Flashback to the 90’s with me for a sec.  One of the many interesting sayings and slang words to come out of that decade was describing someone as being “Monet.”  By calling someone that, you were saying that they looked fine from a distance, but once you got up close, they were a hot mess.

I found our first stop in Portugal to be very Monet.  Many of the pictures that I took make this city look lovely, but zoom in and you’ll see that it’s a little rough.

Do y’all get HGTV out here?

Our first day in Portugal was spent in Porto.  Let me start with the positive things about the city:  1) The layout and architecture is charming and has great potential.  2) The area of town that sits on the river is fun, has many great shops, and is full of friendly people.  3) Our tour of the Calem winery was great, and the port wine we had was fantastic!  I had no idea there were so many different types of port, including white port, which I had never seen before.  4) Portugal makes absolutely stunning ceramic tiles.  Patterns and colors are fantastically bright and appealing, and you’ll find them displayed all over town.  Some buildings have a simple strip of tiles surrounding a window or framing the name of the building, and some structures have their entire facade covered with them.

What I didn’t like about the city was that it appeared dirty and run-down.  Buildings looked like they haven’t been maintained in years; sections of walls were crumbling, roofs were caving in, ironworks were rusted through, and graffiti blanketed certain areas.  The surface of everything looked like it was coated in a thick film of dirt, grime and pollution.  Laundry hung outside windows of buildings that you would assume were uninhabitable.  I halfway expected to see small children in diapers running around the streets, unattended, chasing after free-roaming chickens.  Thankfully, it didn’t go that far.

Our tour guide explained to us that the downtown core was slowly being renovated.  People are moving back into the city, and pockets of nicer building and shops can be seen.  She was right, there were some very cute houses and refurbished buildings, but these were too few in number to affect the overall look of the city.

Even though I thought it was a bit of a dump, I still had a good time in Porto.  Maybe in another decade, once more renovations are completed, I could find the city charming and pleasant.

Is it time to go back to the ship yet?

I’ve heard many great things about Lisbon.  Didn’t Madonna just buy a house there?  Must be nice.  Bzzzzz, wrong.  Actually, I’m sure there are plenty of great things about the city, we just didn’t see any of them.  We signed up for a tour named “Highlights of Lisbon”;  Kevin said it should be called “Lowlights of Lisbon.”  Who knows, the tour could have been good, but we had the tour guide from hell.

Our tour guide immediately reminded me of the old Disney animated film, The Sword in the Stone.  Remember the evil witch in that movie, Madame Mim?  Well, Madame Mim looks like a younger, prettier version of our guide.  Seriously.  Now, I could easily get beyond the fact that her face could double as a Halloween mask, but what really irked me was the fact that she was actually mean to some of the participants.

Within two minutes of our first stop, she was yelling at some poor guy who was looking for a bathroom, telling him he could wait until we got to the church we were walking to.  She also didn’t care that we had a few people in the group who had some mobility issues; she just walked at her own pace, getting lost in the crowd.  She had to be told by two different people that she needed to have more empathy for those who may not be able to keep up as well.  That didn’t seem to make a difference.  Less than an hour after the tour started, we were all ready for it to be over.

We talked to other people on the ship later that day, and found that several of them had a great time in the city.  It’s really surprising how a certain tour or tour leader can change your perspective of a destination.  I wish there was a better way for the cruise lines to weed out the bad ones; I may have an entirely different feeling about Portugal if we had selected different tours.  But as of now, Portugal is checked off my list, and I have no plans on returning.