A Rainy Day in Porto

We’ve been very lucky with the weather on this trip. We have friends who flew into Madrid just after the recent rains, and we met another couple who managed to get out of Spain just before things went south and then had rain in Portugal too. But for us, it has been sunny and warm pretty much the full trip. But today it rained. Sort of. Alex said that the light drizzle we had didn’t really count as rain in Porto. But for the purpose of this blog, let’s call it a rainy day.

We had such a good time on our Port tasting tour that we decided to try another tour with the same guide, this time around historic Porto. And we had a great time, in spite of the rain. We started, surprisingly, with a visit to McDonalds. In this case, the most beautiful McDonalds in the world … but only because the city or Porto forced McDonalds to preserve the Art Nouveau building that had been there before.

Just to be clear, we didn’t eat there, but it was beautiful inside.

As we were standing outside, we saw an innovative way to keep the pigeons and seagulls away from the scraps around the patio.

The falconer was chatting on her phone, standing outside the store. Note the heavy leather glove. There wasn’t a need to do more than stand there with the falcon in plain sight. Simple but deadly effective.

Alex showed us many of the historic buildings and the original city walls, along with the many, many churches in Porto. But he also showed us some of the older sections that haven’t been restored yet.

Fortunately we saw many other buildings that had already been restored and made available for local residents. Hopefully this will continue.

This is our last night in Porto (for this visit) and we had planned to return to the lovely restaurant just across from our apartment. Unfortunately, it was closed on a Tuesday night, so we went searching for an alternative, using the magic of the internet. (Full disclosure: by “we” I mean “Jan” went searching.) She booked a table at a lovely place nearby. But when we went to find it, we saw this…

You’d almost think we were in San Francisco or Wellington from the angle of the street in front of the restaurant.

The only things making us comfortable we were on the right track were Google Maps and this sign pointing to the restaurant. The meal was fabulous and the local Douro wine perfect. We will return.

When we were in Lisbon we discovered a lovely local t-shirt shop. In Porto, they had another store right outside our apartment so we went in to browse. Turns out that all the artwork is by local Porto artists, and all the t-shirts are made in Portugal. We bought one t-shirt in Lisbon, and were so impressed that we bought another one in Porto.