I fell in love with Porto! By Melek

I generally liked every city I saw in Portugal, it is a quite warm and welcoming country. Maybe I found similarities to my country, that’s why! But Porto came as a surprise, there are several cities affected me with their beauty, energy and look, now Porto is one (I think Prague and Rome were the most incredible ones). Of course, there is water in the middle of the city which gives it beauty. It is the Douro River passing from the middle of the city to reach the Atlantic Ocean.

The city is blended with beautiful old houses, historic places like churches, palaces and many others. Of course, since old times it was an important port city. To reach the river side you need to walk down from the center which means you need to walk back up again, of course they made it easy by building several nice tram/elevators.

It is best to see this city by taking a boat tour on the river. We had a beautiful ride where we had the chance to see the beautiful building on the both side of the river. There are also couple of bridges one of which is made of iron, called Dom Luis Bridge. When you cross from this bridge you actually leave Porto and arrive at Gaia! [Shane – The north side of the river is Porto and the south is Gaia.]

Of course, my lovely boyfriend bought tickets for a wine cellar tour with the boat tour tickets. We chose the oldest winery for our cellar tour [Shane – here they call them wine caves and we did Burmester started in 1750]. The building itself was lovely and we had a very nice experience. Porto wine is a very sweet wine and its grapes are coming from Douro Valley. Interestingly it is called Porto wine but it is actually produced in Gaia. ????

The reason for this wine to be sweet is after couple of days from fermentation starts, they stop the fermentation and keep the sweet taste of the grapes in. They showed us how they produce the wine and where they keep it to age and after that we passed to a nice lounge area where we tasted one white and one red wine. Overall it was a very nice experience we loved every minute of it!

After getting tipsy off wine tasting we headed to have a dinner. Shane read about a special sandwich which is in the list of top 10 sandwich in the world, so started searching for it! It is called Francesinha and finally found it in one restaurant. He will tell you about that! [Shane – this amazing sandwich has bacon, sausage, and beef in between slices of bread. Then it is covered with cheese and sitting in a delicious tomato soup. It is basically a heart attack waiting to happen, but it is so good I had another one the next night.]