Hi Dicas!!!
Moving on to share one more experience. With the planning in place to spend Christmas in Serra da Estrela, we decided to go to Porto. We thought about renting a car, but chose to go by train to have a new experience in train travel, this time in Portugal. After all, we had only traveled by train in the UK. However, right at the beginning of the trip I was robbed between Santa Apolónia Station and Oriente.
We stayed at the Hotel Eurostars Porto Douro. Our first impression was “how beautiful Porto is!” And our second, “Oh Jesus… what a slope!” (laughs), that's right, the amount of slope is huge. The city gave us the impression of being much busier than Lisbon. The hotel we were in is beautiful, the service and quality are excellent, but far from all the daytime bustle. As we had to look for the police to record the theft, we Googled the best way, or what we thought would be the best way. I think that on this path we climbed the biggest and steepest staircase of our lives. Too bad I didn't take a picture, it was nighttime, it wouldn't show so many steps. Besides, I still regretted the theft, I was out of patience. Tonight we had dinner at a wonderful restaurant in Cais de Gaia.
In our short stay, our experience, I would say was more gastronomic than cultural. But we had the opportunity to get to know Porto's famous busy street, Rua de Santa Catarina. Famous for being the street that has several clothing stores, haberdashery, shoe stores, the Via Catarina shopping center and numerous street vendors. Another curiosity is that this street was where Zara's first store opened outside Spain, in 1988.
We loved having known Porto, and we will come back in another opportunity to know a little more. However, we see ourselves living here. Despite being a city chosen by many Brazilians, and for being considered one of the cities with the lowest cost of living compared to Lisbon.
In the case of public transport, the only one we used was the Funicular dos Guindais. We take Ribeira towards Batalha. We pay on the FUNI Adult ticket – € 2.50 (valid for 1 trip) and on the Junior ticket (from 4 to 12 years old) – € 1.25, also valid for 1 trip. But beware, the opening hours vary according to the winter and summer seasons. When we took our walk it was winter (November to March), with opening hours from Sunday to Thursday from 8am to 8pm and Friday to Saturday from 8am at 10 pm. For more informations, click here.
The other means of transportation we used was Uber. We had no problems, on the contrary, we had the opportunity to meet several people, some immigrants, some Portuguese. If you haven't used Uber yet, register, use our discount coupon: rngg3m3vue.
