Today we headed off to the Museu Serralves, a contemporary art museum. It was about a forty minute walk from our hostel, and it took us to a different side of town that was more similar to suburbs. This museum is rather out of the way and was hard to find the proper entrance, we eventually did! Now going inside just proved to me some more how I don’t know anything about art. There were so many abstract things here, essentially everything. There were some art pieces that I feel I would have been able to do, like a canvas with a stroke of paint on it. Also there was literally a display case that had only a contact case and solution in it. Now how this is art I literally have no idea! Especially since there were no descriptions about any of the art pieces.
The museum also had garden in it as well. Now I was expecting just a few flowers, but I was in for a rather big shock! These gardens were huge! There was a vineyard, fruit trees, animals grazing, waterfalls, lakes and so much more! I know understand why they needed so much space outside of the city centre.
We then grabbed some lunch afterwards and headed off to walk back. Now this was such a LONG walk, that either of was were prepared for. We walked along the riverside and went over this really cool part where both the cars and pedestrians go over the water for this portion of the road. Walking along when I looked down I could see the water down below through open grate paneling. It was so cool, I was walking on water! As we were walking we passed by the beaches and there were people out in what I imagined to be freezing cold Atlantic Ocean. Now this beach did not compare whatsoever to Lagos…
30,000 steps later, yes that’s right we’ve finally got a pedometer we made it back to the city centre of Porto. And oh my does Porto have an insane amount of hills. We stopped by the hostel and researched where we could get a good traditional Portuguese dinner. I wrote down the addresses of three different places, only to come so realize that they were all closed because of Sunday! Thankfully we figured this out before we went to any of them. So much for trying to be organized. Instead we wandered through the streets and eventually came to find a restaurant that fit our criteria. We ordered Bacalha, Francesinha and Vino Verde. Bacalha is cod fish. Here is it has over 300 different ways to prepare it! It is dried out with salt and stored until use. Before you want to eat it, you need to soak it in water two days prior before preparing to eat. We had what the waiter said was the traditional way, which was eating it deep fried. Francesinha is specialty dish to Porto. It translates to ‘little French fattie’, it has the most meat on a sandwich know to anyone! It has layers of sausage, ham, steak on just a mere two pieces of bread which are then smothered in melted cheese and soaked in a beer sauce that has ketchup and spicy spices. And to wash that all down we had some Vino Verde, green wine. It’s not actually green though, it just called this since the grapes that are used are young and therefore have more sugars than if they matured. It as a result is sweeter and fruit like than typical wines, again I don’t know anything about wine, I am just regurgitation information. After we were stuffed from dinner we walked back to our hostel and got our bags all packed up and went to sleep early so we could wake up on time for our flight to Paris bright and early!