Yeah we are back in business.
About 100 metres from our hotel is a large modern food hall and an upmarket shopping centre. The food hall was where we went for a meal last night ¬ see photos in the last post. The shopping mall had a small IT shop selling a lot of computer stuff. I went there last night about 9pm (they are open 10am to 10pm seven days a week) and spoke to a guy about getting a new charger for my Dell laptop. No go. After deciding over night that I would buy a new laptop I went back to the shop (Chip 7) and spoke with a very helpful guy.
I now have a Lenova laptop with Windows 11 Pro for 609.99 Euro, 499.99 for the laptop and 110.00 for the Windows. 23% of this was taxes. It is a slightly different set up so I am floundering around a bit and stuff keeps coming up in Portuguese and I have to translate back to English. However I am just grateful to be back online reasonably easily and in short time.
So back to what I was going to blog yesterday.
An early start compared to the day before. Checked out of the hotel by 7.45. Today is a transfer day from Lisbon to Porto. Our intercity trains leaves from Oriente Station , 5 stops away on the Metro. We wanted to use our Lisboa Card, the 72 hours of which ended at 8.30 so we had to complete our trip by 8.30am. On a week day this would be no problem but this is Saturday and we were not sure of the frequency of the trains. As it happened it was not a problem. Out of the Metro system with time to spare.
Oriente is a major transport hub for Lisbon with the Metro, suburban, intercity and international (ie Spain) trains, and local, intercity and international buses. As well as a gazillion taxis, all of them black with a pale torquoise roof. This transport complex has mutiple levels, dozens of cafes and bars, a police station and the biggest supermarket I have ever been in. It was designed by Salvatore Calatrava, one of the super hero modern architect/engineers and was completed in 1998. It is very organic with huge concrete arches and buttresses and the platforms are covered in a lattice structure of glass and metal a bit like walking under a canopy of ferns.
Our train left at 11.39 and thankfully, after our problems last year, there were no strikes this year. We arrived in Porto half an hour behind schedule at 3.30pm. We needed a couple of Andante train/bus cards and tried the ticket machines. You can switch these to English but we could not figure how to do this and didn´t have a hope of following all the instructions and options in Portuguese so went and saw a real person at a ticket desk and she had us fixed up in about 2 minutes. Porto Caminha railway station has woeful signage andIT took us a long time walking around in circles before figuring out the Metro train is in a separate building about 100 metres from the intercity train. But then maybe we are just not very bright. Once we sorted this out it was a short Metro ride and a 10 minute walk to our hotel. The Hotel Duoro is smaller than the Ramada and more boutiquey and once again away from the historic centre but is close to a large food court, shopping mall and small supermarket. It is nice and quiet and we will be comfortable here for four nights. The photos for this post are in the preceeding one.