I didn’t think my first day in València, Spain (see my 9 May and 11 May blog entries on the subject) could be topped. Then I spent my first full day in Porto Portugal, on 18 May 2018.
Since I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed until 11am (and after shaving, showering, putting my contact lenses in, and applying sunblock, it was past noon), I made lunch my first priority. I decided to eat at an outdoor table in the Ribeira, the most scenic and touristy area of Porto. Walking over, I got my first taste of Porto’s hills.
This very steep path connects Avenida Eiffel along the Douro River with one of the five bridges over the river, Ponte do Infante, near my lodgings (18 May 2018).
The combination of the steep hills on either side of the river and the beautiful old red-tile-roofed buildings of the city makes for some very scenic panoramas. I was pretty well slack-jawed.
A photo from roughly the same spot as the one above, only looking level rather than down. The bridge here, the Ponte Dom Luís I, was designed in the 1880s by Teofilo Seyrig, a protégé of Gustave Eiffel (18 May 2018).
And amid all of this beauty, as I noticed the previous night, there was interspersed a big, fat dollop of blight and ugliness, too.
Riverfront rowhouses in various states of repair and disrepair (18 May 2018).
Here too, some of the houses are cherry and bright, and others (at right) are in need of a major facelift (18 May 2018).
Here one of those houses is getting just that, a facelift. I hope its neighbor two doors down to the right is next (18 May 2018).
My walk to the Ribeira was complicated by some road closures. I had noticed the night before several signs for an event called “Porto Street Stage” that would take place the evening of my first full day in Porto. I assumed when I first saw the flyers that this was some sort of outdoor theater festival. But as I wandered through town the day of the event, it became clear that “Porto Street Stage” was a grand prix-style auto race through Porto’s spaghetti-like maze of streets. Even better!
Throughout the afternoon, small cars drove fairly slowly along the blocked-off streets, perhaps familiarizing themselves with the race route (18 May 2018).
The road closures did force me to make some detours from my planned walking route, a modified version of the Porto walking tour from Rick Steves’ Portugal guidebook.
Porto’s main square, Praça da Liberdade, made a bit more tricky to navigate by the fences put in place to keep pedestrians out of the race route (18 May 2018).
This is cool and all, but how am I supposed to cross the street? (18 May 2018).
Eventually, though, I made it to the Ribeira, Porto’s most atmospheric and tourist-infested quarter. And I was enjoying being part of the infestation.
The small plaza in the center of the Ribeira, Praça da Ribeira (18 May 2018).
Those tents shelter crafts and souvenir vendors, as well as restaurants and cafés (18 May 2018).
Unlike Kaohsiung, Porto’s docks are almost entirely devoted to the tourist trade (18 May 2018).
By limiting myself to a single glass of port and no dessert with my meal, I was able to soak up the ambience for a couple of hours while still leaving room in my food budget for a fast-food or supermarket dinner.
This is a mighty fine view right here. And lunch did not disappoint — a thick fish stew followed by a sort of cod pot pie. Porto is just upriver from where the Douro River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, so seafood is the order of the day. And I’m looking cool in my Maui Jim aviator sunglasses, Citizen watch, and Maury Show t-shirt (18 May 2018).
After lunch, I continued following the Rick Steves Porto walk in reverse. Guidebooks use terms like “gritty” to describe Porto, which doesn’t quite resonate until you’re actually here. What they mean to say is, until recently, Porto was a f***ing dump. Like, you can tell it was basically Detroit — a bombed-out husk of its former self. Until the last 10-15 years, with European Union funds flowing in, reviving much of the city but also raising the cost of living and swelling the tourist hordes. This process is called “gentrification” in Washington D.C. and there as here is a mixed bag.
I love Porto’s hilly, meandering streets with their narrow rowhouses (18 May 2018).
But not all of Porto’s rowhouses are so cheery. Even on the main tourist drag, there are plenty of decaying hulks (18 May 2018).
There’s plenty of graffiti and blight to be found even on Rua das Flores, a touristy pedestrian shopping street (18 May 2018).
And somehow, that’s one of the things that I like the most about Porto. Ineffable beauty chock-a-block with utter decrepitude. It’s fascinating. This is the first place on my trip so far where I’ve actually been casing neighborhoods, thinking to myself, “I’d love to live on this street. I’d eat at this cafe and drink at that bar. I wonder if there’s a supermarket within walking distance.”
