BEM-VINDO EM PORTUGAL!
(welcome to Portugal!)
Finally I have some free time to write about my travel in Portugal, which took place between the 29th of April and the 3nd of May. I visited three cities, Aveiro, Porto and Lisbon.
My friend Beatrice and I went there by plane from the Milano Malpensa airport to the Lisbon airport (the flight lasted almost two hours and a half), then we catched the train to go to Aveiro (the trains are not very comfortable: I don't know why, but the seats haven't headrests), where our friend Lorena is attending some courses for university.
We arrived in Aveiro at 6 pm and we had a brief walk around the city before dinner. It is a very pretty place with colourful houses and the streets are made with Sampietrini which, often, forms beautiful decorations:
We tasted the tipical Portuguese food in a restaurant called O Telheiro: my favourite one was the delicious "bacalhau com natas" (salted codfish with cream):
We ate also sardines, octopus and shrimps in each of the three cities: Portugal is a perfect destination if you love dishes of fish, like I do. You can find a lot of combinations in which the main ingredient is the salted codfish and all of them are delicious.
A thing I appreciated (which I don't see in my country) is the habit of sharing meals: in fact, in the restaurants where we had lunch - or dinner - the waiters asked us if we wanted to order three or four dishes and put them in the centre of the table, so that we could try different typical food together. I think it is a very good idea having a sort of "culinary tour": the places you visit are full of beautiful things to see, but the tradition of a country includes also its food and its unique flavours.
On the following day (the 30th of April) we went to Porto, a magic city in the north, not far from Aveiro. There we lived the Portuguese atmosphere, we saw a lot of craft shops with the typical objects made with cork, we walked into the narrow rises of the city, we sat on the bank of the river Douro, crossed by boats and seagulls:
Then we came back to Aveiro and we spent a day at the ocean (the 1st of May), with our feet in the thin sand and the freezing water. It was very windy, so it seemed that the temperature was colder, but if you sat down indoor, you felt very hot. There weren't clouds in the sky and the seaside wasn't crowded so we enjoyed the calm and the sound of the bursting waves.
Late in the evening we catched the train to go to Lisbon, which we visited on the 2nd of May. We decided not to follow a specific schedule, but to walk around without restrictions.
After we had left the hotel, we noticed in the distance the Elevador De Santa Justa, so we decided to go there. But, when we arrived, there was a long queue and we changed idea, because we had only one day to visit the city. We walked until we reached the Praça do Comércio, an astonishing square near the Tagus river and also known as the Terreiro do Paço (Palace Yard) because it was the location of the Paços da Ribeira (Royal Ribeira Palace) until it was destroyed by the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Then we climbed a lot of steps and we visited the Castelo De São Jorge, situated on the highest hill of the historical city centre.
After we had lunch in a restaurant near the Praça do Comércio, we took the typical Lisbon tram to go to Belém, a civil parish of Lisbon where we saw the Mosteiro Dos Jerónimos, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries) and the Bélem Tower.
At our last night in Lisbon, we tasted the Vinho Do Porto, a Portuguese red and sweet fortified wine produced exclusively in the Douro Valley.
On the 3rd of May, we had breakfast and then we took our flight.
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See you soon
Yours, Silvia
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