Wednesday Oct 5th: Day 4

My morning started at 4am and so it proved to be a long day. I ventured along the Douro for my morning walk and as today was a public holiday there was less car traffic but many more MAMILs on the road.

The morning trading went well and so I ventured across the river to have a morning coffee and Pasteis de Nata. Then home for some more work before heading out on afternoon walk where I took in the Cathedral and re-traced some steps from yesterday’s walking tour. Dinner was another quite affair before an early night.

Thursday Oct 6th: Day 5

It was a late start for me getting out this morning as there was rather thick fog/cloud but it eventually lifted enough at around 9 am to enable me to get out for a walk. I passed another group of poor Uni students going through some hazing ritual and there has been a bit of this going on around the place over the last couple of days. I had thought it was some Harry Potter type of ritual until my guide, from the other day, explained they were students going through ‘hazing’ as part of the start of the academic year.

I decided to continue my walk up to the Bolhao Markets as they had been in the process of closing when I first visited, however, I was rather underwhelmed. The building is rather dilapidated but, aside from that, there was not a lot on offer. There were some basic meat, fish and produce stalls, a couple of bakery stalls plus a few stalls selling touristy stuff. I realise that we are rather spoilt for choice with our markets back home but I couldn’t help think they were missing a great potential opportunity here.

I headed home after that for breakfast and a bit of trading before my afternoon tour.

I was supposed to be taking an afternoon ‘wine tasting’ tour but, as there were no other English speaking patrons for this tour, I opted for an alternative ‘dinner and wine’ tour as that already had three Irish ladies enrolled. This proved to be a good turn of events though as the evening was lots of fun and the three Irish ladies were very friendly and very chatty. It was a late night though and I wasn’t home until after 11.30 am.