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Bordeaux is a gorgeous and wealthy feeling city. I spent the couple hours before my flight wandering, eating chocolatines, and watching an outdoor African dance class.

My flight went swimmingly and I got to Porto around 5 pm. After quickly dropping off my bag at an airbnb, I headed out to meet Krisjan, one of my Dad’s friends from his time in Iceland. Krisjan and his family were on a week long vacation in Porto and over a bottle of wine they filled me in on the history of how they came to know my parents. One of their sons recently returned from a six month trip through India and Southeast Asia and I eagerly picked his brain for tips and must sees.

The next day I first walked to the Portuguese Center of Photography to scope. The museum is free and located in a former prison. They’ve kept most of the prison doors intact in the labyrinth like space, and included captions on some of they famous prisoners that were held in different cells. One particular prisoner that scored a room with a beautiful view of Porto served his time for the crime of adultery…. things are a wee bit different now.

One of the exhibits detailed the evolution of photography technology. My favorite part of this exhibit was a section on “stereo cameras & viewers” which are cameras intended to capture the world as we see it with our eyes. They attempted to achieve this immersive goal by producing two simultaneous, but slightly shifted images to recreate the perception of our left and right eyes. The final result didn’t resemble a POV worldview at all but I enjoyed the concept.

From there I descended the steep stairs of Porto and laid along the water in the sun. Eventually hunger sent me back in the direction of my airbnb, and on the way I stopped at Bolhao market to buy some figs to munch.

Marc and Max arrived with their family soon after and I joined them at their rental. We set our stuff down and walked to a restaurant in central Porto. We ordered Francesinhas, a typical Portuguese dish that consists of a meaty sandwich covered in 4 slices of white cheese and an egg all doused in tomato soup. Effectively it’s the poutine of Portugal.

We ate dinner with the family, picked up a bottle, and walked back to the water front to slurp poorly proportioned gin drinks and shoot the shit. Once we were sufficiently buzzed we headed back uphill to the Rua de Galeria de Paris, a local party street. The pedestrian-only road was packed, and soon after we met a Canadian couple. The guy was clearly a hockey bruiser that had paid the price with his face. His girlfriend kept awkwardly remarking that he was “definitely an alcoholic” and slowly we distanced ourselves. Around three am we walked to “hard club” near the water for a Drum n Bass night that Jake and I had checked out when I was here in May.

The grungy club was crawling with drugs & fast paced music. Ultimately we took advantage of the 2 Euro beers and bounced around the bar until 6 am before returning home.

Unsurprisingly we woke up late – just in time to catch lunch with the family. After groggily getting our lives together we took the blue line to the beach to spend the afternoon recovering in the sun. The beach was a sand storm, and people had barriers placed around them to protect from the incoming sand.

Afterwards we walked to a cafe and I ordered an açai. It didn’t even flirt with the açai of Brazil and the granola to berry ratio was completely out of whack, but the nostalgia was worth it.