Welcome again, to my wonderful Spanish semester. As you read this blog entry, you'll notice I wrote it actually about a week and a half ago, but I'm just getting around to publishing it now...so please, disfruta! (enjoy!)
Oh the end of the semester is bringing about quite the travel plans! I’m currently sitting on a bus from the Madrid airport to Valladolid. It’s Monday, April 23rd, and it seems like I was just traveling, and here I am, going at it again! Truth
of the matter is, we have a lot of long weekends at the end of April,
so I’m taking full advantage of them and getting a few more travel plans
in before I come home on May 20th.
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| Boats that used to be used to transport wine to Porto |
So, to jump start my last month or so of the semester, this past weekend (April 20th-23rd) my friend Katie and I headed to Porto, Portugal. Our flights left from Madrid on Friday and we came back on Monday (today!). Once again, the country of Portugal has me smitten. We
left Madrid's airport around 3:30pm and after a very short flight, we
arrived Friday around 4:30pm and checked into the Garden House Hostel
(which, on the contrary from my last experience) was the most wonderful
hostel I have ever been in. We were greeted by a
Portuguese man named Rui, who showed us to our room, gave us a tour of
the hostel, maps, and any more information we needed. We headed to the supermarket to get food for the next three days and then bummed around town for a bit. It was supposed to rain all weekend while we were there, but we got lucky. When it did rain, it was mainly a drizzle here and there. Friday
night we made ourselves some dinner, along with a group of 25
architecture students from Vienna, Austria, and planned out our weekend. The
group of students was quite intimidating to be around, and only a few
of them spoke English, but they were all really, really nice and offered
us their leftover food (too bad we had already cooked dinner!)
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| First you pick your chicken... |
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| Then she butchers it for you! |
Anyway, Saturday we got up, enjoyed breakfast (included in our hostel) and ventured around the city. We
went to a market and got the sweetest smelling and tasting strawberries
I’ve ever encountered, some zucchini, green pepper, and dried red
kidney beans. The market was incredible...on one end, there was a
bread shop, and on the other, you could pick out your chicken and have
it butchered right in front of your eyes!!
This is the market - it was raining, but we made the best of it! We walked in on street level, which was actually the second level, and we wandered around looking at all the delicious vegetable and fruit stands for a long time before deciding what to get! There was everything you could imagine, from flowers, to chickens, to parrots, to wooden toys for children...seriously, it was a phenomenal market! We got some great tasting food for cheap!
Anyway, we
headed back out to the city after the market and made our way across the
Douro River to where the famous wine cellars are located. Portugal is known for their production of Port Wine. Well, I guess I should rephrase that. Porto has the wine cellars in which the Port wine is stored...but the grapes are picked and the wine is produced along the Douro River in the northern provinces of Portugal and shipped to Porto for storage. We
enjoyed a free tour and tasting at Taylor’s Wine Cellars which included
samples of both their white Chip Dry Port Wine, and their red Select Reserve
Port Wine. We learned that port wine is sweeter and a much
stronger wine because the fermentation process is stopped after about 4
days, and then a grape spritzer is added. By stopping the fermentation, you preserve more of the natural sugars of the fruit, so it’s a naturally sweet wine. We also learned about several different types of Port wine, one called a Vintage. The Vintage wine keeps aging once it’s bottled, and the longer it’s
aged, the better wine it will be. Because of that, on
their menu, they had a bottle of their Vintage wine that dated back to
the 1800s (it was bottled before the American Civil War) and it cost
2500 euros per bottle, or 100 euros per glass. Needless to say, we didn’t try it, but it sure sounds interesting!
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| Wine cellars at Taylor's |
After the tours, we bummed our way around the city. We saw the picturesque Riviera village near the river, and the beautiful train station. The city also has a ton of churches. After wandering around all day, we came back to the hostel to make ourselves some rice and beans for dinner. We
had meant to cook the red beans for lunch…but we discovered you have to
let dried beans soak for a long period of time before you cook them, so
we made them for dinner. That night, Katie and I worked on our
final papers for the semester - we had both brought our laptops along
with us to Portugal because we knew we had this daunting paper looming
ahead of us, and due to our travel plans, we really had to finish it
soon! (See? We study too...)
