After our adventures in Lisbon and Sintra, we headed north by train to Portugal's second city, Porto. When we arrived in Porto, the weather looked more like the wind and rain we had left behind in San Sebastian rather than the sun and relatively warm temperatures we enjoyed in Lisbon. Unfortunately, we feel like we did not have a fair chance to truly enjoy Porto and are already thinking about our next trip there, which we might combine with wine tasting in the Douro Valley (oh, the horror!).
In any event, we did have one relatively decent weather day in Porto, and the city is extremely pretty:
Another thing that we really liked about Porto (and Portugal generally) was the extensive use of tiles both inside and outside buildings:
The second picture above is from inside one of the train stations in Porto. The walls are covered by tiles depicting all kinds of historical events. Most of the tiles are blue and white like above, but the tiles nearer the ceiling are in full color (sorry, no picture).
And, of course, we had to do a couple of tastings of the city's namesake wine - port. The Douro region has been the only place where grapes for port wine can be grown since 1756, making it one of the oldest appellations in the world. Port is a fortified wine that has much higher sugar and alcohol content than "regular" wine. We did two tours and tastings while we were in Porto, and they were most notable for the fact that we did them in Spanish! We were very happy with our ability to understand the tours (it helped that (1) we have a pretty good knowledge of how wine is made already, and (2) our tour guides were not native Spanish speakers, which meant they spoke slower and clearer than a native speaker might have). All of that said, we decided that we like, but don't love, port. The tawny's tended to be our favorites overall:
Overall, Portugal was a very fun break from school. Now, we are in our second week back and already looking forward to our next break in ... Paris!
Cheers,
Jeff and Shana
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