... read on.

Oporto was especially cool for me because Portugal is unlike any country I had ever visited before. We were docked in a small town twenty minutes outside of the city itself. For morning P.E. class every day we ran to the beach and watched the waves crash on the sand. The water glistened a turquoise blue and the sand stretched along the coast as far as the eye could see. It was something like paradise. The restaurant right on the beach was a hotspot for us to hang out. What a view! And there were surfers too …

 

The buildings are embellished with azulejo tiles with rich pigments of blue and yellow, and wrought iron adornments are everywhere.

For our first port program we headed on the bus into the city of Oporto and visited a Factory House. Factory Houses are grand buildings built for the top administrators in Port Wine producing companies. It’s almost like a country club, but the only members are the company heads. We visited the Graham Port Wine Factory House. Inside there was a great entrance hall, a ballroom with a magnificent grand piano, two formal dining rooms for traditional eleven-course meals held at the house and a library archive of thousands of books in multiple languages. There were poetry books, encyclopedias, hand-written weather records, newspapers and magazines dated back to the 1800’s – everything you could imagine. It was phenomenal. We could have been in there for hours just exploring and looking at the different books. It was super cool! (Especially for a bookworm …) Following the Factory House tour, we went to an actual Port Wine Factory and learned about the port winemaking process. It was really interesting and quite complicated. After the tour and lecture, we all sat down and had a tasting of some ten-year-old port. It tasted fiery and sweet. I liked it.

Cheers!

Exploring the streets of Porto

After winetasting, a group of us headed off to explore the city. We spent the time just wandering around, taking it all in. It was really fun. I liked the feel of the city; nothing was perfect. The brightly coloured buildings had paint chipping off and the cobbled streets were well worn. Everything seemed laid back and relaxed. My favorite part was the fact that laundry was hung outside of every apartment window, which added something to the surrounding streets. After a great day of exploring, we miraculously figured out the Portuguese metro system and made our way back to the ship - quite the adventure.

Having had lots of successful and delicious picnics in Brest, we thought it would be a great idea to try it again in Oporto – big mistake. I’m not saying anything against Portuguese grocery stores, but let’s just say it was a combination of unfortunate events that led to the worst picnic ever. First of all, it took us ages to find the grocery store. Once we got there, it was disappointingly small and I struggled with cheese and vegetable decisions. We made our way to the beach and on the way, stopped at a bakery. Finally arriving at the beach, we missed the sunset and it was rapidly getting dark. Then, someone realized that they had left their picnic groceries back at the bakery. We half jogged six blocks (uphill!) back to the bakery, although first we ran too far and completely passed it – whoops. After retrieving the grocery bag, we headed back to the beach and ate our picnic in the pitch black. We could not even see the water and I ate the plastic around the pepperoni sticks, To make matters worse the cheese turned out to be butter. It was a disasterous meal. We took it in stride though, and laughed about it. Afterwards, we spent some quality cultural time at MacDonald’s. McFlurrys make everything better.

The next day went to small village and walked along an ancient pilgrimage trail. The trail was built on a dusty, narrow roman road that passed through great big vineyards and hillsides. It was beautiful. We ate grapes right off the vines and chatted while we walked down the trail. After a while, we stopped at a break in the path and the bus picked us up and took us to a restaurant where we had a lovely meal of buns, squash soup, rice, carrots and pork. It was SO GOOD.

Portugal was fantastic! I’ll be back…