...I walked until I reached a pedestrian zone. Voila! Restaurants. And everything else. I went back to fetch Chris and we walked back the 15 minutes to a square in the city to have lunch.
I love small plate meals, whether you call them tapas, mezze, or whatever else people of the world - especially Mediterranean and Mediterranean-adjacent types - choose to call them. This was the first of many tapas meals we ate, and the first of several charcuterie boards, too, because the cheeses and salted meats are too good, even if they contain the sodium content of an ocean. (We both felt the effects of too much sodium at certain points.) Portuguese have a chorizo sausage that is 10x better than Mexican chorizo (which I like), and prosciutto that is every bit as good as the Italian variety. The cheeses are fairly unique - a lot of creamier cheeses, some reminiscent of brie, others distinctively Portuguese. We tried a couple of hard cheeses, too, which tasted like what a cheese would be if you crossed a hard Italian cheese with cheddar. Tasty.
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| view from our table with vespa and flea market |
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| graffiti above us |
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| Birds enjoying some Super Bock |
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| view from our table |
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| Where we ate |
After lunch we walked down to the Carmelite church with its famously tiled walls, like everything else in Porto.
(If the next few inside shots look blurry, click on them. I don't know why they are rendering blurry in the post.)
We were going to the river, eventually. It would take some time to get there, but we had all the time and most of the energy we would need. Whatever I was feeling was probably something like jet lag, although with only a five hour time difference, and having left at the hour we did, it didn't seem like jet lag was all that much of a problem. We didn't really have an agenda; the only thing I had really wanted to do in Porto was eat the food and drink the wine and have a look around and do a boat and winery tour. (We did three of those four things. The boat and winery tours turned out to be spending most of the day in a car, seeing two wineries, and getting to spend an hour on a boat for a hundred bucks each. We later did an hour on a boat anyway right in Porto without the car rides for thirty bucks total.)
I went into Portugal knowing nothing about the country. Lisbon and Porto were the only two cities I could even name, and Porto only because I get Bon Appetit magazine. Of course, I knew about Vasca da Gama, as every American should, given that we learn about explorers in elementary school (glorifying them while ignoring their atrocities.) I knew peri-peri hot sauce came from Portugal (but I didn't know they hardly even use it) and that the hottest dish in Indian restaurants - vindaloo - comes from the Portuguese (but none of their food is remotely hot so this is confusing.) I was exposed to Portuguese people in Luxembourg - they were the immigrant laborers in the 90s, and our favorite bartender, Maria at Pub 13, was Portuguese. I knew that Portugal was the world's largest producer of wine corks. That was pretty much it. Everything we walked by was something new. Who is that statue? What is that mural? How old is this building and what does it stand for?
And so we walked, and looked, and wondered.
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| Tower of Clerics |
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| Tower of Clerics from the only kind of olive garden I will enter |
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| a shopping center hidden under the park |
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| Church of the Tower of Clerics |
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| No, I don't know who the clerics are |
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| view of Porto from the olive garden |
We moved on from the garden of olives and soon found ourselves looking at the river.
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| I love the tiles on the bell tower |
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| The River Douro, as seen from still pretty far above |
To be continued...
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