The bride and groom are on their honeymoon, the family has all been shipped back to their respective countries and its about time I get back on top of this blog. And the other one eeek!
I promised I would write about the one touristy thing we did. Luckily we did it all over again yesterday with my parents so I have it fresh in my mind!
Porto in Portuguese, Oporto in English.
In Portuguese all nouns have feminine or masculine articles, a mesa, the table, o copo, the glass. Names being nouns are the same.
Rumour has it that when the English first came to Portugal and asked the cities name they didn’t realise that the ‘o’ was an article. So O Porto became Oporto. Not to mention how we butchered it with our accent too!
Its a beautiful city. It’s won this years top european destination award, there is a great video on this link which gives you a real taster of the place. Believe it or not, it was filmed with a remote control helicopter! Davids friend knows the guys who made it!
We wondered through the old city centre on our way to the Torre dos Clérigos.
Portugal is a catholic country, there are churches everywhere. In fact a village isn’t considered a village unless it has a church!
They also love their tiles.
This is the Camera Municipal which is the City Hall. Rather fancy eh?
This castle is actually another church!
David has just pointed out that this isn’t “just another church”, its the Sé do Porto, the Cathedral, the mother of all churches, one of the oldest monuments in Porto and one of the most important Romanesque monuments in Portugal!
And the Torre dos Clérigos is at the bottom of this hill. In case you haven’t guessed, its the bell tower of a church!
It costs just 2€ and I definitely recommend it, I’ve done it twice with in the month after all! The views from the top are fantastic, the only worrying part are the child sized open windows on the way up, which (perhaps luckily) I didn’t get a photo of.
The only other trouble is that unless your very tall, its quite hard to see out!
David found another alternative though…
When he took my Dad the second time.
But don’t worry, there is another level, which we almost missed the first time! Just as we were about to head down the stairs we noticed people coming out of another doorway and realised there was more. There are also handy boxes for the shorter people to look out.
The church roof:
The old houses:
Gaia on the other side of the river Douro and what used to be the boats used for transporting Port, now they run tourist trips.
And a bit of modern architecture!
The whole time we were up there we were accompanied by a fantastic trumpet busker! Can you see the dot at the bottom? Thats him!
Traveling Bugs and other Animals 