May 10th: Goodbye Porto, Hello Lisbon!

Of course, our last morning in Porto and the weather was absolutely gorgeous! We figured we might as well make the most of our last few hours before leaving.

We started out with more delicious coffee and pastry things for breakfast...

...then walked down to Torre dos Clerigos, which is the really tall church tower we could see from our apartment. You could buy tickets to wander around inside and go up in the tower itself.

I liked the behind the scenes view.   :)

After wandering around inside, we climbed a bunch of steep narrow steps and eventually found ourselves...

...here. It was a pretty sweet view.   :)

You could even see out to the ocean. It looked so close, which I found funny since it did not feel close the day before when we walked all the way down there.

We spent a few more minutes enjoying the views before eventually making our way back down the stairs and out to the street.

We passed the Livraria Lello on the way back to the apartment. It's a very old, very pretty bookstore, and supposedly inspired JK Rowling's writing. It would have been neat to check it out, but there were already a ton of people waiting to get inside AND you had to buy a ticket, so we skipped it. Maybe next time.

We wandered past the Igreja do Carma again on our way back. I could probably walk past this every day and never get tired of it.

I mean, really. Gorgeous art on a random street corner! I would have no problem living in Porto.

We passed by a bit more art here and there on our way back to the apartment.

I took a couple minutes to enjoy the view one last time before we left. That tall tower on the left side of the picture is the Torre dos Clerigos, where we had been earlier in the morning.

We finished packing, said goodbye to the sweet apartment, and got an Uber to the train station. We had a little bit of time before our train left...

...so we stopped at a nearby cafe for lunch first.

We still had a bit of free time, so we hung out on the train platform for a while before the train eventually showed up. We stowed our bags, found our seats, and a few minutes later we were on our way to Lisbon.

Bye, Porto...I'll be back someday to drink more port and ogle over more tiles!

We spent a few minutes cruising past the beach before the tracks turned inland. I spent the time watching the scenery, listening to music, and occasionally answering emails as we cruised south at 130+ mph. Vroom!

We made it to Lisbon just fine, took the metro to our hotel, and went to the front desk to check in. Lucky us, they had already filled all of the type of room that we had booked, so we got a free upgrade! We even had a balcony. 

The view from our balcony; that's a local train station right across the street, and the metro was only a couple blocks away. Handy!

The first thing we did after dropping our bags was pour a couple small glasses of port and hang out on the balcony for a bit. There were a few people playing soccer in the fields across the street, and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Mark took a quick trip to a nearby whiskey shop after he finished his port, and I hung out on the balcony for a bit longer before eventually getting cleaned up for dinner.

We weren't really sure where to go for dinner, but Google Maps showed a restaurant just across the street so we decided to check it out. O Mattos wound up being a very good choice; we may have been some of the only Americans in there, but everyone was nice despite our language barrier (Portuguese is HARD, but I tried!) and the food was delicious.

We decided to get dessert, and I had picked out a pumpkin something or other. When I told the waiter what I wanted, he said, "no no no not that, you want THIS" and pointed to the chocolate cake listed on the menu. I figured what the heck and went with it.

And while it may not look like much, holy monkeys, this was quite possibly the best chocolate cake I've ever had in my life. Wow. I still fantasize about this hahaha. It was warm and gooey and just the right amount of chocolate without being too rich to enjoy. I would go back to Lisbon just to eat this cake.

After stuffing ourselves, we made our way back to the room. We wrapped up the evening by watching Eurovision, a huge Europe-wide singing competition that we had not known was going to be held in Lisbon until after we had booked our airfare and tried to find a hotel (which is why our hotel was pretty far out in the city, because almost every other place was fully booked). We had a bit more port, then went to bed. We had a lot of exploring ahead of us the next few days!