May 6th and 7th: Bom dia, Porto!

We had a week off in May, and decided to put it to good use with a trip to Portugal. 

I did my usual stellar job of packing. This was probably about an hour before we left for the airport. It eventually all got in my bags.

The drive to Dulles was really easy, the shuttle bus pulled up to our stop almost as soon as we had unloaded the car, and we zipped right through bag drop and security, so we had a bit of free time before boarding. We hung out at a bar for a little bit before eventually heading to the gate.

It turned out our flight was full of grumpy overpackers, so boarding was, um, fun. The lady in front of us was especially grumpy. At any rate, the dozens of grumpy people eventually crammed their overstuffed carry-ons into the overhead bins and plopped down in their seats and we left. It was fairly late at night and I had already eaten dinner, so I skipped the free food and aggressively tried to get at least some sleep. A fair bit of crummy sleep later...

...I woke up in time for some airplane breakfast with this view.

Good morning, Lisbon!

Customs and baggage claim were really easy to get through, and we joined a line and eventually got metro tickets. We weren't staying in Lisbon; we had tickets for the train to Porto that afternoon, but had several hours to burn. If we had known it would be so easy to get through everything, we would have picked an earlier train!

I've had worse afternoons, though. We spent our time wandering through a shopping mall and eating pastries with espresso.

We eventually wandered out to the platform to wait for our train. We were starting to fade a bit from the red eye flight, though running the full length of the platform to get in the right car helped wake us up a bit. We had paid for first class seats, which mostly meant that we had assigned seats in a quieter car and partway through, they came around and offered us juice and Portuguese newspapers. I spent most of the time listening to music on my iPod, looking out the giant window, and dozing here and there.

After a couple hours, we pulled in to the station in Porto. We were running a bit late and were worried that we wouldn't make the short connection to our next train, but we ran to the next platform and got there just in time. A short ride to the other train station later...

...we were in a taxi on the way to our Airbnb, and I was ogling the tiles on the buildings as we zipped past. There were tiled buildings like this everywhere.

We've been lucky so far with Airbnbs, especially in foreign countries, and this was no exception.

We had a rooftop terrace!

There was a pretty sweet view from the roof. Our Airbnb host gave us a quick tour of our little apartment, made some restaurant and sightseeing recommendations, and left us to hang out and finally, after such a long travel day, sit down and relax for a few minutes.

We didn't sit down for very long, though. There were things to see!

The art in Porto was absolutely fantastic. It seemed like everywhere you looked, there were tiled buildings or murals or posters or something interesting to see.

We eventually wound up sitting down at Cafe Progresso. We spent a bit sipping at their cheap but tasty house red, and spent a good ten minutes watching someone do a hilariously bad job of parallel parking (which ended with the owner of the cafe coming out to yell at the driver to move out of the handicapped spot he had just finally managed to wedge his car into).

With that fun over, we went across the street to Solar do Moinho de Vento for dinner. I think it was a recommendation from our Airbnb host of a good place to try some local food, and he was spot on; everything we had was fantastic. We started with wine and meats and cheeses. The ham in the bottom left was amazing; it was almost like ham candy.

I forget what Mark had, but I had salt cod fried into little crispy balls and served with tomato rice. The rice tasted almost exactly like rice my mom used to make. I inhaled pretty much everything; everything was delicious.

After stuffing ourselves, we wandered back to our Airbnb. We wound up passing the Igreja do Carmo (Catholic church) along the way. It's insane that something this pretty is at a random intersection in the city.

I took a few more pictures of the tiled buildings along the way, and a few minutes later we were back at our little apartment.

We thought it would be nice to hang out on the rooftop terrace and enjoy the view, but the weather had other plans. We instead had small glasses of port inside, then went to bed and immediately passed out. Time to get some sleep for the next day's adventures!