After much celebration the night before and getting up early to pack, we boarded a bus to Porto, Portugal. Since I had arranged a flight out of Porto on Saturday, I checked out of the dorm and left Santiago for the last time.

On arriving in Porto, we got a tour of a series of houses (Casas de Boa Vista) designed by Alvaro Siza. The houses were full of amazing details. I noticed two other interesting differences between Portuguese houses (at least these) and American houses:

• The house was a six bedroom house, but had six or seven bathrooms. Apparently the standard is about one bathroom per bedroom.
• Marble and granite are inexpensive in Europe and so are everywhere. The soffits around the doorways and garage as well as all the bathrooms were done in large pieces of marble, which would be an indication of huge luxury in the US, but is not out of the ordinary in Portugal.

After the tour of the apartments, we drove to Matosinhos (just north of Porto) to visit one of Alvaro Siza’s first projects — the Boa Nova Tea House. Sadly, the former restaurant has been empty for some time and has been stripped of its copper flashing and other parts. The site though is amazing and you can see why the project is so well known.

Just down the coast at Leça da Palmeira are Siza’s Swimming Pools, which were completed at nearly the same time as the tea house. We spent three hours at the pools, swimming (the water was COLD), eating and enjoying the sun.

After the pools, we changed and drove back into Porto to visit Siza’s office. The offices are lovely, functional and filled with sketches, plans and more models than in most architectural offices. We got a quick tour from one of the architects in the office (the same one who gave us the tour of the house earlier, but I didn’t catch his name) and then Siza signed the books that nearly everyone brought with them. Siza was very, very nice about the signing considering he had a broken arm and there were over 20 books to sign. I had Siza sign the report I did on him for history last spring.

The students who were returning to Santiago had to leave abruptly, so after about two minutes of quick good-byes with the people we’d spent three weeks with, six of us (me, Jordan, Jackie, Magda, Javier and Scott Brown) loaded into taxis to go to our hostel.

The Gallery Hostel in Porto is extremely nice. If you ever make it to Porto, I highly recommend staying there. We checked in at about 8p and then on the suggestion of three lovely Belgian women we went out in search of dinner with two German guys we met at the hostel. We were supposed to meet up with Tatiana for dinner, but by the time we were ready to go out, she had already left her room, so my adventure in Portuguese pay phones was unsuccessful.

After dinner Magda and Scott headed back to sleep, but the other six of us wandered around Porto a bit and had a couple of drinks before getting back around 3a.

Enjoy the photos of the day.