Porto 1

So my parents went home and you might expect that means my travelling was over. Well that would make you wrong, because I still had another country to visit and the entire weekend back in Madrid. First Porto, Portugal.

I was getting worried at first. A full year in Spain and I wasn’t even going to make it to Portugal? What was I doing with my time? Well, now I can proudly say that I have made it to every one of Spain’s neighboring countries. Yep! Even Andorra and Morocco. It just so happens that Portugal was the last one marked off the list, even though it is so close!

Waking up early yet again for a flight, I say my farewells to my family and fly to Porto, Portugal. If you are pretty clever and have a slight knowledge of varieties of wine, you might be thinking, “Zach, is Porto where port wine comes from?” Why, yes, yes it is. Porto and the surround Duoro River Valley is the only place in the European Union that can claim to produce port, while other countries get away with it if they aren’t in the EU.

So as you can guess, I drank a lot of port. But that really isn’t the only thing I did.

The first day Hill and I formed our own little DIY tour of Porto with the help of Hill’s iPad, Wikipedia and Lonely Planet’s Porto Guide. We followed the itinerary across the city, seeing all the amazing sites.

Porto isn’t very well known I would guess. Yeah, it is Portugal’s second largest city, but how many of you knew that? It is pretty small as cities go, only 250,000 or so for a population (the metro is larger at 1.35 million) and there aren’t any Eiffel towers or the likes to see here. Just a lot of beautiful, old buildings lining the banks of the Duoro, charming streets winding up steep hills flanking the river, and of course wineries.

Okay, well I guess there may be one famous must see site in Porto, Livraria Lello. Look it up. It is gorgeous. I couldn’t take many pictures because they said it was too busy. I don’t know. Anyways, it has probably one of the most interesting stair cases I have ever seen and is filled with an eclectic mix of old and new books in Portuguese and English. It also has really beautiful stained glass sky lights combined with really old intricate crown molding to make such a perfect bookstore atmosphere. It is up by the university.

Speaking about the university, I have another thing for you to look up. Burning of the Ribbons. When we checked in, the woman working at the hostel (I believe she was the owner) told us that we would notice a lot of people dressed up in their school colors or black jackets in the city because it was a very special week for the students. Some sort of graduation celebration similar to Cornell’s Senior Week. I was not prepared for what it actually was.

There were students dressed up in black capes, with colored top hats and canes and groups of students all dressed up like bob the builder or with other costumes running around chanting. It was incredible to see so much school spirit and true elation. It made me nostalgic for high school graduation where there was just this huge sense of cohesion and accomplishment hanging in the air.

Oh, and the black capes looked like Harry Potter, and for a very good reason. Apparently JK Rowling wrote a lot of her first Harry Potter book in Porto and the capes served as an inspiration for the uniforms in the book. How great is that!?

After the tour, we picked up some cheese and our first bottle of port and brought it back to the hostel for lunch. Hill and I just enjoyed our white port and goat’s cheese while chatting with the girl working at the hostel.

We headed out again and stopped at this hipster mall that served a huge piece of chocolate cake for just a euro that the girl in the hostel suggested. Then we went to the park to pass out and relax. Apparently it was supposed to have spectacular views of the river because it was situated on some bluffs. Well, it did have some nice views, but we couldn’t relax too much. We heard this really loud music in the distance. It was constant, and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, but kept on getting closer and closer to the source because it kept getting louder and louder as we walked through the park.

Finally, down below, we spotted a huge gathering of students lined up along the street, ready to parade through the city. We made our way down to the parade to find all the students that were dressed up standing on and around large trucks blasting all types of music into the streets. The ones wearing capes and top hats were going around hitting each other on the head with their canes while whispering questions or phrases of good luck or congratulations or something between each whack. Like I said, it was spectacular and I was so happy just from their happiness.

A quick dinner finished our first day in Porto. We were ready for a long night of well deserved sleep. We needed rest for our port wine winery tour the next day.