Monday, August 30

Porto has very few flat areas although the street we live in seems deceptively horizontal. We walk to the centre to seek out a famous church and as we go up and down and up again we discover exactly how unusual a street we live in.

Up and down we go and, oddly enough, it seems we mostly go up. At the top of a hill, in the university district, we visit the church of The Third Order of Our Lady of Carmo. I discover that ”Third Orders were originally intended to extend to laymen the spiritual benefits of monastic laws as well as some of the privileges, grants and indulgences enjoyed by the regular clergymen”.

Hmm, I say.

Later we walk down to the river, pausing to have lunch at a café on a slope so steep we have to keep hold of our glasses for fear that they will slide off the table.

We finally arrive at the Luis 1 bridge and I realise that Porto actually looks like the kind of collage you see on postcards. The clump of coloured buildings really do look like this, and the angles really do bang together in unrealistic ways.