Cute l’il gifts

One day I reached the office and found this chick on my desk.

Later my manager told us that he had placed it there, to wish his subordinates good luck for the new year. (It was the first week of the new year.)

Each of us received a different animal. I snapped a photo of my chick with the bee that XL received.

I was joking that my chick was the roundest one of them all, because my manager knew I needed a stress ball to squeeze. 

And then Snorlax received a round sheep as a free gift from one of his online purchases. He didn’t like it, so I said I wanted it.

Round like a ball, and very squishy too!

Just like that, I now have two "stress balls"! Haha…

But the cutest gift of all is a Pokemon figurine!

Who's that Pokemon?

That's Blastoise! But...

It's Pikachu!

ZY received a duplicate from a blind box and decided to put it up for adoption...luckily I heard of it; I immediately said that I would gladly adopt it!

Pikachu-Blastoise met his friend in a Charizard suit, and I couldn't resist making this little skit.

Venusaur 🗨️ Hey guys, let's go catch some Pikachu!

Pikachu and Pikachu 💭 Act natural, act natural...

The most famous bookstore in Porto

This is the view from our hotel room in Porto.

the sun is rising!

A pretty nice view, actually. The clock tower right opposite the road does not seem to be anything special, but on the left you can see the Torre dos Clérigos (Clérigos Tower).

Here is a night view:

The Clérigos Church is not far from our hotel… to reach it, you can see that there is a slope going downhill and then uphill.

This photo was taken one morning. The photos below were taken in the afternoon, when there was a rather glaring sun at the back of the church (and therefore a less lovely sky).

check out that slope...

There is this famous bookstore called Livraria Lello, the staircase of which supposedly inspired J.K. Rowling for her Harry Potter books. The name on the storefront is totally different, which made me confused; I thought I hadn’t found the store yet. But the long line of people waiting opposite its entrance indicated that something was interesting here…

Because you see, it is now so famous that we have to buy tickets to enter.

As you can read from the sign board, there is a fee of 10 euros to enter the store. It is discountable on the purchase of a book, which makes sense for those who want to enter to buy books. But if we just want to take a look around, the entrance fee is 10€!

Needless to say, we did not enter. :P 

We crossed this square when going from Livraria Lello to the Carmo Church. 

the fountain

There are actually two churches side by side: Igreja do Carmo and Igreja dos Carmelitas (Carmelitas Church).

Igreja dos Carmelitas on the left and Igreja do Carmo on the right

Portugal is so famous for sardines that there is a special store just to sell sardines. 

I remember that this road was quite narrow (was it due to construction?), so I couldn't get far enough back to take a good photo.

Inside, it is bright and circus-like. 

There are so many kinds of sardines and other canned seafood. (all the products were canned) They were very expensive though...the cheapest can was maybe 7 euros? We didn't buy any there...we managed to find cans for 2€+ and 3€+ in another shop and in the Bolhão Market.

This store has several branches; we saw it multiple times, in Lisbon as well. I can’t remember whether I have better photos of the store in Lisbon; I guess we will see when I start writing about Lisbon.

Ovos moles of Aveiro and a Portuguese meal

Let's continue visiting Aveiro! 

Venturing away from the canal, we visited a confectionery store called Confeitaria Peixinho. It calls itself the oldest shop selling ovos moles in Aveiro.

We bought an ovos moles (given that this name is in plural, aka “soft eggs”, I wonder whether one piece of this dessert should be called “ovo mole”? :P ) and another dessert that looked quite good. 

the barrel-shaped ovos moles

The shop actually had many shapes of ovos moles. We asked for one, and didn’t specify what shape we wanted, and they gave us this one. 

The ovos moles was not very good. The outer white “skin” was thin and seemed to be quite dry (like dried egg white? Haha). And the filling was a simple eggy custard, rather solid. Like the filling of some cream puffs in Malaysia, which I don't like. :P

The other dessert, on the other hand, was really good. We had no idea what it was…but now that I am researching, I saw on Google Maps that someone took a photo of this in the shop, with its name. It is called ninhos de ovos moles (nests of soft eggs). So I guess the eggy custard is the same thing, just that the custard was softer than the one in the basic ovos moles, and the pastry (nest) around it also tastes better than the basic white skin of ovos moles. If I were to go to Aveiro again, this would be on my must-eat list.

the yummy nest of ovos moles

Some souvenir shops actually sell ovos moles sealed in boxes, as souvenirs. But we didn’t buy any, because I think the expiry date was about one or two weeks away, too soon for us at the beginning of our two-week trip!

Close by Confeitaria Peixinho, there is a church and the District Council of Aveiro (the town hall, basically?). 