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| This is the old Riviera town along the river front. |
But, the
next day, we took a free walking tour organized by our hostel, which
was really interesting even though we saw a lot of the same things we
saw the previous day. We were able to learn more about the buildings as well as the history behind a lot of the places in the city. We learned about a church that was built a very long time ago - circa the 1000AD, and our tour guide informed us that the first mas was given in 1120AD. Quite old if you ask me! The church itself was quite impressive, and ahead of it's time. Some decorations on it appeared to be very similar to Gothic cathedrals, but my art class has taught me they came much later in time.
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| Very old church in Porto, Portugal |
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| This is the cafe where JK Rowling wrote parts of the Harry Potter series |
On the tour we got to see some really interesting things - including an old book store that was JK Rowling's inspiration for Harry Potter's staircases, as well as the cafe she used to sit in and write the Harry Potter series. We also saw the train station, which had a ton of beautiful tile work inside. Everywhere you look in Porto there are buildings with blue tiles on them. In fact, just down the street from our hostel was a church completely covered with beautiful blue tiles. The buildings here are beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, and the people here are so wonderful!
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| The inside of the train station! |
After
the tour ended, we went back to Taylor’s Wine Cellar to purchase some
souvenirs (after a long discussion on how we could fit them in our
carry-on backpacks). Porto is an extremely hilly city
(something I didn’t know until we got there!) so we were walking up and
down and over, and down and back up and every which way to find these
wine cellars.
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| The church with the incredible blue tiles |
After visiting Taylor’s one more time, we walked past another wine cellar that had free tours, named Croft. We actually took a Spanish tour there, and we understood almost 100% of the tour! We even explained it to an Indian man who was on the tour and only spoke broken Spanish. It felt pretty dang good to be able to explain it to him! After that, we came back to the hostel, cooked lunch at about 5pm, and watched a movie. We
made dinner at 9pm, and sat in the kitchen drinking wine and tea with a
few people we met in our hostel until 1am talking about literally
everything. We were hanging out with Todd from Perth, Australia, Julia from St. Louis, Missouri, and Rainer from Dusseldorf, Germany. It was a very fun night to get to know everybody’s story. That’s what the hostel experience is really about.
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| The streets of Porto, Portugal - they have a unique type of beauty. |
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| Houses built on the green slopes of the river |
Well, Monday morning (today) we got up, checked out of our hostel, and caught our flight from Porto back to Madrid…and that brings me full circle to where I am now…still sitting on the bus from Madrid’s airport to Valladolid. I’ll go back to classes tomorrow, but next weekend I’m off to Sardinia, Italy. It’s an island north of Sicily, and south of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. I’m really excited! But for now, I’m going to revel in my fantastic weekend travels to Portugal. Once again, this country has won my heart over! The people were so genuine, and kind. It was truly a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
And that concludes my blog updates! It’s been a whirlwind of a month so far, and I know it won’t end until May 20th. The date is looming in the future…last weekend after my bad experience in San Sebastian, I would have told you I was more than ready to be home. But after traveling this weekend, I’m not sure I want this ever to end. It’s been a dream come true, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better.
With much love from Spain and Portugal,
besos y abrazos,
Erin
This is the market - it was raining, but we made the best of it! We walked in on street level, which was actually the second level, and we wandered around looking at all the delicious vegetable and fruit stands for a long time before deciding what to get! There was everything you could imagine, from flowers, to chickens, to parrots, to wooden toys for children...seriously, it was a phenomenal market! We got some great tasting food for cheap!
Anyway, we
headed back out to the city after the market and made our way across the
Douro River to where the famous wine cellars are located. Portugal is known for their production of Port Wine. Well, I guess I should rephrase that. Porto has the wine cellars in which the Port wine is stored...but the grapes are picked and the wine is produced along the Douro River in the northern provinces of Portugal and shipped to Porto for storage. We
enjoyed a free tour and tasting at Taylor’s Wine Cellars which included
samples of both their white Chip Dry Port Wine, and their red Select Reserve
Port Wine. We learned that port wine is sweeter and a much
stronger wine because the fermentation process is stopped after about 4
days, and then a grape spritzer is added. By stopping the fermentation, you preserve more of the natural sugars of the fruit, so it’s a naturally sweet wine. We also learned about several different types of Port wine, one called a Vintage. The Vintage wine keeps aging once it’s bottled, and the longer it’s
aged, the better wine it will be. Because of that, on
their menu, they had a bottle of their Vintage wine that dated back to
the 1800s (it was bottled before the American Civil War) and it cost
2500 euros per bottle, or 100 euros per glass. Needless to say, we didn’t try it, but it sure sounds interesting! 
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