Corinne CrawfordI took an Uber to the train station to catch my train to Porto. Once I arrived in Porto, I walked the short distance to the subway and got off at the station that was just a 5 minute walk to the next Airbnb I had booked. Taking public transportation is interesting. Sometimes it is very easy and things are in English or quite obvious such as where the subway lines go or how to buy a ticket. Other times, it seems as if I have been given no clues to figure out how to buy a ticket or even what direction I should be going. This proved to be pretty easy in this instance as the ticket machines were in English. You just have to be patient and take in the information around you for context clues. For example, the bus, train or metro may not immediately show your destination so you have to look deeper to see if your destination is a stop on the route. For the train to Porto, I was looking at the displays and could not see any train to Porto, so I looked on a map and figured out that the train labeled to Braga was the one I was looking for as it stopped in Porto on the way. I made it to my apartment, which was a small, cute place down an alley and I had forgotten to book one with a washer so I knew that my first task in the morning was going to be to find a laundromat as I was out of clean underwear. The following morning, I walked to a laundromat and it was a pretty cool set up. The machines were pre-loaded with soap and you started all of the machines, both washers and dryers, from a central control panel. You put your money in and pushed the button with the number of your machine. It was raining out and the walk was about 10 minutes so when my clothes were clean and dry, I called in Uber so I didn’t walk in the rain and get my newly dry clothes wet. I had booked another Ebike tour for Porto with a company called Ciclo and was glad that the morning rain was dwindling down and the skies clearing for the afternoon. I took another Uber to the meeting place as it would have been about a 35 minute walk and I didn’t want to tire myself out before the bike tour. There is no way I could do a regular bike tour in Porto with its many hills.
The tour was 3 hours with stops along the way. I like doing these types of tours because it gives me an overview of the main sites, where they are in relation to each other and the routes to get to them so that I can better plan my own site seeing. I had an idea of what I wanted to visit in more detail the following day. My tour group was two couples from Belgium and our tour guide, who also happened to be originally from Belgium but had lived in Porto for 9 years.
After the tour, I walked part of the way back including over one of the main bridges that was under construction and then called an Uber to take me the rest of the way to the apartment. I made a salad for dinner having gone to the grocery store just 5 minutes away the day before. I went to bed early with a plan for the following day. I had noticed a weird sensation in my throat growing throughout the day, like something was stuck back near my tonsils but didn’t feel too bad so I didn’t pay it much attention.
