Ville de Conde

This is my favourite day in Porto, simply because we are visiting the beach/seaside, a place that I grew up with :) This is a relatively new place, in the sense that it's quite unknown to the mass tourists and there isn't much of them trampling the whole place down, which is good, as the last thing you would want to see after escaping from Cambridge town is more people. LOL

As a 'ritual' before going home and not seeing my beautiful egg tarts anytime soon, it's something to start the day with, fresh, warm and crispy :P

Next, we wandered around town and found a local supermarket, with eye catching wine prices. Seriously, for 3 Euro's you'll get a really decent wine here. We saw this cookie medley and just had to try it as I thought I was just blinded by the egg tart as Portuguese's only famous pastries. Really interesting mix, especially the one with the burnt bits on the top, shaped like a inverse cone, rich yellow color (there's 3 of them in this pic). That caught my curiosity first and it turns out to be a rich coconut and eggy mixture baked in the over till crispy on the top. Too sweet for my liking, LOL. And no, we did not finish this pack all in one go, let's just say 80% :P

We ventured around town and found the good bakery listed in the mini guidebook. It wasn't hard to find, the town is really THAT small. Besides the egg tarts (again), we tried some odd looking ones which are basically a variant of the egg tarts. Since no one spoke English there, there's no point asking what it is and just try it :) I remember the one on the right with a dust of icing sugar on top, it seems to be less sweet with a richer custardy taste to it. Note that I'd sprinkled some cinnamon on top of the tart on the left. Was on egg tart high that morning, we ate all of that pastries within 1-2 hours of arrival in town -_- talk about binge eating ...

Feeling slightly guilty and quite 'jelak' (sick) of sweet stuff, the beautiful beach was next. It was slightly out of town, and took a good 15 minutes walk at least. The beach is just right next to the residential area, I'm so envious of the ones facing directly to the sea! There is a really exclusive hotel that looks like a some sort of a forte with really high walls and and a bell, facing the sea. The beach is almost unbelievably deserted, except with a really patient man fishing and some (two) sun tanners lying about. Just strikes me how underrated this part of Portugal is...

Especially when you have lunch facing a sea like this, with a good book facing the breeze ...