Ohh, Porto

Albergaria-a-Nova to Porto, Porto, Porto, Porto to Labruge

So now I’m walking beside the sea.

It’s been a few days. Sorry. I got stuck in Porto.

Porto was the last big city before Santiago. Not that there won’t be other sizable population centers, but Lisbon and Porto are Portugal’s two biggest cities, and I won’t hit another one till Santiago and the end of the trip.

Because it’s a big city, being in Porto meant I dropped the Camino for a couple days and became once again just a regular American traveling in Europe. I got a nice place to stay (two, actually) and did the tourist-y things and bought souvenirs and was incognito to all the obvious backpackers, whether they had Camino shells on their packs or not. It was a total reset, in a way…one I really enjoyed.

When people ask me whether I liked Lisbon or Porto better, I won’t be able to say for sure, but I know that I had a better time in Porto. It hit in the middle of the five weeks of this trip, and I was in a better headspace than I was in Lisbon: I felt I knew Portugal a little better, I had my feet under me, and I felt stronger and more in shape. I met a local and got shown around a bit one evening, off the beaten path a bit and down to the coast. We got dinner in a local churrasqueira (a word I still can’t say but I think means “chicken joint”), went high up above the city to a lookout point to see the lights and the river, and even down to the beaches to see a church out in the middle of the water, connected to the land by a little walkway. This gave me a bit of an inroad into Portugal, finally…to spend some time talking to someone who lived there and knew it well, and who let me listen to some “new” fado music - the sad, longing, nostalgic music of Portugal, AND MAN AM I HOOKED. There are modern “fadistas,” and I took a few screenshots of my Shazam app and will be searching a few of those artists when I get home. One of them, if you’re curious, is called Mariza.

The walk into Porto was a 17-mile slog that gave me two fresh blisters and reconstituted the one underneath my toes and lengthened it down the ball of my foot. I was in bad shape by the time I staggered to the first Metro station I recognized as such, in the south-of-the-Rio-Douro part of the city called Gaia. I took myself to the stop at the city center, Sao Bento, and flung myself into the crowds of tourists in what looked like a sort of Times Square with cathedrals. I found my apartment without too much trouble, and once I figured out how to check in, I found myself in a lovely little flat four stories above the pavement with a balcony that had me thinking I’d accidentally booked a penthouse apartment. (The burnt-fish smell wafting up from the bar/restaurant four stories below me for the next two days assured me it was not.) I was a block away from the Praça Ribeira, which is right down on the river walk, which seemed to me to be the heart of Porto, so I counted that lucky.

Across the river I could see all the port houses lined up along the promenade, their names displayed in huge lettering to capture the attention of the passersby. A bridge loomed over me, looking like the Eiffel Tower (and in fact designed by the same guy). People were everywhere…many dragging giant suitcases (sometimes TWO!) clattering over the cobblestones. I know I’ll be too old one day, but I hope to be carrying my belongings on my back through Europe for as long as I can. The sight of people trying to manage wheeled luggage on European cobblestone always makes me shake my head.

I did the hop-on-hop-off bus tour…got the lay of the land…got off at a pretty-looking square after we traveled up a long avenue lined with mural-style street art that I wanted a better look at. But at the top, near the square, I kept getting pulled away to look at this…oh, and then this!…and then I’ll just look at this real quick before I head back down the avenue…. A statue, a museum-looking building, a cathedral spire, a flea market of white-canvas pop-up canopies.

With the hop-on-hop-off tour (of which I did maybe 10% of its full length), I also bought myself a boat tour, a cable-car teleferico ride, and four port tastings in four particular houses I was assured were right across the river. I had 48h to do them all…and I was sure pretty quickly that I wanted an extra day in Porto. The apartment that I had at first didn’t have availability for an extra night, so I had to move down the road to a guesthouse about half a mile from the city center.

