We started our northern loop of Portugal today and drove to Porto which is 3 hours away. Unfortunately, we hit the worst weather of the trip today and it rained almost continuously! Thankfully, the rain stopped during the first few hours after we got there giving us the chance to take some beautiful pictures of this famous city. Although Porto is the second biggest city in Portugal after Lisbon, we like it better than Lisbon for its more down to earth feel. Although there are TONS of tourists around, there are less touts here to hassle you. Many small grocery stores with lots of produce and fruits have very reasonable prices. Being Porto, there are MANY liquor stores here selling port and other local wines. This is the epicenter of Portugal's wine industry. The valleys around Rio Duoro, which flows through Porto, is the most famous wine region in Portugal, and Porto is where the port wine got its name from.
We shot the most famous pictures of Porto from the opposite side of the river facing the old town. The buildings are so colorful and pretty with the brown terra cotta roof framing the front. It's so funny that our son Eric has been using a picture of Porto as his screensaver background all this time without knowing its origin. When he saw the pictures we sent him, he said these look very familiar! After we checked, it turned out that we took our pictures at the same spot as his screensaver, without the seagull! What a coincidence!
Even though the weather continued to be miserable for the rest of the afternoon, we still enjoyed wandering around the old town and riverfront. One of the fun things we did is to walk across the river on the old steel bridge where their Metro trains run across. The view is superb. However, we noticed something that we witnessed throughout our whole trip: lots of old dilapidated buildings that seem abandoned, even in Lisbon. With the real estate prices high (I assume), why would people not buy them to refurbish them at a profit? And revitalize the areas in the process?
The restaurant recommended by our hosts turned out to be excellent. It's patronized all by local people (we stayed in an apartment 2km from downtown). The food is authentic and inexpensive, restoring my faith in eating out after the debacle in Lisbon last night. I had monkfish rice and Yi had oven roasted veal. So much foods that we could have shared one plate! We also bought our bottles of aged port wine to bring home from a neighborhood store after we tried some wonderful aged port wine.
The train terminal is located in a building done with beautiful Portugese tile art. There are also various churches that are decorated in tiles, sometimes the whole building itself!
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