Misericórdia Church, along Rua das Flores shopping street (18 May 2018).
Another of Porto’s lovely squares, Praça do Infante Dom Henrique. Despite what it looks like, the sprinklers missed my ears. But the wind definitely blew some spray in my direction. My Maury Show t-shirt got wet (18 May 2018).
Porto’s main train station, Estação São Bento. While small compared with New York’s Grand Central Station and Washington D.C.’s Union Station, it’s just as gorgeous in my opinion. The blue-and-white azulejo designs are a style inspired by Portugal’s mass imports of Chinese Ming dynasty porcelain begining in the 16th century. The style was revived in the early 20th century, as here (18 May 2018).
As with San Francisco, trolleys were once an important part of Porto’s public transportation infrastructure. Now they’re purely for tourists (18 May 2018).
If I were to move to Portugal, the language would undeniably be a challenge. Portuguese is spelled much like Spanish. But it’s there that the similarities end.
Just as written Spanish is fairly easy for a native speaker of English to decipher, as I discussed earlier, so is Portuguese. This is the wrapper for some chocolate bars I bought at the supermarket. I think we all know what “delicioso chocolate,” “espectacular nougat,” and “caramelo super cremoso” mean. I’m not sure what “amendoins crocantes” means, but presumably it’s a description of the nuts (almonds, maybe?) in the chocolate bars. Of course, this being Portuguese, “amendoins” is probably pronounced “vrash” (21 May 2018).
No, Portuguese sounds like Russians trying to speak Spanish. I’ll overhear a conversation between two people in the street, and maybe for a couple of sentences it’ll sound Latin, but then somebody will say “pravsh” or something. There are a ton of “sh” and “tsch” sounds in Portuguese that really do make it sound more like a Slavic language than a Romance one. I think I’d have a much tougher job learning Portuguese than Spanish.
In fact, the first time I heard Portuguese, I thought it was Russian. It was 1999 and I was studying in China. That year, Portugal returned the enclave of Macau, near Hong Kong, to China. The Chinese Communist Party made a huge big deal over this event, showcasing it as another example of the Communist Party erasing China’s 100 years of “national humiliation” beginning with the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s and ending, naturally, with the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949. While the 1997 handover of Hong Kong — granted “in perpetuity” to British as the result of the Opium Wars — was of huge historical significance, Macau’s history was very different. The Brits took advantage of weak late Qing Dynasty China to snatch up Hong Kong; the Portuguese, by contrast, had to grovel a bit before the Ming Dynasty, near the height of its powers in the mid-1500s, granted them a peripheral speck of their empire as a trade entrepôt.
But the Communist Party of course fitted the return of Macau into its narrative of the Party standing up to foreign aggressors after a century of weakness and humiliation. And so, in December 1999, I was watching the Macau handover ceremony on TV in China. When a white guy — whom I initially correctly surmised was the last Portuguese governor of Macau — started speaking, my friend Lindsay asked me, “Why is he speaking Russian?” To which I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe a Russian was the only white guy the Chinese had been able to locate for the ceremony. I had assumed Portuguese would sound like Spanish. It does not. But I digress.
Since I still had a little bit of money left in my food budget, I swung by the supermarket I noticed the previous night and bought a slice of quiche, some peanuts, fruit, some Portuguese egg tarts (naturally), and four beers (alcohol is super cheap at Portuguese supermarkets, too). Then walked back to a nice hilly, grassy park I’d spotted earlier and watched the race.
The race consisted of small cars with souped-up engines roaring up the streets one-by-one. Apparently this type of race is a time trial. Which is good, since there was definitely no space for race cars to pass each other in those streets (18 May 2018).
I sat, back propped against a tree, in the early evening sun, just past the finish line, watching those tiny cars zip one by one past me.
When in Rome, wear whatever ridiculous hats the Romans are wearing (18 May 2018).
I didn’t plan on drinking all four beers in one night, but the “American Amber” wasn’t bad. Hoppy, but not too bitter. A lot like Sam Adams. So I sat there, ate my picnic lunch, drank all four beers, and watched the tiny cars roar past until shortly after sunset. Sorry València, but I just enjoyed new favorite first day in a new city.