Doing the tourist thing

We used pooh-pooh tourist buses, but not any more (we even tried one in Galway last year). We intended doing the hop-on-hop-off thing yesterday but got side-tracked. We were determined to make good today even though the food recast wasn’t at all good.

First, though, we investigated some streets closer to home for coffee places. They weren’t keen on just giving us coffee at the first place we came across, so we had desserts as well. A few doors further along we found a really good place that concentrated on coffee and made a note to go back there again.

We’d toyed with the idea of getting a taxi to the place the tourist buses begin their tours but then decided to walk instead. Yesterday’s road works got in the way again and we had a bit of a wait before a bus was due to leave and took a pit stop for coffee and (pretty awful) pastry.

Rain was forecast to arrive around 4pm, which was the time the bus was due to move off. The forecast proved very accurate, unfortunately. We like the hop-on-hop-off thing because it’s a great way to get your bearings around a new place, and today’s trip fitted the bill nicely for Porto. A shame about the weather, though.

More drama later on, unfortunately. I’d made a restaurant reservation from home weeks ago to celebrate Carl’s big birthday that we’d missed making a fuss about because of the Covid situation last year. So, instead of celebrating in Norway as originally planned, I booked what looked like a suitably posh restaurant here. I pre-booked a taxi using the FreeNow app, and we were due to be picked up at 7:40. Didn’t happen. Instead, the pre-booking confirmation just disappeared from the phone’s screen. I rushed downstairs to the restaurant we’d been to on our first night and asked them to phone a taxi for us. No go. All busy because of some sill football match. They phoned the other restaurant to pass on the news that we wouldn’t be with them after all and our downstairs restaurant managed to squeeze us in for a meal at 9:45 instead.

As we got back to the apartment the taxi app suddenly notified me that a driver was on the way after all and the eating arrangements changed back again.

Fortunately, we had a really beautiful meal in DOP Restaurant, who did us proud and made the belated birthday celebration into a total success.