Igreja da Misericórdia de Aveiro (Church of Aveiro's Mercy)

Câmara Municipal de Aveiro (District Council of Aveiro)

On the square in front of the town hall, there is a monument to José Estevão Coelho de Magalhães, whoever that is. Behind it is the Aveiro public library.

There is also a Cathedral of Aveiro that tourist guides say we should visit, but seeing as it was a little out of the way, we skipped that.

After all that walking, we looked for a good place to have lunch. It was to be our first proper meal in a Portuguese restaurant!

Using Google Maps, we decided to go to O Legado da Ria. (psst…I had huge difficulty finding back this restaurant, because I hadn't saved it, and digging out their receipt, it has another name on it. Luckily the road name was correct…but it took clicking on many shops in that area before I managed to find this)

We ordered two Portuguese specialties: grilled sardines and codfish gratin. 

grilled sardines, 15€

bacalhau gratin, 24€

This is their special; they call it bacalhau à Legado da Ria on their menu. 

Bacalhau is the name for cod in Portuguese, and there are many Portuguese dishes with cod. In Porto we had already tried codfish cakes, and we were to try at least another cod dish later.

salad that came with one of the dishes...I've forgotten which. Maybe the sardines?

The main thing to note is that the codfish gratin dish was HUGE. The sardines were an okay size (not small but not unexpected), and in the photo above, you can see the gratin dish beside it, at the far end of the table. The two dishes made up the length of the table, which is a normal-sized square table for two.

We were initially shocked and thought they had mistakenly given us a double portion of codfish gratin (the menu had single and double portions), but we realized that no, since the sardines were a single portion, this gratin was not double the portion of the sardines.

So…codfish is really cheap there, huh. :P At this price, with the huge piece of fish under all those potatoes, this dish is cheaper than what we would have paid in Malaysia for it, with currency conversion taken into account.

See how thick the fish fillet is…

And the potatoes were so crispy! I didn’t expect them to be so crispy since they are cut quite thick. They were so yummy that I ate quite a lot of them (I picked out all of those that didn’t get soggy), even though the portions of fish were already so big. The potatoes that came with the sardines actually tasted very good as well (well seasoned and with just the correct firmness in texture), but I had to give up on them because the crispy potatoes were better.

But the codfish was actually a little tough. Besides that, the taste was good.

This portion on my plate is to show more of the cheese, which does not look very clear in the other photos. 

After this meal, we no longer dared to order one dish each in a restaurant. We would share one dish, or order a main and a side. The huge portions make Portugal rather cheap food-wise. 

Also, we noticed that everyone was drinking wine, even though it was a weekday lunch. I had heard that we could ask for tap water, and that’s what we did. The waitress took a moment to understand (I guess it is not a common request!), and we felt very much like the odd one out, with other tables not just drinking wine but ordering more and more. So later on in other restaurants, we would order a drink to share. 

To return to Porto, we walked along the main road back to the train station. The road had a number of department stores, but not being into shopping, we didn’t enter any of them. To end this post, let me leave you with another view of Aveiro’s train station, from outside this time.

It looks so pretty! This is why an article said that it was a must to visit the train station of Aveiro, even if we were not taking the train there.

Train to Aveiro and its canals

On our first full day in Porto, we made a day trip to Aveiro. It may seem strange not to first visit Porto properly before going to see a nearby town, but this was in the interests of being able to walk. :P Aveiro needed more walking around, whereas in Porto it may be easier to take public transport to the attractions. So we wanted to get the necessary walking done first. If we felt up to it, we could still go around Porto by foot (which eventually we mostly did), but at least we had the backup option of public transport.

The famous São Bento train station is just a short walk from our hotel. The surroundings were under renovation while we were there, so I don’t even have a picture of the exterior. So here are a couple of photos of the famous azulejos (blue tiles that Portugal is famous for) inside the station.

view from the train when crossing the Douro river

Ovar station. We noticed the pretty blue tiles while the train was stopped there, so I snapped a photo.

Note: Even in the previous post, you will have seen photos of the blue tiles. We didn’t take photos of all that we saw, but they were really everywhere!

Upon arrival in Aveiro, the train station looked so picturesque that we took photos of it from the train tracks.

Then we made our way to the end of the canal.

At the end of the canal there is this red building which is the Aveiro Congress Center, and which was previously the Ceramic Factory of Aveiro (seems that it’s a heritage building).

to give you some bearings, the statue in the water on the left, is the same as the one on the right in the photo above

Beside the hotel, you can see a red heart in the background. That is actually a flight of stairs with "I ♥ Aveiro" written on it. We didn't walk all the way there. 

We basically walked along the canal, because most of the sights were there. If we go all the way to the end of the canal, we will reach a beach, and along the beach there is a place called Costa Nova that has some iconic beach houses. But we didn’t go there because it was too far away to reach by foot, and buses only came hourly. It seemed too much of a waste of time just to see the beach and some striped houses (search it up online if you want to see them!).

