's camera by a passerbyAs I sit here thinking about what to say with regards to Portugal, my mind flashes back to some of the experiences we've had:
- Eating the best seafood
- Looking at ornate objects
- Learning ancient history
- Seeing familiar faces
- Meeting new friends
- Drinking a lot of espresso
- Learning new words (my favorite is cerveja!)
- Staying on a banana farm
- Healing in hot springs
- Hanging out with Steemit devs
- Driving on windy roads
- Hiking over old volcanoes
- Walking, walking, walking
I'll do my best to distill the journey into a few episodes. Enjoy the first one!
Porto
We got into the country about 10 days before Steemfest, so we decided to spend some time in the second largest Portuguese urban center, Porto. Porto is a beautiful town to walk about, with it's steep, narrow roads, excellent street art, grandiose architecture from centuries ago, and Ribeira Douro cutting through. The birthplace of Port wine, this picturesque city has great public transport, food, and a nearby beach in Matosinho. This is a great town for your typical flavors of tourism: food, drink, street performers, good weather, plenty of museums, and lots of history. Walking around at night didn't feel threatening... although if you go in the fall at the start of the new school year, you might witness Praxe - when new university students go through initiation rituals publicly, sometimes getting hazed.
We met a few friends here, one man was a retired engineer who opened a garrafaria with his son. Sadly we don't have a record of his name or place (it isn't on Google)... but he's southeast of the circle park on Rua de Boavista if anyone ever goes there! He told us about the history of Portugal and the many different places to visit- especially the Algarve. He gave us tasters of Portuguese wine from Alentejo and Portuguese whisky- aguardente velha! Now we finally understood that Portugal also made less sweet wines. Port was not one of our favorites after all, and although we did try some tasty ports, it was nothing we could drink very much of.
We learned that many Portuguese people seem to have some disdain for tourism, given how much tourism has increased in the country over just a few years. Also traveling here is a great value overall, but the large cities do tend to be more expensive near the center, so go outside of the usual places to find great value on food and drink. Grocery stores are so cheap compared to North America! We found ourselves buying 3-4 days worth of groceries for 10 Euros.
Finding local people to hang out with and talk to without some kind of transaction involved was pretty difficult in Porto. People that we interacted with really appreciated that we tried to speak their language. More people in Europe seem to smoke cigarettes... and the espresso is cheap and delicious. Porto was a great place to land in, I found myself working in cafes a lot polishing up the https://agoric.co project. Too bad our team had other technical difficulties with bringing that one to SteemFest... we certainly did not let a missing bag ruin the trip!
Stay tuned for the next episode... Lisboa! Coming to you whenever I find the time (probably later this week)!