Origin of Port - Oh

I didn't really know what to expect of Portugal, the main reason for us being here was that Cello for a brazilian, not that he's clean shaven or a nut, but he does have portugese heritage. Much to my surprise there was a lot of asian influences (or maybe the chinese have portuguese influence) in the food. Their shops are lined with really yummy and cheap pastries, alot of which resemble asian deserts like egg tarts, coconut tarts and the like. And in keeping with usual theme of my travels so far, it rained. Yet to buy new shoes, my old sketchers were slippin around all over the place. It's never pleasant to walk around when dogs freely poo everywhere, even worse when the rain dissolves it and spreads it thinly across the pavement.

Food here is amazingly cheap and good! We came across Porto's amazing valley of the Douro River and had their famous Bacalhua in the Ribeira district. Unfortunately it was about now that we realised that something was awry. We went, out got really drunk on overpriced cheap wine and beer, tried our hardest to find something happening, but everyplace was empty, dying or dead. In the most packed club everyone was just too sober and sitting around. So dissappointing. Then it dawned... considering how close to Spain we were (which is full of absolutely gorgeous women) just how not so the Portugese girls were. We had been forewarned of this, and it carried. No wonder nobody goes out, either the beer goggles are ineffective or waking up one too many a time next to the wrong person has scared everybody off from partying.




Due to the heavy heavy rain, we stayed in a lot. But we did venture out again and heard strange chanting everywhere and suddenly noticed a lot of cloak clad people walking around. Originally thinking they were some awesome fashion trend to bring back the cloak, we all wanted one. Then we saw about 100 of them standing in a square chanting whilst kneeling down, and we thought maybe it's a cult, so we looked, but didn't join. We noticed after a while that there were more of these guys on the street then general public, so we got scared. Then we noticed they were all young, wearing shirts with slogans and came to the epiphone: it was Uni induction day!! But first we were hungry. So we ate dinner at this fancy silver service place that we chose at random called Guarany, but turned out to be one of the most famous restaurants in Porto. Ate possibly the BEST steak in the world, like how the Japanese do it, rapid seared on both sides, but still completely raw in the middle, it was AMAZING. To top it off we had green wine and port for desert! It was so so cheap.


After, we took a gamble and just followed these cloaked students around, passing by the occasional bunch of freshers kneeling and pledging to their seniors on the street, we finally came to a congregation of hundreds of them. What subsequently followed was a magical one-off experience, we were treated to musical performances from each University house. Their classical guitar and singing was absolutely enchanting and with the most wonderful setting. At the end of each performance they dont clap, the either shake their hats, or cough. Which worked out really well for me, since due to my newly acquired TB I was perpetually coughing.