I arrived in Porto for Wikisym 2008 today. I had a little rough start with this town.

The first mistake was to trust Google Maps on where my hotel is located. The hotel it sent me to turned out to be the wrong one. But my one is located even more central. It has a four star rating but isn't that great at all. More of a three star one. I have a nice view on a garage, a gas station and a little church . WiFi is at incredible 8 EUR per hour and the only power socket in the room is that of the TV set .

My first impression of Porto was that it is crowded and dirty. But that turned out to be wrong as well. I just happened to run into the last bits of the Red Bull Air Race which took place here over the last days. Just a few hours later it is already much quieter again. And even the streets were cleaned within these hours. Impressive.

The town it self (at least the historic part I looked at) has a lot of beautiful old houses and small alleyways but unfortunately much of it is rotten and not well maintained.

The harbor with the giant steel bridge on the other hand is really impressive. The view there made up for the bad start

I'm looking forward to WikiSym tomorrow. As always I will blog about it at my work blog at CosmoCode ¹⁾.

Update: fixed the image sizes

Similar posts:

• San Francisco Diary
• Boston
• Ruins and Churches - Rome