Last day in Porto and last day of the tour.

Today we went to a café near the university to talk to a recent graduate. He is currently an architect. He had three years of high school, three years of university +2 more to get a masters. He then spent time apprenticing in his field until he can pass the exams to be a full-fledged licensed architect. It took him 11 years. He talked about the problems that are occurring in Portugal because of the economy. The cost of living has gone up and many graduates leave to find jobs outside of Portugal. Some even do their studies outside of Portugal. Even though tuition is very low, living costs are too high for students.

There doesn’t seem to be a general studies program like we have an American universities. They expect that students will get a decent liberal arts education at the high school level so that when they enter the university, they will just take classes mainly in their subject area. So the universities are divided up into schools, or in our case, departments such as architecture, medicine, etc. Our speaker’s girlfriend is an environmental engineer, and they are considering leaving Portugal.

He also talked about the clothes that university students wear. They have these capes. As a freshman, they can only drape the cape over their arm. When they become a sophomore, they go through some kind of a ceremony that allows them to then use the cape other ways. The capes are black and so is most of the other clothes that they wear except for a white shirt. You can personalize your cape by sewing on decals, but you can’t buy the decals. You have to earn them. J. K. Rowling taught at the university here. This is where she got the idea of capes for Harry Potter.

I happen to notice that the nails on one of his hands were longer than the nails on the other hand so I asked him if he was a musician. He does play the guitar, especially jazz and Brazilian music.

Here are some more pictures of the city as we were walking this morning.

This McDonald’s bought an old café and they did the right thing by not changing it around very much. Kudos to them.

The university’s administrative building

Inside the administrative building there with these three huge balls depicting the moon, the Earth and Mars. I took a picture of the Earth.

18th century Church near the university.

After our discussion, the group moved onto the local market. Our guide bought us samples of cheese and nuts and wine. I bought some spices to bring home.