Beside the canal, there were sculptures representing ovos moles (literally "soft eggs"), a specialty of Aveiro. (though we can actually find it in Porto too) It is a dessert with eggy custard filling. We did try it later, but first we took photos of these. 

They make ovos moles in lots of shapes and sizes, but the barrel shape on the left seems the most common. 

On the canal there are cruises on moliceiro boats. Just like the gondola boats in Venice…which is why Aveiro is dubbed the Venice of Portugal. There were a lot of these boats…but they mainly seem to be motor-powered, and very much like a tourist trap. (I say “trap”, but maybe not…just an “attraction” :P ) 

moliceiro and bridge

canal and another bridge

moliceiro and a bridge decked in ribbons

I don't know why, but a number of bridges had colourful ribbons all over them.

Municipal Assembly of Aveiro

This is my favourite photo of Aveiro. I actually don’t care what building that is; I just love the view in this photo, with the building, its rooftop, the canal, and the clouds. 

Beside the canal there is a shopping center called Forum Aveiro. Not a high-rise, but just a semi-open-air building with stores. It turns out that I didn’t take any photos of it. Nothing spectacular. 

In the next post we will see some sights away from the canal! 

First day in Portugal (and the most mysterious thing in Porto)

From Changi Airport, we flew to Porto with a short transit at Munich airport.

Leaving Porto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport on metro

Walking to the hotel, we passed the Porto City Hall. As usual with this kind of places, it is hard to get a photo without other tourists inside.

Since it was too early to check in to our hotel room, we left our luggage there and set out to a market where we could try some local food.

On the way there, I spotted a gigantic tail hanging from a roof. I had no idea what it was, but I snapped a photo.

I expected it would be easy to find out what it was, but not really… As I was preparing this post, I used Google Lens to look it up. It seems that a number of tourists have posted photos of this, but no one had any information about it. Luckily I found this reddit post that gave me my answer!

The cat (yes, my initial impression of it being a cat’s tail was correct) is “hanging” from the rooftop of ZERO Box Lodge Porto. From Google Maps, I found a photo of the rooftop, where there are mini pools and we can see the cat’s face. 

After that we reached Mercado do Bolhão (Bolhão Market). It is a huge market selling foodstuffs. Very clean, no raw meat/fish here!

I didn't take photos of the individual stalls; there were too many. There were also a lot of people walking/hanging around the stalls. Later on in our stay, we actually came back to this market to buy canned sardines, which is a specialty of Portugal. We actually didn’t manage to find other places that sold the canned sardines cheaper than at this market!

As for food that we tried at this market, actually we didn’t try a lot. :P There was this sausage platter with three kinds of sausages, and we tried a fried codfish cake, which is a specialty of Portugal but this market isn’t exactly famous for. It was not very crispy, which was why it was mediocre, I guess. The squarish one is a veal patty I think? I can’t really remember, but it was mediocre as well. (maybe because they weren’t freshly fried)

The best is the one on the far side, the kind of smoky flavour that I like. The blood sausage was okay, but the other two were better.

codfish cake

the half-eaten one is veal I think...

Just outside the market is a shop called Leitaria da Quinta do Paço, famous for its eclairs. We went there for an eclair and also tried a pastel de nata (the famous Portuguese egg tart!)

The eclair has a very tasty filling, light and not overly sweet, but the pastry didn’t seem very good. The pastel de nata was not that good either… the pastry seemed rather hard.

After that we went to Manteigaria just across the road, and bought another pastel de nata. 

Same here, the pastry seemed rather hard… And this is the most famous chain for pastéis de nata! (“pastéis” being the plural form of “pastel”) At this point we were kinda writing off the local Portuguese egg tarts as not being our kind of dessert…but spoiler: We found better ones later.

Later that night we had a kebab wrap near our hotel, which neither looked nor tasted very good. We had kebab a few more times in Portugal, but then gave up trying, because they were nowhere as good as those we get in France.

Leaving the market to go back to the hotel, we visited a few other attractions on the way.

Capela das Almas de Santa Catarina (Chapel of Souls)

After that, walking along a street, I just took a photo of this shoe store because it's shaped to look like a tunnel.

Then we reached the Majestic Cafe.

Doesn't look that majestic, huh?

They say that this is one of the most beautiful cafes in Europe. I guess if we take a closer look at its interior, we can appreciate that (see the chandeliers…). But I had read that the cafe was expensive, so we didn't go in.

Church of Saint Ildefonso

To end this post, let me show you the most beautiful McDonald’s in the world (or one of them, at least). This McDonald’s is very near our hotel; we passed it many times in the next few days.

We stepped in to take a look at the interior, and to snap a few quick photos.

There are chandeliers!

mirrored wall on the side, making the area look more spacious