Porto part 2

Large parts of the second day of our Porto weekend was spent similar to the first day: eating and taking photos!

Our Airbnb hosts were so nice as to deliver fresh bread and pastries to the flat in the morning and we went out to the nearby supermarket to buy a few more ingredients for a breakfast at home. I love going to foreign supermarkets and looking at all the products and buying strange things. This time we ended up buying a lot of different colourful cans of fish.

After breakfast we made our way over to the market. Market photos are in this blog post.

I spotted a bit more laundry as well (check out my dedicated Porto laundry section).

Afterwards we walked around the streets and enjoyed the dry weather while we could.

 

Then it started to rain. A lot. It was absolutely lashing it down and we decided to go back to our apartment to rest for a few hours before going out again.

We were keen on experiencing some traditional Portuguese Fado music. I’d been to a Fado place a few years ago in Lisbon and it was really good! Very sad but beautiful songs. But it was a bit touristy. I was with a group of German girls and we were challenged by a group of Turkish doctors to do a folk song sing-off. We miserably crashed and burnt with our weak rendition of Eisgekuehlter Bommerlunder.

So this time we wanted to go to a fado place where the locals hung out. And Yishyene’s boyfriend recommended this place: a small bar which was packed with about 100 people.

It turned out that a lot of the audience were also performers! Each person sang two songs and then the next one stood up and sang.

The man in the background by the door is the bouncer. He didn’t let anyone in while a performance was in progress. He also shushed people if they were chatting in the background. I have to say that it was very well organised!

What I thought was really funny was that the singers were all taking photos of each other with their smartphones.

In a break I saw that they were uploading the photos to Facebook. I guess that was the only thing that united us with the locals – we all use Facebook.

Afterwards we went to eat Portuguese Tapas including a chorizo that we needed to cook at our table. Here’s Jayna braving the flames to turn over the sausage.

The next day it was beautiful sunshine again so we decided to walk to the restaurant where we were going to meet friends for brunch.

We randomly came across a marching band.

The brunch place was at the top floor of this Art Deco parking garage.

The interior was really cool! Colourful, retro and with lots of light.

Jayna and I shared the brunch for two. It was really yummy but a bit unusual because we didn’t have separate plates but we had to eat from the same bowls and plates. It was also impossible to cut the sandwich in half because it was so fully loaded, so we had to take bites each.

 

We had afternoon tea in this lovely place.

And enjoyed the free wifi!

And then it was back to London!