The Cathedral of Porto, Portugal

The Cathedral of Porto is a quite beautiful, large building along a hill just outside the city centre. It's a very old building, with construction started in the 1100s, and sort of looks like a medieval castle. Here's one I took at night, so sorry about the quality:

During the daytime my wife and I approached the castle, and we heard two Israelis speaking Hebrew. Since we live in Tel Aviv, we speak a little Hebrew, so I said, "Shalom, Ma Nishma? (How are you?" They were quite taken aback, probably since my wife is Chinese and I am quite Aryan looking, so we could be Muslim terrorists trying to discover the mythical secret of Israeli Hummus. Little did they know, that I am the legendary Ashkenazi superhero of the night, Moshe Batmann.

Well, after they said they were ok (Beseder in Hebrew, if you are interested) my wife screamed the Scandinavian war cry of "Odin, ahhh! och bar! (Odin, ahhh! And to the bar [afterwards]!" (She's a recent convert to Scandinavian Lutheranism due to the history channel's new series, Vikings). Then she attacked them, stealing enough money to pay for our church entry. Outside the cathedral is a statue of her god Odin, built by Angela Merkel on her last trip to Portugal to implement austerity measures.

The church's exterior is adorned with beautiful Portuguese tiles, or Azulejos. You can read more about these beautiful tiles at my post about the National Azulejo (tile) museum in Lisbon- a must-see visit in Portgual!

Aparently Portuguese use blue and white tiles because their printer ran out of yellow and red ink a long time ago.

Now the EU Empress Angela Merkel won't let the Portuguese buy new ink for their tiles since it would interfere with austerity.

Blue is a nice somber tone. Here's a man with a stick.

Inside, the church's ceilings are barrel-vaulted, which is essentially an extruded arch in one dimension. Since the arch is necessarily load-bearing, windows cannot be placed inside the arc, and are limited to the ends, like below:

Like most large Cathedrals, there's a rockin' organ!

There are some impressive side-chapels as well. Here's a gold-leaf one:

I find these lamps fascinating in Catholic cathedrals:

This statue looks Romanesque (e.g. 1100s, before Gothic), but I don't really know- Jesus just looks like something I made while stoned in art class in highschool, so probably pre-gothic.

This was an awesome- Indiana Jones style sarcophagus:

Below is a depiction of a monk party. "Tisk, tisk," shakes the monk on the right, while the left monk claps the vomiter on, hopeful that the young initiate can rebound and carry the party on! Ahh, Fraternite!

Baby Jesus is my favorite incarnation of Jesus.

Inside the cathedral you can visit a gothic cloister, for the obscene entrance price of 2 € (the cathedral visit was free, I was kidding about my wife beating up those Israelis).

The cloister is fucking amazing. You have to go.

Gothic arches have points in the centre versus roman style arches which were rounded. The gothic arc came later, and permits higher ceilings without so much outward force at the base of the ceiling supports.

This little princess may or may not have been in the cloister, I'm not sure.

He's a man with a love of nature and a flowing mane!

Fabulous!

The J-man himself.

Here is Jesus, with apostle Luke crying over his dead pet lemur. "Peace, dude," Jesus spoke, really stoned, "Let us eat it, man, with this delicious olive artisan focaccia."