The End

I don't like to think about how long (or short) a time it is since we returned from Portugal (missing the volcano ash by about an hour, dammit, I wanted to stay). Our good intention of posting the last blog entry from the airport went the way of most good intentions. In my case, I was losing myself in a fantasy novel and in a state of denial about going back.

We'd like to summarise by listing our top 5 things to do in Porto. It's such an underrated city - while I don't want to have to share it with the whole world, I don't understand why more people don't go there. We had a bit of disagreement over what should go in the top 5, but here's the democratic list (email me if you want the real list).

1. Get the Metro across the Dom Luis 1 bridge to Jardim do Morro and walk back across, drinking in the view.

Looking down from the bridge at the port barges

2. Go azulejo hunting - i.e. the painted tiles all over the city. Start with Sao Bento station. Capella das Almas also worth seeing.

3. Eat a custard tart for breakfast (but probably only once - you'll feel sick after it for sure).

4. Get the funicular down to Ribeira - and back again - in fact, get the funicular as often as you can fit it in.

Buy some souvenirs while you're down there

5. Have a day away from the city, we recommend the beach. But anywhere smaller, quieter, friendlier will help you appreciate the city more when you get back.

Aveiro

Finally, always supposing one of us gets round to downloading photos, we may add pics to the blog retrospectively (done as of April one year on!)


Next hol for me (K): end of July, a week in Wales. Hopefully not entitled a wet and windy week in Wales.

The Great Escape

Up early (honestly-though it was difficult to be otherwise with the tramping of feet down the street from the early hours all going to see Papa Bento). Despite the allure of commemerative umbrellas, folding chairs and even windbreaks, we decided to give mass a miss and get out for the day. So we recharged our Metro tickets (K is still miffed that the machine will not speak to her in English as requested whilst it will quite happily do so for me and that my Portuguese mumblings produce results, ie tickets, whilst hers in particular as regards sha or tea mostly get blank stares- c'est la language vie!) and made it onto the 8.55am train to Aveiro - we were amazed and consternated that we had made it out of Porto before 9am as planned! The Great Escape had begun!

Aveiro is in the Bairo Litoral - so we even made it into a whole new area of Portugal than the Douro - and is known as Portugal's Venice. A very long walk down the Avenue - much further than the guidebook indicated and we hit Aveiro itself and the rain also paid us a visit but after a quick hot chocolate, the sun was out and it was time to wander the peaceful canals with seaweed nibbling fish, as well as brightly coloured seaweed boats and adjacent houses plus funky bridges all accompanied by the distant hum of the motorway. This is definitely the place to come if you are Azelujos hunting and if you want to discover moles in eggs.





Ovos Moles - local speciality, sweet and orange and gooey inside

Unfortunately, Papa Bento's visit meant that some of the restuarant owners including the one over the fish market, were on pilgrimmage to Porto, but we managed to get a good, thincrust pizza (mine with capers -described as akin to olives) and indulged in the required colouring on the paper tablecloth - the best examples of which get put on the walls - don't think our efforts will make the cut but if you visit and see a Frosty at the Beach that looks like it's been drawn by a 5 year old - then he's ours!

Frosty needs no introduction

Then, it was the long, long walk back, this time punctuated by shopping ostensibly to shelter from the rain, but shooes were again viewed as well as a lovely homeware shop (butterflies were pinned onto the merchandise with such care I wanted to take photos) - we have the web address for future :) It was nice to be back in a small place where people are friendlier and try really hard to communicate with us despite our lack in both Portuguese and English, as the cafe owners and the shop assistants all proved. Then, it was back on the train to Porto, tiredness and the blurring scenery making us nod off, but we were safe in the knowledge that if we dropped off, we were the last stop on the train, so should hopefully not end up anywhere unexpected. The great shopping expedition starts tomorrow - really we have been very restrained to date......

Further adventures in Portuguese perplexity

Wed, the sun came out! We both jumped out of bed early in the morning, full of enthusiasm... ok not quite. Nevertheless we thought we'd try to see Ribeira and the terracotta roofs washed in sunshine instead of rain for a change. A quick hop on our favourite form of transport so far, the funicular, and indeed Ribeira is a different place in the sunshine.

