Viseu & Aveiro

Hello everyone,

This weekend me and my familly decided to go visit other familly members that live in the central area of my country. We go there very little even though its less than 2 hours away by car.
They recently moved so we did not have an address and had to wait till someone gave us it to know if we were going or not. We got it thursday and called right away to schedule.

We left Porto in the morning and arrived at Viseu around 2pm. Here's part of a map of Portugal so you can check where I've been.

My aunt had already prepared lunch for us so soon we were eating. Mari had a bowl of carrot soup and two plates of rice and chicken. She is eating a lot! She ate more than I did!

My aunt lives there with my uncle and my grandfather. They also have cats but the scared type who run when someone tries to touch them. Mari tried "catching" a few but with no success.

Mari had a blast that day! Everyone wanted to play with her and she was certainly the center of attention.

I know every mother thinks the same about their son/daughter but I do think Mari is one of the nicest and cutest babies ever. <3

After lunch my aunt invited us to go around the block and check the differences between where she lives now and where she lived before (seriously it was a very boring small town and she had nowhere to go since she does not drive). They now have everything: a shopping mall  (shops, restaurants, cinema...), coffee shops, bars, travel agencies, banks, supermarkets.... everything basically. 

 We then went back to their house and watched tv and just hanged out for a while. We also had dinner there. My aunt is a great cook! Mari ate a ton, again! I don't know what's wrong with this child! haha

And since we did not know how many rooms their home had and also because i did not want to intrude after not visiting for a while we reserved a room in a hotel. My aunt was sad but understood. She told us we should stay with her next time.
It was very hard to say goodbye especially due to my grandfather's age. We must try to visit much more often. I could tell he was sad to see his only great grandchild go. Here's a photo of them:

We left and got in the car, got the gps running and tried getting to the hotel. Unfortunately it ended up being very confusing and stressfull because aparently people hang out in that area on saturday nights and the streets are very narrow and parking very scarce but we ended up parking a bit far and just walking there.

We finally arrived at the hotel I booked, a small luxury hotel called Casa da Sé.
We were greeted in a very nice manner and I was very impressed with the decoration and our room. All the wallpapers are the original ones from the house. The furniture isn't and some of it was for sale. Apparently the owner also owns a couple antique stores and can just refurnish. Interesting huh?

Our room was the Mirita Casimiro room, #202.

The view from one of our windows: 

I felt like such a princess there I just had to take some more photos of my outfit. I had not worn this dress in a long time and never in such a casual fashion so this was a nice pick.

Mari fell asleep instantly and so we had time to take a nice shower and just take it easy. It was really a nice evening for us, i missed relaxing this much. And It made me want to sell my bed even though i love it and get a king sized bed... those things are huge! Mari even slept with us in the morning with 0 danger. It was amazing.

Today we got up very early, 6am I think so I had time to get dressed slowly, pack everything and just relax. Breakfast was only served between 8am and 10am so we couldn't help but wait.
Finally we got to go down and had something to eat, we were starving!

They had 4 or 5 home made cakes to chose from, of course tea, coffee, water, orange juice... a big selection of local jam and different types of cheese. They also had fruit, yoghurt and ham, and other sort of things. They did not have scrambled eggs which i love but it was ok since i could not eat much anyway. The issue was that they did not have a baby chair so Mari was fed on my lap which does not help when it comes to eating myself. I ate enough though.

We chatted a bit with the staff, Mari played a bit around the lobby and then went back to our room.
My husband decided to go park the car in front of the hotel since now there was room for it and in the meanwhile Mari fell asleep again. I dozed off too.

When he returned i ask that he took a few shots of my outfit that day:

 We finally left, checked out and got everything in the car. We were in the historical area so we took a while to visit the local religious art museum and also the Viseu cathedral. Mari ran a round for a while, but we tried to be as silent as possible since there was a service being held at that exact time. I am not baptized nor do I follow any religion but i'm a huge fan or religious art and architecture. I know that might be weird for some...

After that we visited the museum. We finally got in the car. I called my brother who is studying in the area but he was not feeling well so we ended up skipping the part that we scheduled with him which was to have lunch together. Because of that we just figured we'd go to the town of Aveiro for lunch, the fish restaurants there are great. I asked on facebook if any of my friends had any recommendation and we got a few names. I went with one of them and since it was easy to find we tried that one.

The area is not that pleasant to the eyes to be honest, its in the middle of all the confusion. There's another area i like more. But today it was interesting since they had a used item market going on. This ended up being an antiques filled weekend!

We ordered pea soup which Mari ate completely and them a typically Portuguese dish called cataplana which is basically a sort of fish and sea food stew with some potatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, salsa etc. It ended up being too much food even though Mari, again, ate a bunch as well!

 My husband was driving so he had a non alc. beer. I ordered wine.

I did however see a piece of chocolate cake that looked delicious and i had to have some even though I was full. I do not regret it because it was ridiculously delicious! Oh my!

It was time to say goodbye to Aveiro and our weekend adventure. We did have fun and I'm so glad I'm taking these oportunities to do things with my familly. I want 2014 to be a much nicer year than 2013 even though i had a good year. 

Anyway I hope you liked reading, it's time to sleep and I should already be in bed! I wanted to post this before. <3

Love you all,

Jo