Day trip to Porto

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Day trip to Porto - Thursday 3 September 2009

Another good feature of staying at Pavoa de Vazim was the metro link from there to Oporto. We walked to the metro station which was about a 15 minute walk and arrived at the station ready to take on the automatic ticket booths. Well they had us nicely confused in about two minutes flat and then we were rescued by a very friendly Portuguese lady who spoke fluent English.

Our little saviour had our tickets organised pronto and we enquired as to the source of her command of our native tongue - simple - she watched television, well everything except soap operas, she didn’t like them at all. We were to find out that most, if not all television shows and movies that are not produced in Portugal and or Spain but American and English shows are shown in version original and then sub titled in Portuguese so a vast majority of Portuguese learn English this way, suits us just fine.

To us, Portuguese sounds more like Russian than anything else with some very strong guttural and throaty sounds than any other language we have heard. The pronunciation of words is very, very difficult and whilst I was hoping there would be lots of parallels between Portuguese and Spanish that is simply not the case. We have also been able to find out that local Portuguese is far more difficult and complex than the Portuguese spoken in South America with a lot more vowel sounds and combination sounds. We are persisting though and doing the best we can, much to the amusement of those we encounter in our sight seeing and shopping trips.

Anyway, back to Oporto. We caught the express train to Trinidad Station in Oporto which took about 45 minutes. We headed off to the main part of town and pretty well straight away stopped for morning tea, getting another nice surprise at the low cost of being in this part of the world. While we were having our coffee we noticed a typical double decker tourist bus and thought that might be a sensible way to see the town so off we went, bought some tickets and soon after we were atop of the bus, looking very much the typical ted tourist, basking in the sunshine and headed off.

The bus provided headphones and commentary in English and was an excellent way to take in the sights of the city that would have not been possible in the time we had if we had taken the old shanks pony method. Oporto is steeped in history, having been settled about 3000 years ago and later developing into a major sea port and of course Port wine manufacturing region with strong ties being made with the English.

Our tour took in both sides of the river and it allowed us to hop off / hop on whenever we pleased and the lure of shopping centres for the girls was far too strong to overcome so we did a combo of sightseeing and shopping, trying to appease all. Our tour also included a trip to an incredibly big Port Winery where we were able to sample some of the local product, trying some white port and some ruby port. The white port was very nice, being chilled but I think an old Tawny would be my preference over the ruby.

We finished the tour back in the centre of town and this allowed everyone an opportunity to head for more shops. At the moment, my poor old lap top is showing critical signs of impending doom with regular crashes and blue screens of death appearing so I am on the lookout for a replacement. This took us to one electrical / book store that had a brilliant little coffee shop within its walls where a live band was playing. We stopped for a while having a coffee and a bit to eat while the music played on and coffees still costing less than $2.00 AUD.

We caught the train back to Pavoa later that evening, this time being helped out by another Portuguese lady but one who didn’t speak English very well but her French was excellent, so time to switch back, bring out our French from the memory banks and voila!!, tickets organised and bums on seats back to Pavoa. If I could only compress the little I know of a lot of languages into just one, I might be able to communicate far better!!

I am sure that Oporto is one place that you could spend days walking around and enjoying but we just did not have the time this trip, perhaps we can come back if we end up spending the winter in Portugal.

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Photos

Porto
Around town on the Bus trip

Porto
Around town on the Bus trip

Porto
Tiled walls will remain long in the memory of Portugal

Porto
Porto tasting