Porto

Getting to Porto takes approximately two hours on the train from Régua. On leaving the small Douro town, the train runs along the river, giving us the opportunity to stick our heads out of the train window trying to spot the farm where we are staying, and nice places for river swimming.

In Porto, still in the walking mood, we decide to walk from the centre of the city to Museu Serralves, about 3km northwest from Sao Bento station, the central one. Wanting to keep to the spirit of adventure, or for some other reason, we decide to not follow a map, until we get hideously lost walking around a university sports field and trying to get from one side of the motorway to the other.

We finally arrived, and rewarded ourselves with an ice cold beer, and two good exhibitions, one a sort of retrospective of Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre, and another of David Goldblatt’s work.

Along our walk we came across different examples of contemporary architecture, the strangest being this one below. We concluded it might be student accommodation. And that there might have been a show of some kind recently, although now there was absolutely no crowd to control.

And finally, the perfect symmetry of the garden of the Museu Serralves.