This time we even ventured off the main tourist path of the riverfront and up some windy stairs and along sidestreets. The Lonely Planet describes this area as 'surprisingly ungentrified' and they're not wrong. What makes me laugh is that everyone hangs their washing up outside with no embarrassment whatsoever. One household it appears had only washed one pair of underpants and there it was on display for all the tourists with their cameras.

Spot the underwear

Whilst wandering we came across a little old lady barbecuing sardines outside her front door. She very helpfully proferred un-asked for directions back to the river, not a word of which we understood, but we thanked her politely and found our way back to the riverside.

Now this is where we discovered a whole new world of ice tea and vending machines - 'press' a 'button' and the nice man inside the makeshift vending machine will drop a can of exotic fruits ice tea. Big crowd, lots of laughing. Marketing genius.

Other highlights from the day include a visit to Cafeteira da Bolhau (that might not be exactly how you spell it) - a beaux-arts deli/cafe very close to our hotel, full of locals, where the friendly waitress did a Popeye impression to convey 'spinach soup'. We're pretty sure that's not what it was, though. Like the Cafe Majestic should be - traditional, established, but real. You have to get there early though - lunch is their main meal, if you want a light tea or cake / coffee / port on your way home from work - 7.30 is the latest you can get there. And they will mop the floor around you, adding the aroma of bleach to your dining experience. We liked it so much, we went back on Thursday.

Thursday, after being kept awake by a combination of howling dogs and howling people (allegedly singing), we got lazy and hopped in a taxi to a new part of town for us (uphill) - Cordoaria. The main thing of note here is a lovely park, which according to the official sign is where historically, the cord warners gathered. Once again, our English let us down. We had heard rumour of a vegetarian restaurant, which we did find - and it had closed down. Not much call for it here, I suppose. We still managed a nice lunch with Nothing Fried, then ventured into the Centre for Portuguese Photography. This building used to be a prison, and they've left the bars and the gates in. For some reason, they've also left a couple of guards. Only a handful of people in there, all acting guilty, shifting feet, whispering, we were quite convinced we would get locked in. We didn't linger long but made our way out to sunshine and boys playing football, and saw a gathering of cord warners taking place in the garden. Well, I don't know if they were cord warners but what else would they be doing there?

Over apple ice tea (which turned out to be apple juice) we both agreed this is our least favourite part of Porto so far - not just because of the prison, there's also the Jewish quarter and something a little depressing about it all. Not to mention worrying about what the cord warners are up to these days. The one bright spot is the sculptures in the garden - men on benches laughing, men falling off benches laughing. Perhaps the artist agreed the whole place needed a lift.

Oh, and one last word to any readers who are professors and are having streets named after them in Porto - don't get too excited. They'll change the names before long and all the maps will be wrong.

We be Touristas!

We had just set off (admittedly close to midday) when the rain came down and so, it was a rush to find the funicular – the map was getting very soggy and so we were scanning for street names with increasing verve, when I spotted a lift with 'furnicular' written on it – so our first surprise of the day was that the furnicular started underground (they might want to state that in the guidebook). Our second challenge was to get our heads round the metro ticket system – it purportedly had an English version, but as so often here, our English was lacking. What seemed to say 2 titles for 24 hour card (which we wrongly interpreted as 2 people) was in fact a 48 hour card for 1 person, as explained by the kindly metro employee who showed up when we tried to get 2 people through the barrier on one ticket. To add to the confusion, you buy tickets for zones (Z1, Z2 etc) but the map has zones marked as C1 & S8 etc marked right next to each other with no obvious explanation – we took Z2 as per the employee's advice and thankfully the ticket inspectors don't seem to stop tourists.... so far so good.

