Our first night in Porto we were rather sleepy and it was a Sunday, so there wasn't much incentive to be active. We were mostly just hungry, and this Malaysian girl had given us some ramen packets that didn't fit in her bag so we decided to be desperate and cheap and ghetto and make what was left of our spaghetti noodles and kinda mix them into the ramen, but this proved to be easier said then done because EVERYONE was having kitchen disasters/cooking at the same time and causing a ruckus and making it impossible to get burner space or pots. Someone attempted to cook meat by putting it in the oven straight on the rack, someone tried deep frying chicken, almost caused an oil fire, burnt the crap out of the chicken and then ran out of oil and someone else broke a plate. It was a fiasco. But we did it. And it was, well, pretty alright. Then we spent a good long time having shadow puppet shows on the walls and creating a ridiculous story about an overweight seeing-eye dog.
"We laughed, we cried, we cringed."
Cape Dude vs. Claw Man
The next day we met two sisters that were triplets and also turned out to be basically the nicest humans alive. But I'll get to that. They'd been robbed in Lisbon and one of them, Jill, had her entire bag stolen but was still cheery and energetic. We decided to do our sight seeing with them and wandered around beautiful Porto together. We looked at some...old buildings (you should know by now I fail at remembering the "important" historic stuff) and walked through a market that was supposed to be fairly well known but was coming to a close. I bought something that I thought was a chocolate pastry and it turned out to be more egg-cream, dusted with cinnamon. But it was tasty and the guy was funny and popped into my photo very eagerly.
We walked through a historic old part of town by the river where the buildings were (extra) crumbling and picturesque and rustic and everything good and European and photogenic. But my favorite part about the city was the actual river with it's cute little boats and the view of all the sweet little buildings stacked up from across the river, in Gaia.
Gaia is where all the Port houses are, so we went across and found a free wine tasting tour, which turned out to be way more interesting than I anticipated. Plus we got a free taste afterwards and it was really nice. Courtney really wanted to buy a little wine bottle gift set to bring back but we'd flown into Porto with RyanAir and they're really intense about the size of your carry on (even your purse has to fit in your bag!) But (and this is where the girls' extreme niceness comes in!) since Jill had been robbed she offered to take some of Leah and Courtney's stuff so they wouldn't get stuck paying extra for a check on! (Leah had bought two pairs of boots and Court bought a bunch of stuff at the flea market.) They were flying out the next morning suuuper early (the same flight as us but a day earlier) and they were staying in Madrid, but she offered to meet up with us after our flight on Wednesday and bring their stuff. We were flabbergasted by the offer! Needless to say, Courtney got her souvenirs.
After wine we all went back to the first restaurant where we had tried our first francesinhas on day one and all indulged in the saucy treat. Mmm. I miss those already... Mmm.
Fun fact: the original title for the Portugal blog was going to be Putting on the Pounds in Portugal, but since I broke it up so much, I decided to be more practical and boring about it.
That night, after our free shots (yeah, the hostel gives out a free shot at 11 every night!) we asked the guy at our hostel for going-out advice and he directed us to this area where the bars were having a 2-for-1 night of almost all of their ENORMOUS drinks. We ended up finding this huge flock of like 18-year-old Portuguese medicine students that were REALLY wasted and REALLY enthused about us and about their weird misconceptions about the United States. At one point one of them told me, "I'm going to be a doctor! I will cut open your heart and change it for the heart of a black woman! I'm not racist." And another kept making sexual propositions and commented, "I'm a virgin, you could do me a favor!"
We ended staying out pretty fucking late and missing breakfast the next day, but we had to check out by noon, which was a little rough. Luckily Yes! Porto (the hostel) is awesome and let us leave all our crap in their closet and make sandwiches and stuff. We decided to wander about some more, and we'd seen these air tram gondola type things the day before and thought maybe it'd be cool to go on one. We found what we thought was the entrance for it and were shocked that tickets were only a little over one euro, so we waited in excited anticipation and then boarded. The glass compartment began to lift, up, up and we could see the river, and the bridge, and then, suddenly... we entered a tunnel...and came to a stop. We laughed so hard I cried; apparently we'd gotten onto some strange form of public transportation. It was basically a glorified elevator; a way of getting from one part of the city on the bottom of the hill to a higher up part... We are geniuses.
