Corusca

Recently my life has been eventful to say the least. A couple of weeks ago my grandfather passed away and I’ve since made two trips to Porto – one to go to his funeral, and another, this past weekend and Monday, to visit my now widowed grandmother.

João (who’s never actually visited Porto) and I took off the Oriente train station in Lisbon in Saturday morning, having gotten to Porto in the early afternoon. By the way, I’m well aware that in english it’s supposed to be Oporto, but screw that since if you can write Porto as a wine name, you sure as hell can use it for the city’s name. :P

We took care of our public transportation tickets for the three days we were there (the ‘Andantes’), purchased our return tickets to Lisbon, and went to have lunch with my grandmother at her house.

The first afternoon, we went to visit the Clérigos tower and church. The top of the tower has a wonderful view over the city, and it’s river, Douro. It was worth the effort of climbing up all those stairs. After the visit to Clérigos, we passed by the famous bookstore Livraria Lello & Irmão, considered one of the most beautiful of the world. Sadly, since it became so popular in later years, it was very crowded and we didn’t stay there for long.

We passed by the Aliados avenue during out trips in the area, but this was one of the few parts of Porto that João knew already (from a previous stop we made there a few years ago, while heading toward Gerês), so we didn’t stay there long and decided to go have our afternoon snack, at the most popular and one of the oldest cafés in Porto – Majestic. The hot chocolate there was very good as were the miniature pasteries we asked for.

We browsed some shop windows and then decided to go home for a wonderful dinner with my grandmother. The first day was over.