Going down... view from the funicular carriage

The furnicular added to our transport experience, which today came on in leaps and bounds having also hit the metro. It was like a slow rollercoaster ride down to the Ribeira quayside which made me thankful we had avoided a whole load of steps. We then proceeded to take photos in true British fashion in the rain of Gustav Eiffel's bridge and the pretty and characterful townhouses which adorned the quay before admitting defeat and having a hot chocolate to warm up. After some souvenir shopping (some nativity scenes were indeed purchased in May) and the recognition that our Euros may not go so far in Porto itself down to the shopping opportunities (K sighed shoooooes on more than one occasion plus handbags are in plentiful supply and we have already indulged in scarves to fit in with the locals and I am more than happy with the homeware selection on offer....), we headed back to the metro.

Just behind the riverside, winding alleyways and steep steps

It is strange how certain experiences convince you that you are indeed in a foreign land. The weather was doing its best to bring on childhood regression to UK based holidays for both of us but the metro lifted us out of such confusion and centred us once again happily into holiday mode. We made our way to Casa de Musica, an architechtonic, asymmetrical white concrete wonder with metal staircases that would make a fine Dr Who filmset, with the intention of trying to be cultured and obtain tickets for a musical extravaganza (as long as such did not include Annie or anything in the genre of Andrew Lloyd Weber). We decided against an Austro Hungarian sex comedy and plumped for a piano recital and tickets duly purchased (we weren't even allowed the liberty of practising our favourite but admittedly appalling Portuguese phrase (doysh billetas) to gain these), we then took on the challenge of our first self service restaurant. Now, you may think that self service should be a piece of cake but no, in this case we were firmly told cake was not on the menu -you must choose from jelly or fruit or what we think was blancmange, even though cake was clearly sitting there just to trip you up – and also, managed to offend the Portuguese serving ladies further not by asking for the vegetarian special (yes there was actually a veggie dish on the menu) but by refusing the included in the price soup (it was pea) and also, by committing the cardinal sin of not following up our set menu with a coffee.

Piano recital posters

We emerged from our visit to another planet to find that the sun was trying to make an appearance and so wandered over to the nearby park to look at the war memorial topped with a lion killing an eagle or a griffin – it was hard to be sure and some googling will be required to determine the significance.

After a day of hard transport use and having actually seen some of the tourist highlights of Porto, we continued in our tourista vein, by having afternoon tea at the Majestic cafe. It seemed a little odd to be drinking tea and eating scones in Portugal, but we were assured that explorers first brought tea to England from Portugal and so, their tea drinking precedes ours, but the strangeness was exacerbated by the cheese grinning cherubs on the wood paneled walls and the intermittent camera flashes. However, this was nothing as then, the piano playing started. His first rendition of Abba's Winner Takes It All did seem a touch out of place for an eighteenth century cafe, but he soon topped this with Cliff's We're all Going on a Summer Holiday – I went into complete meltdown having an immediate flashback to hours of being stuck in a car feeling travel sick with a choice of Cliff's greatest hits (from my mother) and Radio 4 (from my father), whilst K started singing along much to my surprise and that of the other cafe patrons – this was her family's onset of a journey song and therefore held much fonder memories for her – it definitely loses its appeal after several repetitions with no journey's end in sight. This time, despite some elongated tinkling at the end to give it a flourish it did only last 5 minutes and so, we all survived relatively unscathed.

Especially for E's mum

Touristed out, we got the metro across the bridge to Gaia and spent some time in the park there enjoying the views in the early evening sunshine (yes – we even took our jackets off for the first time to take some snaps actually looking like we were on holiday a la Dolans in the 80s.)

The sun did come out... eventually

Porto had thus far borne little resemblance to Weymouth (Weymouth had balmy sunshine and calm seas to paddle in) but we were to find a weird similarity this evening – just like Weymouth, Porto shuts down at 8pm – if you haven't got your dinner by this time, you need to find a proper stay open late restaurant – as we only needed a snack having had the menu at lunch, we were forced to buy what were described as tuna sandwiches from the one supermarket open until 8.30pm – though we discovered today that the metro has a fine array of vending machines if we find ourselves in this position again.

