City to city!

There was a time when all we really knew of Oporto was what you saw from the bus – the Galizabus – going from Oporto airport to Vigo. This mostly consisted of a lot of rather dull streets with high points being the extremely posh MacDonald’s on Avenida Aliados, where the bus stops to pick up passengers, and the Avenida itself. 

This was in the early days of our visits to Vigo and we had lots of other places to go and see. And then in that first summer a friend came to stay. Her plane was leaving from Oporto early on a Sunday morning so, rather than leave her to spend a lonely Saturday evening and also to extend her visit a little, I went with her to Oporto and we went round the city. It was one of those gloriously sunny days when the sky is bluer than ever seems possible and all the colours stand out extra clearly. All the old buildings of Oporto looked magnificent and even the tumbledown places looked good. 

Some months later Phil and I had occasion to stay overnight in Oporto and we walked through the city again, ending up down by the river. This time it was a dull, grey day. The old buildings still looked fine. But by the time we reached the river it was damp and drizzly. Phil looked at the bridges in both directions and commented, “It looks just like Newcastle.” A valid comparison, both the rivers are fairly busy, although the boats ferrying people to the port wineries are a little more picturesque than what you see on the Tyne. But it’s the bridges that do it: a variety of bridges spanning the river in both cities. 

I’m going on about this because we have just spent the weekend with a friend in Gateshead, just across the river from Newcastle. Arriving at Newcastle’s Central Station late in the afternoon, we set off to walk across the river to catch a bus to our friend’s house. And the bridges are pretty impressive. 

So is the castle, pretty old now. 

And the very modern Sage exhibition and concert venue, designed by Norman Foster. 

 

While we were there Phil did some maintenance work on our friend’s computer, more or less taking it to pieces and putting it back together again. It’s amazing what some people know how to do! This included taking all the keys off the keyboard and giving them a wash. And so I found myself taking photos of the keyboard so that we had some chance of getting them back in the correct places. Computer keys soup looks like an interesting dish! 

We did get them all back in place and the computer worked fine after all the tender, loving care. 

During our return journey, we were deciphering the instructions on the ticket machine to catch the metro back across the river to Newcastle Central Station (all these ticket machines are slightly different wherever they are located and all are easy to use once you know how but initially are just stress-inducers) when someone came up and offered to sell us his ticket for £1. He no longer needed it and this was rather cheaper than the machine’s asking price. So we bought his ticket off him and went back to buying another from the machine. That’s when he produced another – his girlfriend’s no-longer-needed-ticket perhaps – and sold us that as well. 

And so we travelled the one stop to Newcastle in some trepidation. Had we just been caught in some kind of scam? Would we be fined for travelling on invalid tickets? Were we really stupid? Well, all the entry gates and exit were open so we didn’t need to test the tickets in that way. And no inspector stepped forward to look at our tickets. So if it was some kind of scam, we got away with it this time! 

And now here we are, back in Delph, which today has been amazingly sunny once again, if a little on the chilly side.