Day 1 in Portugal 🇵🇹

So after the plane journey and the taxi from the airport, I finally arrived at the hotel in Porto. By then it was quiet, apart from the street lights, cars, colourful shop fronts, loud music, loads of people, scooters and fast food joints, etc.. Having delivered all my stuff to my room I was met at the reception area by one of the team and was invited to join the main group who were at a restaurant, suitably called A Bicicleta. A tried to eat a rather greasy snack meal but gave up so I joined a small group in search of ice cream. Having found some nice ice cream at the Timeout Market, we were good for turning in for the night.

Thus, started day 1 in Portugal, starting in Porto and finishing in Braga.

The town hall/ civic hall in guess where?!

A small group of us headed out of the hotel to find a coffee and a pastry breakfast, before heading to the arboretum and a wonderful overlook where we could see all the hundreds of people running the Porto Marathon.

One of the most striking aspects of the architecture in Porto is the use of ceramic tiles on the sides and faces of buildings, making this a very colourful city to visit.

Porto also has some quirky things too, including these taxis

Having met up with the volunteers for the building work in week 1, when we will be cycling, we had a joint lunch together and tasted the local specialty ‘franceschina’ - a strange combination of meat and bread covered in a cheesy, spicy gravy. I don’t see it catching on back in England!

After lunch we collected all our belongings and caught an organised bus to Braga to come to Domus House, which will be our home for the next two weeks. Wow! What a great place.

Having settled in, found our beds and taken a look around, guess what?! It was time to find a local cafe to find some food! We rather stumbled across a local place which did pizzas but none of the staff spoke a word of English and no one in our team spoke Portuguese! Eventually we were able to place an order including drinks and it was fantastic!

We will be back!!!