January 27th, 2015:

For the last two nights of my time in Portugal, I settled into the riverside city of Porto. Porto is Portugal’s second largest population center, the place where the country gets half it’s name from and all of it’s port wine.  My days were spent wandering the street looking for the right light and drinking coffee beside the river – my nights were quiet ones spent reading and indulging in a bit of the local food/port/cheese.   It was a relatively mellow couple of days, but it was the perfect setting to end my time in the quaint country.

January 23rd, 2015:

Evora is one of those little towns that you come across when traveling that you don’t really know what it is, but you just don’t feel like leaving.  There really wasn’t much to see – a church, some roman ruins and plenty of yellow and cream color buildings – but as soon as I checked in to the Hostel Namaste (very highly recommended by me) I felt at home and instantly decided to tack on at least an extra night.

The first night I was there was December 31st and Maria (the hostel owner), invited us along with her to a local party consisting of mostly young families and the middle aged demographic – other than me and couple other travelers in our group, the room consisted of about 100 Portuguese people, wine/whiskey that just kept flowing and live music.  Over the course of night the other travelers and I got to talking about the little hillside town of Monsaraz, which was supposedly beautiful but inaccessible without a car, We were kind of bummed we’d miss out seeing it when another lady at out table leans over and says “You need a car? I have a car. Cars are for getting places and I don’t need it tomorrow.”

The next day found us heading towards the Spanish border in a 15 year old car that rattled a bit with the advice of “If it makes noise, don’t worry about it, it’s old!”  It was a great day behind the wheel, even if the recommendation was to drive gently and don’t go over 100km/h.  I am always amazed at the generosity of people.

I ended up staying 3 nights here and spent long afternoons doing nothing but reading my book, drinking coffee and chatting about philosophy with Maria (who has a a PhD in the subject and taught it for 30 year).  It was just the right way for me to start off 2015.