Hello From Porto, Portugal

Hello from Porto, Portugal! I wasn't intending on writing a blog post until I got back from Portugal, but my flight is delayed so here I am writing to you from a public computer at the airport.

To be frank with you, I'm writing out of anger towards my self for making stupid decisions. I make a lot of "fuck it" decisions and right now is the first time I feel regret for one of those decisions. 

I've been in Portugal for almost a week now, since last Friday, and I absolutely loved Porto, a small city located in the north west shore of Portugal. I stayed there until Monday and then visited my friend Catarina who I met in Tokyo of last May. We met while we both struggled to figure out the coin locker system and exchanged contacts to later get drinks. We never ended up getting drinks and only met for a total of 5 minutes but here I am visiting her here in Portugal. 

Because of Catarina I was able to see and visit five smaller cities in the north of Portugal in the area of Braga. She showed me around Barcelos, Guimaraes, Braga, Vianna do Castelo and Ponte De Lima. I'm going to write a post solely dedicated to the cities I visited, but right now I just want to write about the stupid decision that I made.

I'm completely pissed off with myself right now and being extremely critical for this decision that I made, but hopefully within hours I can be laughing at myself. 

So day 5, after I visited Guimaraes and Braga, I checked the weather for Lisbon and saw that it was going to be raining for my entire stay there. It was raining all day when we were in Guimaraes and Braga, I really didn't want to be in Lisbon due to the rain, partially because I feel like I had seen a lot of Portugal and I was tired of trying to understand Portugese. 

I really thought that Portugese was going to be easy to understand since I understand some Spanish, but it's so hard for an elementary Spanish speaker like my self. The words and grammar are the same structure, except Portugese has a shit ton of accents that sounds like French and sometimes Russian. 

So I decided that it would be fun to go to Barcelona, instead of Lisbon, since the weather forecast said it would be all sunshines. Plus I've been wanting to to go to Spain for longer than I've wanted to go Portugal or London and I was right next door, so why not. 

After finding flights to Barcelona from Porto and a flight from Barcelona to Lisbon, which I'm flying out of to go home to NYC, I began to cancel my hostel for Lisbon and look for new sleeping arrangements in Barcelona. Once everything was looking uphill, I decided to book the flight and hostel for Barcelona. 

I wasn't worried about losing money on my flight to Lisbon since I only paid $11.

So this morning I got to the airport and waited for my flight information to be released only to find out that my flight was delayed by 30 minutes. Okay, 30 minutes but there was a high likelihood that it was going to be delayed further since the weather wasn't looking too great.

I waited 30 minutes to find out, my flight to Barcelona was pushed back by 3 hours. I still had 15 minutes until my original flight to Lisbon departed. This is where I lost my decision making skills and I just started freaking out. Normally I make the decision my self by talking through it, but for some reason I just couldn't do it.

Quick decision making is a skill I pride my self of, but today I just completely shut down. 

I started frantically texting different people trying to get help to talk me through making the decision. Even then nothing was helping, I couldn't make the decision and the gate to my flight to Lisbon closed. 

If I had gone to Lisbon, I would've lost $160 for the flight to Barcelona and first night's payment for the hostel since it's less than 24 hours AND I would've spent the entire weekend in rain.

If I had gone to Barcelona, I would get there at 7 pm and only spend all of Friday since I'd have to fly back to at 5pm for Lisbon on Saturday for my flight to NYC on Sunday also at 5pm. 

Which one was going to be more worth it? I couldn't decide and the gate to Lisbon closed, so here I am writing to you about my ridiculous brain malfunction. Since now that I'm going to be spending less than 36 hours in Barcelona, I'm going to enjoy and make the best of every moment. 

I'll see you guys soon, hopefully my flight to Barcelona doesn't get cancelled and we can all laugh about this together.

Love, Rie

Follow me on instagram @rie_margaret for updates on new posts!