Porto!!!

So this past weekend I had my first vacation to Porto, Portugal! After spending a weekend in this city, I can honestly say it is one of the most underrated European cities ever.

Day 1
Started off on Friday with an 9am flight (yay...) and had my first experience flying on a cheap crappy airplane! Just a heads up to anyone else using RyanAir, apparently at the end of every flight they play extremely loud celebratory music for arriving on time. I was severely underprepared for that...

So after wasting 45min trying to figure out how to buy a metro pass, we were on our way to the hostel. Coming out of the metro, we were met with this view on the left.  Not a bad first sight in Porto!

The street we were on had a ton of shopping and little cafes, so we grabbed some lunch (food details to come in the next post...Portuguese food deserves its own post.) while we waited to check into the hostel.

Our hostel (Garden House Hostel) was so cute and nice!! They had a communal kitchen, living area, computer room, and a garden outside with a ton of picnic tables and green space.

After we checked in, we explored the city!  We found a castle/cathedral looking thing that had a TON of students outside of it. The students were all dressed in black pants and shirts with these long black capes for some reason. (literally straight out of Harry Potter)  This cathedral also had an amazing view of the whole city so obviously being the super cool people totally dorky tourists that we are, we took a million pics.

From there, we went on a tour to go visit a wine cellar of Real Companhia Velha, one of the oldest Port wine companies.  We watched a movie, walked through the wine cellar and then got to taste some of the wine.... turns out port wine is not so amazing.  Considering it was like 77% alcohol, I'm not too surprised, but still it was hard to drink the small glass they gave us.  The white tasted like cough syrup and while the red was more bearable, it was definitely a taste you'd have to acquire.  It was still a fun experience though because Porto is famous for their Port wine.

After, we went down to the Rio Douro, where they had tons of little shops and restaurants lining the beautiful river in Porto!  Everything was so pretty and made walking up a ton of stairs more bearable.

That night, we went out to dinner at the famous Majestic Cafe and then went on a pub crawl organized by our hostel.

Day 2

We woke up and went to a market close by our hostel for breakfast/brunch.  The amount of pastries that I ate is debatably too embarrassing for this blog.... (hint: it was more than 4)

After breakfast, we headed to the beach for the day!  It was only like a 25min ride on the metro, so we were there in no time and spent the day enjoying the 85 degree and sunny weather.

After the beach, we went back and went out to dinner near our hostel.  It was a race against the clock because our favorite pastry shop was closing at 8pm and we had to get pastel de nata, a kind of creme brulee dessert that's very typical in Portugal. We stayed in for the night because we had to be up at 400am the next day for our flight. (good times..) That night at the hostel there was live music in the garden by some of the people staying there, so we had great music to listen to as we fell asleep.

Overall it was a fantastic first trip and I look forward to going back someday to get some nata and walk around the city some more!