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.
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.
And amid all of this beauty, as I noticed the previous night, there was interspersed a big, fat dollop of blight and ugliness, too.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.