Porto

Porto was my favorite. We arrived after dark, checked into our Airbnb and took a little wifi break to update our families and Google any notable dinner spots nearby. We wound up just wandering through the chilly nighttime air and decided on a fancy seafood restaurant. I didn’t make note of this in my Captain's Log but thinking back about it now, I remember feeling grubby and gross and like everyone in the restaurant could tell I’d hiked up a mountain that morning and then sat three hours for a cross-country road trip and hadn’t yet showered the day off. In addition to me being gross, we ordered a seafood sampler platter and other than some articles being unrecognizable and needing to be pried out of creepy spaces, my stomach suddenly was repulsed by seafood and I couldn’t eat a thing. Take a moment to Google Goose barnacles and then imagine that you have to pinch and rip that elephant skin off to pull out a large booger-like substance and that’s what you’re supposed to eat. This was the first real occasion in my life where mental factors kept me from eating.

There were also shrimp and clams on our platter, which I eat readily here at home, but I was so repulsed by the booger barnacles that I couldn’t eat those either. I ate the starter bread for supper and in Portugal, they bring bread and olives to you at every restaurant, to temp you. If you eat them, you are charged an additional fee. I told this to Brett ahead of time, but he still ate the bread and olives everywhere we went. Brett understood my sudden heebeegeebees about the elephant-leg boogers so he polished off the platter all by himself and then we walked home in the rain. 

The next day was a beautiful warm day and we did lots of touristy things. First we climbed to the top of a giant tower for a panoramic view of Porto. You had to climb a seemingly never-ending and especially narrow spiral-staircase to get to the top and when you encountered other tourists going up or down, you kind of had to hug them and spin to switch places but it was well worth the view. 

Then we stopped by the Livaria Lello, possibly the coolest bookstore ever… except that it was extremely crowded and because it was so neat in there, everyone was taking selfies and the obvliouslness to their surroundings was at an enraging high. The center of the space had an ornate staircase where most pictures were being taken and people would hold up traffic and make people wait to have their photos made. It was the only staircase and I couldn’t imagine stopping everyone in the shop so I could take a photo of myself. When we were trying to leave, we couldn’t get down the stairs and I got angrier and angrier by the second. Finally I pushed through, determined to get out and I found that no one could go down the stairs because a girl was laying on her side, posing on the landing and wanted a shot with no other humans in it. Can you imagine striking a swimsuit pose, on your belly in a public shop, with about 60 people staring and waiting for you? Brett and I became irritable separately and then had to work together to find lunch. That was the hardest half-hour of our whole trip.

A Google image of the bookstore.

A selection of Porto notes from the Captain's log:

-      We both might be cranky today but were too excited to tell.

-      Everything is made of cold stone so our feet hurt and we're always cold. Brett’s been soaking his feet in various sinks.

-      Porto has lots of funky artsy people and friendly street cats. A homeless woman lives on our street and yells at us for cigarettes and wine even though she has both in each hand.

-      Brett continues to eat the non-complimentary bread.

On our third day in town, we’d signed up for a coffee tasting. We took Martin over to the west bank of town and this is where we met Carlos, a Portuguese Jeff Goldblum with a fondness for precision and run-on sentences. Carlos opened his coffee shop after he retired from a long career as a civil engineer. I thought he looked like he was cast for this job; a coffee roaster in a commercial selling credit card software to small business owners. Carlos is a handsome man; silver hair, weathered hands, glasses resting on his nose and a thick leather apron tied around his waist. His shop was spotless and organized and void of any color except for his collection of espresso cups. It was that stark, Scandinavian décor that’s so trendy right now in so many places, but not in Portugal. The Portuguese like warmth and comfort and a homey clutter. Carlos, a self-proclaimed coffee snob, admitted that he decorated the shop this way to keep out the kinds of people he doesn’t want in his coffee shop – folks looking to curl up awhile with a warm beverage. “Dese drinks with-eh syrups and wheeped cream…” he said, “Zis is not coffee.”

We were the only two who had signed up for the tasting that day so we got the whole shop to ourselves and Carlos had set out little cookies at our perfectly aligned place-settings that were framed by wooded slabs he would later set with warm brews. We learned many things on this day and in a strange turn of events, I found it all extremely fascinating. We went into this more as something for Brett to enjoy but I walked out of there bouncing with excitement and talking a mile a minute – I’m sure it had nothing to do with all the coffee. I had no idea the lengths people go to grow, market, and then acquire coffee beans. Carlos showed us the difference between high quality green coffee beans and ones that would go on to become “somsing like-eh, Folgers.” Of these lackluster beans Carlos just said, “Dis coffee has problems.”

We got a big kick out of Carlos and though we couldn’t acknowledge anything at the time, afterwards at lunch, we discussed the many nuances of Carlos and were very happy to find that we had noticed many of the same subtle but priceless Carlos moments; the adorable way he wiggled his bean grinder or the moment he broke his very tight, calculated movements with a lackadaisical slap to his French press. I appreciate that Brett notices these things. One time Brett’s boss walked around all day having missed a belt loop and Brett thought it was adorable. I thought Brett thinking it was adorable was adorable. 

We hung out with Carlos for three hours, had some lunch and by the afternoon, our coffee tasting had blended with last night’s Indian supper and suddenly there was lots of gurgling going on in our bellies. When we tell people we went to Portugal for our honeymoon, they all say, “Oh wow, how romantic!” but what I think about is this day; this day of ethnic spices and fibrous beans and the farty time we spent together blaming the other, and the time we spent apart “working things out.” We had a few farty days in Porto and we used bathrooms all over town. We dubbed the whole thing “The Porto Potty Experience.”  

Like in Lisbon, we spent most of our time here eating and searching out other places to eat for the next time we got hungry. We hiked around and stuck our heads in many different churches, found a favorite coffee shop above a shoe store, tried some Portuguese wine (it all tastes like wine), and met an American girl named Gita who was traveling alone, so we all had dinner together one night. We climbed a bridge that Brett had his eye on the whole time we were in town and on our last day, a championship soccer game was being played in town so the whole city filled up with people in bright blue. People came in from out of the country and starting drinking at breakfast. We were out walking along the water and came upon a sea of drunken jersey-clad men, shouting and singing, and laughing. It was only 11:30.

 Our only photo together on our honeymoon. It is less than ideal.

The last three days of our trip were planned as we went. We studied a map and found two more towns to visit so we booked some last minute AirBnb's, loaded up Martin, and headed back south towards the sunshine.