Porto!

I spent about three weeks in Porto, the city that I will call my home starting this fall, and I fell more and more in love with it the better I got to know it. It is kind of old and dirty - lots of abandoned buildings and so on - but that gives it character. That's one of the things I love about New York City, too - the messiness of it sometimes. There's a lot of life going on in both cities.

Porto is built on a bunch of hills - every time I walked home, I felt like I was doing a Buns of Steel workout, and every time I went running was a hills workout. It was surprisingly more energizing than tiring - but I will miss biking. And bonus - I usually have a terrible sense of direction/orientation, but the hills really help - "I know I was gasping for breath walking uphill to get here, so downhill must be the way back!"

Porto has a river and the ocean. So many bodies of water! And you know how I feel about bodies of water. The picture at the top of this post is a nighttime view of the river and Vila Nova de Gaia, the town just on the other side and the home of port wine.

I was kind of shameless about meeting people - when people wrote me about renting out a room but it didn't work out, I asked, "But do you want to hang out anyway?" That's how I ended up, for example, barhopping with a Brazilian artist/clown/pastry teacher/beekeeper.

Porto...soon you will be mine!