Thus fortified, we went to the hotel bar mainly for the internet and also, tried to get some tea. K eventually managed to get some of the heated variety minus milk after handing the phrasebook to the barman, who still looked confused, despite having a pristine coffee machine that spewed out hot water fine and a selection of teabags. I decided to make things simple and have Ice Tea but was denied all glasses (hi-ball and tumblers obviously were not appropriate) and was given a wine glass but at this point was past wondering why. We settled in front of the TV which demonstrated Portugal's priorities – coverage on the news alternating between Papa Bento's visit to Lisbon and the football and when K discovered Cameron had been made PM, I decided the wisest course was to go off to bed and leave her to drink the bar dry in despair (if she could actually manage to order a drink and get it in a glass of course!)

Bye bye seaside, hello Porto, aka The sun will come out tomorrow

Reluctant as we were to leave Liliana's, I have a feeling we would never have seen much of Porto itself if we'd been able to stay, as we were just too comfortable. So here we are now in the heart of the city, at the Pensao do Norto. A little bit of a culture shock. My single room on the 3rd floor is one of the smallest rooms I've ever stayed in (bathroom even more so), but it's comfy and clean, and quiet considering how central we are. E's room a floor below is bigger (it has a chair!) and is near enough to the bar that we can tap into the wifi network. We are right opposite the Capella des Almas, the outside of which is completely covered in blue and white azujelos (painted tiles - a Porto speciality). We are also very near shops including SHOE shops so be warned, the blog may get retail-obsessed from here on in.

The stunning chapel

I can't help but feel at home in this city. (Here are some clues: football, rain, chips, surly Northern attitudes. Ringing any bells?) You can actually get a good cup of tea here, and you can get vegetables too so both of us are pleased. (I'd like to add here that it's perfectly appropriate for me to drink tea in Portugal – the Lonely Planet tells me our tea addiction is all the fault of Portuguese explorers who discovered it and brought it back to Europe.)

Tea Street

Even in this part of town you can tell it's an old city. I think that must be what makes it so utterly different from any other European city either of us have visited - the oldest parts are medieval and the houses are piled higgledy piggledy on top of each other. A glimpse of the market today was amazing, there are flashes of beaux arts architecture here and there, and of course the colourful tiles. The Sao Bento station is a really good example and well worth a visit even if you're not catching a train. They also sell cheap scarves if, like us, you're cold!

Sao Bento Station

Needless to say it poured with rain again today, and Papa Bento is on his way for a visit, so we're making plans for both staying dry and having a day out of the city. We noticed that Annie is on at a local theatre, and we were even treated to a blast of 'Tomorrow', which we felt was kind of appropriate given the lashing rain, and we hope, prophetic.

Just for E - I know how much she loves musicals

The Paddle

Portuguese folk have many ways of entertaining themselves by the sea, especially on sunny Sundays. But we've noticed that with the exception of surfers and dogs, they don't venture into the water itself.
Well, being brought up on British seaside holidays, we hate to miss the opportunity to roll our trousers up and get our feet wet. After a very rainy Saturday, we had decided that on our last day in Canidelo, we would go for a paddle, come hell or high water. Hell stayed away but we got the high water - huge, crashing, thundering waves, sucking sand back again with just as much violence. (Not the beach to pick if you want a swim.) The waves either miss you or soak you and we were quickly soaked (especially me as I forgot to roll my trousers up). The sand was swept from under our feet with such force that we were hanging on to each other to stop from falling over, and both shrieking like crazy. I'm sure we entertained the locals.
Not much like paddling in Weymouth.

Salgueiros Soundscape

No alarm clock. No phone. (No Chris Evans on the radio.)
Wind whistling around the building, sea growling, roaring, crashing, sucking. The tap of my fingers on the keyboard. The click and whirr of E's new camera. The whirr of the shutters going up and down. Dogs barking. Cocks crowing - one always sounds as if he's being strangled. Portuguese drivers beeping their horns, they appear to be communicating in a not-so-subtle language. Locals laughing good-humouredly at our attempts to communicate.
And if I'm being honest, the sound of the rain pattering, pouring off the scaffolding, dripping off my nose.