We chose to fly from Faro to Porto instead of taking the train because the trip would have been 6 hours. Unfortunately, the hotel I booked cancelled on me the last minute because apparently it actually tests my bank card for its remaining balance and found it not enough to cover the total payment even though it accepts cash (at least it said so on Booking.com but actually the hotel at Barcelona also said it accepts cash but apparently because we booked 4 nights it was over the threshold for accepting cash and I had to use my card to pay instead) and we basically intended to pay with cash when we arrived at the hotel. So I ended up booking an apartment instead and it was actually an apartment with a bunk bed. Mum and I had climbed onto the upper level of a bunk bed before and we figured we were not going to start trying now when she was approaching 80 and I’m in my 40s. So we ended up squeezing together on the same bed on the lower level. To be honest, we didn’t sleep well at all. The first night, when I was sleeping on the inside, I felt like I couldn’t breathe and Mum had to swap position with me. Then because I’m a sound sleeper, Mum couldn’t go to the toilet at night because I was obviously blocking her. Sound penetration was also quite bad. We were on the first floor and there is another floor up above us and every night there would be some stomping that we could hear from the apartment directly above us. But other than that, the apartment was fine. I especially like that the hot water from the shower comes quickly, unlike some of the other hotels we had lived in. And the upside is that the cost for 4 nights is about ⅓ of the cost for the original hotel I booked. Anyway, in terms of sightseeing, we only did the Clérigos Church and Chapel of Souls. We also tried to look for Sao Bento train station but got turned around a lot and then figured that we might as well look for it for real tomorrow since we are taking the train to Braga from it tomorrow. For dinner, I quickly booked the only decent restaurant that I could find through Google, which was the restaurant for a 4 star hotel that is at one end of the same street as our apartment. It had a small menu so we ordered garlic shrimps and sea bass with sweet potato puree. The food was decent but not great.
After snapping enough photos of Sao Bento train station, Day 2 was spent at Braga. We took the bus to Bom Jesus do Monte as soon as we arrived and we almost didn’t go up via the funicular due to my fear of heights but it seemed such a waste of time in terms of phototaking if we didn’t so we took the plunge. And actually, it wasn’t that scary, it had a cable that pulled the car up that ran parallel to the track and it wasn’t that steep an incline (at least when I was sitting inside). So it took us all the way to the up and we walked a several set of short steps down to the take the obligatory picture with the cascading blocks of stairs (I don’t quite know how to describe it properly, see pic above) but being slackers, we didn’t go all the way down to the big oval place, just a vantage that would allow us to snap it. Then we walked back up to take the funicular down again. Then we took the bus back to the city and quickly snapped photos of Congregadors Basilica, Chafariz da Praca da Republica and Theatro Circo before stopping at Largo Sao Jao do Souto for lunch. Mum ordered a crepe and I ordered the banana split for lunch. It was quite tasty. In the afternoon, we visited Santa Barbara Garden, Largo do Paco and Arco da Porta Nova. Then we made our way back to Porto where we had dinner at the place I booked where we ordered 4 codfish cakes (very big, a little too much for our appetite, but not bad as they go) and an octopus dish.
Day 3 was a day trip to Aveiro, the Portuguese Venice. We stopped a bit to take pictures at the Largo da Eastacao with more tile paintings before heading down Avenida Lourenco Peixinho on a straight path towards Moliceiros pier to make the obligatory boat tour. Actually, the boats here were more colourful than the Venice gondolas and I quite easily took a photo of an empty boat that passed by us but taking a photo of the boat we were on was tricky since we were allocated to sit at the back portion of the boat (the Aveiro boat fit way more people than the Venice gondolas). It was a 45 minute tour and after it, we had the local specialty pastry of Ovos Moles for lunch. It’s a pastry with egg yolks inside and it’s actually salty as opposed to sweet. After that, we took the line 36 Costa Nova bus to the end stop to snap pictures of the colourful striped houses. Actually, it was a pretty narrow strip of houses and not much to see. But we still took a long time. With a long gap between the 4ish and 6ish buses, we were basically stuck at Costa Nova and couldn’t even spot taxis. Eventually, we caught the earliest 6pm line 36 bus back and got back to Porto at around 8pm. It was very hard to find a restaurant without booking around such peak dining hours so we ended up ordering a Pepperoni pizza which was the only place that had ample sittings inside.
The last day at Porto originally had breakfasting at the Majestic Cafe as an item but we scratched it because it wasn’t an experience we are actually interested in so it’s basically a church visiting day in the morning covering Church of Saint Ildefonso (which looks exactly like the Chapel of Souls except that it has two crosses instead of one in the middle and you can hardly see that it has two crosses unless you specifically looked for them), Igreja de Santa Clara, Porto Cathedral and Igreja de Sao Lourenco. During lunch, I ordered the francesinha and Mum ordered the biscuit pie. She really liked her pastry lunch but mine was so-so- I only ordered it to try the local specialty but didn’t really expect to like it. It basically tastes like a cheesy pizza with three types of different meat in it- the steak was a bit tough and the bacon tasted much better in comparison and there was a 3rd type of meat in it that I forgot was what. In the afternoon, we walked along the Duoro River. For dinner, I prebooked a place the day before in order to cheer Mum up with oysters. We also moved from the apartment to the 4-stars Mercure hotel up the street (where we had dinner the first day at Porto) in the morning (with the help of someone from the apartment who helped us carry our checked luggages down a short flight of somewhat narrow stairs and up the very narrow street to our new hotel) and with phone booking, the total cost of our Porto accommodation still came out cheaper than that of the original 3-star hotel I booked. Due to the late booking, the only slot available for dinner was 8:15pm. But it was worth it- we had oysters, barnacles (small portion that came with the oysters) and clams. It was the first time we had barnacles and it was the only live seafood that interested us because the prawns and crab all didn’t look too fresh. We were going to order razor clams but it was all sold out so we had clams instead. But back to the barnacles, we were shown how to eat the barnacles by the waiter- you had to pull really hard on the triangular bit at the bottom in order for the ‘covering’ to be pulled off, leaving the meat behind which tasted a lot like crab legs. It was always touch and go for me whether I could manage it but eventually Mum taught me that I could squeeze out the meat from the broken off tube/covering if I accidentally snapped it off with the meat inside instead. It left us more expectant of the next time we would have barnacles (I encountered them on the menu of a Lisbon restaurant during my detailed trip planning back in Melbourne and decided we would try them, knowing that Mum’s forever curious about new food and I personally have a fondness for what I call shell-like food: well, mainly clams, a lot of shells are hard to suck out so I tend to avoid those since I’m lazy). Overall, a great dining experience.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 