“Look at the size of those melons”

As mentioned at the start of my previous post I’ve spent a few days in Portugal for the wedding of Sonia and David.

I had done an appalling lack of preparation for the trip and left most of the planning to Amy. This led to me getting confused about where I actually was. I thought we were in Porto. On one of our walks, when we were up high, I had a look round to see if I could see FC Porto’s stadium. Transpires I would have needed fabulous eyes as it transpired we were actually in Viana do Castelo, a mere 75 km along the road from Port.

Amy and I thought the town was putting on bit of a show for the wedding but It appears that there is a big festival in few weeks and the place was looking fabulous as they set up the decorations.

We only had one full and clear day for doing touristy things. We decided to take the Elevador de Santa Luzia, a funicular railway, up to the top. I had unfortunately forgotten to bring my face mask with me so I was despatched off to a nearby shopping centre. After a grand tour of both floors and the bus station I finally found the supermarket and returned with a box of 50! We did our bit for local goodwill and handed some out and on our return the bottom we just left the box on a chair for future visitors.

At the top is a beautiful church called Santuaria de Santa Luzia with wonderful views of the city. Even though there was a service on we were able to at least stand at the back and admire the architecture. Amy then suggested we go up the bell tower for an even more panoramic scene. As always I agreed but as we ascended the spectacularly narrow staircases I immediately regretted it. One of my recurring nightmares is exactly this situation and I really seem to struggle with these climbs. Nonetheless I persevered with the ascent and met Amy at the top. Took one quick glance and felt so uncomfortable that I then asked Amy to take some photos so that I could head straight back down.

We met Graham and Elizabeth for a lovely lunch and we indulged ourselves with (I think) Francesinha Atabernadas. Hard to describe really - some sort of meat sandwich drenched in a cheese sauce.

Amy and I went out again in the evening - initially the plan was for pizza but we ended up having extremely large steaks. I actually did a quick check of the exchange rate and my main course of steak with sides was 1 euro more than my cake and coffee in Sandnessjøen.

Norway is obviously famed for being an expensive place to live - I don’t drink so the price of alcohol doesn’t affect me which is good! However I read that the important thing to take into account is that people are paid a bit more in Norway and not to worry about converting it into pounds. I have developed a finely tuned and sophisticated method of working out the apparent expense of things or not. To get a rough ball park British equivalent I divide the Norwegian price by 10. That’s nowhere near right but it works for me. Now that I’m being paid in kroner I don’t do that v often but reasoning is as follows - 99 kroner or less is cheap (v pleased with my swimming trunks which were 99!), 100 - 999 not too bad and then over a 1000 is getting expensive. It’s not a scientific method but it works for me.

We had a very friendly waitress who very kindly offered advice about getting back to the airport. As mentioned a number of times I thought we were in Porto so hadn’t really given any thought to my return journey. I really wanted to keep it as simple (and cheap) as possible so after a bit of research I settled on the Autna bus. The stop was only about 10 mins from our hotel and the next stop after that was the airport. The downside was that the low risk bus was at 4.45am. So here I am at the airport writing my blog. There was a tiny bit of stress as yet again I put off actually buying the ticket till the next morning. As we were having coffee with Graham I was trying to buy the ticket, the 4.45 bus would not be an option and I started to get quite ratty (sorry Amy). I was always going to be able to get the airport so it wasn’t that important but I liked the idea of not having to talk to anyone en route. However about 10 mins of me getting progressively grumpier I discovered that I was in fact trying to book the wrong day so all was well….

But of course the main event of this wee jaunt was the wedding of Sonia and David.

The ceremony was held outdoors (in the shade fortunately!) and obviously a lot of care had been taken into making it very meaningful. A lot of the music we had performed at Dundee University either in concerts or at graduations and there was a beautiful selection of personal stories and texts.

The band they had hired were fabulous - gentle background music before the meal and after the meal they went onstage and banged out lots of hits from a certain era (mainly the 80s) for people to dance to.

The food? Goodness me it was a feast - I’m not needing to eat for a good few hours yet!

A fabulous time was had by all and I was struck by how radiantly happy the couple were.

All being well I should arrive in Scotland later (and since I wrote this things have not gone well - my flight has been delayed twice and I’ve had to rebook a different flight from Amsterdam to Edinburgh) and v excited about catching up with my kids and family.

And the enormous melons? That was a comment as we walked passed some fresh food stores in the town.

Thanks to Amy for most of the pictures.