Good Jesus

this past weekend, my fiancé and i went to braga which is credited as being the oldest city in porto. it is truly a very beautiful city, and you can tell by how intricate and well kept the cathedrals are that the city is also very rich in culture and tradition. well, that’s what i’m going to imagine about braga anyhows because i was really only there about ½ a day and didn’t get any real opportunity to see the entirety of the city. i was mainly there just to walk around, see the city, and visit the Good Jesus (as opposed to all the other Jesus’s out there)…

for starters, we took the train from campaña to braga, which is actually not that bad of a trip. it gives one the opportunity to really see the country side and the transition in the landscape between porto and braga. mostly, we just saw forests and vineyards, but that’s always cool, so i’m not complaining. once we arrived in the city proper, we made our way up towards the city center, which is a little uphill trek from the braga train station. we were trying to find the tourist office, and we did find it indeed. however, it was easter monday, and as such, the place was closed. great… now how were we going to find a map. no better place to look than the shopping mall, where we did end up finding a completely useless map for our purposes—of finding Bom Jesus. so we not only did not know where exactly Bom Jesus was, we didn’t know how to get there either, but it was okay because we had a drink before starting our climb to the summit and were in good spirits. we asked around, random passers-by and store clerks, but asking around didn’t gain us much of an advantage. i ended up calling the missionary who just told me that i could catch a bus. huh. what an epiphany [insert sarcastic scowl here] because several of the residents in braga managed to think that it was beyond reason to simply mention that we could have taken the bus. apparently without a car we were destined to never get there.

FINally, we caught the bus to the base of the stairway that leads up to the sanctuary. it was a magnificent sight to behold, and mere words don’t do it proper justice. Bom Jesus was built right up the side of a mountain, and though there was a cable car that could have taken us up to the sanctuary, it would have been an ineffably tragic deprivation of experience had we chosen NOT to take the stairs instead…