Day 6 Lisbon to Porto

We left Lisbon this morning with a good impression of the city. We were very pleased with our pick of the Residencia Florescente Hotel. It's an inexpensive hotel that get five stars for location and convenience. The rooms were clean and the staff helpful and friendly. We made reservations to spend our last three nights in Portugal there. The drive to Porto was fairly easy and no one got hurt. We checked into the Hotel de Bolsa at two o'clock and were taken to our room; a corner room with a spectacular view of both the river and the port producers lodges (picture). After unpacking we walked down to the river and were struck with the similarities to Savannah, Baltimore, and other cities with waterfronts developed especially for tourists. I'm sure that will be our last trip down there. From the river we walked up to the city center and wandered around rather aimlessly. Porto is not a beautiful city, it has some great views, but it is not beautiful. There are many large, old, and magnificent buildings that are run down, abandoned and dirty. But there's still something special about them. We sat at a cafe at the Park Liberdade near the train station and watched thousands of people head home after work as the waiter happily gave us some Portugesse lessons. I could have sat there for hours and watched all the activity. A couple of beers would have to suffice and we would go back to the hotel and finish unpacking. We had skipped lunch so at about seven o'clock we started thinking about dinner and went down to the charming little hotel bar and asked the bartender for a dinner recommendation that did not include any restaurant down by the waterfront. He suggested the O Bom Talher, a little family run restaurant down the street and a place that if it were not for his recommendation we would have walked right on by. Sylvia ordered a half order of a delicious roast pork, potatoes, and cabbage that between us we could not have finished if we were starving. I on the other hand, ordered a traditional Porto dish; a stew of beans, several types of sausages, and tripe which is pig intestine. Plus there was some other "stuff" that I was unable to identify. It's definitely not going to be on my list of favorite foods. However, I did manage to get through half of a very large pot of stew with the help of large gulps of a local white wine. It's really a place I'd like to get back to...maybe tomorrow. After dinner we went back to the hotel and called it a night.