We ended staying out pretty fucking late and missing breakfast the next day, but we had to check out by noon, which was a little rough. Luckily Yes! Porto (the hostel) is awesome and let us leave all our crap in their closet and make sandwiches and stuff. We decided to wander about some more, and we'd seen these air tram gondola type things the day before and thought maybe it'd be cool to go on one. We found what we thought was the entrance for it and were shocked that tickets were only a little over one euro, so we waited in excited anticipation and then boarded. The glass compartment began to lift, up, up and we could see the river, and the bridge, and then, suddenly... we entered a tunnel...and came to a stop. We laughed so hard I cried; apparently we'd gotten onto some strange form of public transportation. It was basically a glorified elevator; a way of getting from one part of the city on the bottom of the hill to a higher up part... We are geniuses.
What we thought we were riding...
After that hilarious fiasco we just gave up and decided to go to wine tasting again at a different place: Taylor's. This time they gave us tastes before the tour, and gave us two types to try, a tawny and a ruby, and also had some really nice olive oil for us to to taste! This time we also took the tour in English and the woman seemed really stoked off everything. I definitely learned a lot! For example, I didn't know that in order to make ruby into tawny port you had to store it in smaller barrels, to maximize contact with the wood, but that new wood reacts with the strong alcohol content to create really strong vanilla flavors (which is often how vanilla extract is actually made!) and so they have to use barrels that have already been used to make regular wine before. Hella yeah, free knowledge AND free booze. Taylor's: 2 UC System: 0. Ouch.
After having another taste of wine and perusing the giftshop items, we did some souvenir and postcard shopping and some more meadnering and then Courtney met up with one of our new Portuguese pals and Leah and I got some food and went to relax at the hostel. After sleeping around five hours, we were pretty beat. The hostel, as I mentioned, was super fucking chill, so they said we could hang out until the wee hours when we had to catch our flight. I ended up falling asleep on the couch for a pretty hearty nap, and eventually Courtney came back with some of the Portuguese kids and one of them played a little guitar and we ended up talking to a ton of different batches of people. As it got later, people dropped off one by one and Court fell asleep and Leah attempted to, so I ended up chatting for a good while with the night shift front desk guy, who was actually super interesting and nice. He was a film student and told me about how one of his teachers wanted all the students to get naked together as a part of the creative process, the idea being that directing a film requires baring your whole self and being okay with your whole self, as you are, so physical nudity is a kind of metaphor/jump-start for the process.
At three thirty in the morning, we gobbled down some noodles and packed the last our stuff to a soundtrack of Russian dubstep. Russians, apparently, are insane... There was a group of them, largely wearing SHORTS in the freezing December weather, pounding down shots at three am and goading the hostel worker dude to drink with them while blasting weird tunes, talking about how they'd swam in the ocean earlier in the days and cheering because their futbol team had beat a Portuguese one.
At four am we caught a night bus to the airport and headed back for Spain. We took the metro to the bus station and Jill showed up bright and early with Courtney and Leah's stuff and she had even stopped at the store and bought us fresh bread, some crunchy cheese puff type things and some apple juice. How did that even happen? We couldn't believe our luck. She said after getting robbed she guessed she needed some karma points but, damn, we're impressed.
In closing:
Their ceiling also happened to be one of the coolest things ever.
After having another taste of wine and perusing the giftshop items, we did some souvenir and postcard shopping and some more meadnering and then Courtney met up with one of our new Portuguese pals and Leah and I got some food and went to relax at the hostel. After sleeping around five hours, we were pretty beat. The hostel, as I mentioned, was super fucking chill, so they said we could hang out until the wee hours when we had to catch our flight. I ended up falling asleep on the couch for a pretty hearty nap, and eventually Courtney came back with some of the Portuguese kids and one of them played a little guitar and we ended up talking to a ton of different batches of people. As it got later, people dropped off one by one and Court fell asleep and Leah attempted to, so I ended up chatting for a good while with the night shift front desk guy, who was actually super interesting and nice. He was a film student and told me about how one of his teachers wanted all the students to get naked together as a part of the creative process, the idea being that directing a film requires baring your whole self and being okay with your whole self, as you are, so physical nudity is a kind of metaphor/jump-start for the process.
At three thirty in the morning, we gobbled down some noodles and packed the last our stuff to a soundtrack of Russian dubstep. Russians, apparently, are insane... There was a group of them, largely wearing SHORTS in the freezing December weather, pounding down shots at three am and goading the hostel worker dude to drink with them while blasting weird tunes, talking about how they'd swam in the ocean earlier in the days and cheering because their futbol team had beat a Portuguese one.
At four am we caught a night bus to the airport and headed back for Spain. We took the metro to the bus station and Jill showed up bright and early with Courtney and Leah's stuff and she had even stopped at the store and bought us fresh bread, some crunchy cheese puff type things and some apple juice. How did that even happen? We couldn't believe our luck. She said after getting robbed she guessed she needed some karma points but, damn, we're impressed.
In closing:
Look how cute this patient pup is, waiting for her human to finish buying groceries.
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