I was a total American. I bought Starbucks, I ate McDonalds. I joked with a local about how the American tourists were probably the worst ones…he said no, the European ones were worse, because they felt too at-home in cities that weren’t theirs, and acted as though they owned the joint. I chatted with Australians and Brits and Canucks when I heard them speaking English. On a bench in the shade I eavesdropped on a British mother’s phone call with her daughter as her husband sat listening and piping up from time to time with things he wanted her to ask or say, but otherwise doing the Dad Thing and letting Mom run the conversation…it felt so homey to listen to her prattle away about all the stops on their cruise so far and how little they had left to go before they were back home in Sheffield again and my goodness, it’s been so hot lately, and on and on and on. When she was off the phone and we chatted a little more, we suddenly heard a few bangs in the distance, and I told her, “It’s okay, we’re not in the States.” :-/

I saw the Sé Cathedral…the train station at Sao Bento…a few immersion shows in an interesting little underground catacomb-like space filled with columns and translucent projection screens that told me ten legends of Porto and then immersed me in the works of Monet, Klimt, and Van Gogh in mesmerizing movement on the walls and screens as I moved through the space. (I’m kicking myself for not getting a pass for the Da Vinci one, but I didn’t see it till it was too late and I was on my way out of the city's

I got a few stamps in my credencial…the guy at the cathedral kept re-doing it “to get it right,” and each time moved it accidentally, so it looks totally screwed up. Sighh. They had shells at the cathedral, too, but they were too white and manufactured-looking, with bright Basque crosses on them. I understand that they’ll be for sale all up the coast, so I’ll get one when I can choose my own from some that look more natural. I lost my original shell on the way home from Rome in 2019 - I shouldn’t have left it hanging from my bag. It should’ve been tucked inside. It was there when I checked my bag, but I came back without it. Price of sentimentality. So I want to find one like that again.

I didn’t do a fraction of what’s possible in Porto, but when you’re alone, you only have to please yourself. So I did the things in the package deal I bought: I took the boat tour (of the city’s bridges, it turns out) up and down the segment of the Douro River that runs through the main part of the city. I walked across the Eiffel bridge to the south side, wandered the flea markets, and rode the teleferico up over the port houses and then back down. I found one of the port houses on my list of four I had gotten tastings for…and it was CLOSED! And, not being able to find the other three at all, I finally looked them up on a map and found they were flung about the city. Grr. So I went and sat at Sandeman’s and ordered something FREAKING AWESOME made mostly with basil and lime and lemon.

On my way back, I moseyed. I never mosey. I move pretty fast in my regular life, because as a teacher, you always have too much to do, and the longer you take to get it done, the less time you have for yourself. Also, for most of the year, your life is run by bells, on a schedule that never gives enough time for all you have to do. I rush a lot. And I drive fast…and a lot, because I live ~30 miles from where I work. So I never move slow.

But on my last evening in a big city, on a warm, breezy summer Sunday, with everything on the to-do list checked, and the sun going down slowly over a glittering river, and the people around me moving past and sitting and eating and drinking and laughing, with buskers playing their music and doing their magic and their acrobatics, with hawkers offering me hats and scarves and sunglasses and ceramic souvenirs, as a nameless, faceless, anonymous American girl on the banks of a river in a southern European city thousands of miles away from anyone who knows my name…I moved as slow as I could, feeling a sense of utter calm and relaxation.

There was nothing to do, nowhere to be, and nothing that had to be done.

And a boy was playing a guitar through an amp with his case open for coins, and he was singing “Dock of the Bay,” so I sat down among the others and listened for a while as the sky got dark. The blue hour, they call it. It was magic.

I gave myself one last morning to be an American tourist in Porto. I’d spent two days mentally marking things I’d liked in the shops I’d passed. Today I could go back and get the things I’d liked best, and mail them home on my way out of town on the trail. So I got a couple beautiful ceramic tiles, two trivets made of wine corks, a long ceramic serving dish painted like the blue and white classic tiles of the Portuguese homes, a t-shirt or two, and ALMOST some art…but I have art from Jerusalem I haven’t framed or hung yet, and probably from Ecuador too, so I didn’t let myself get art.

The hard part about buying stuff on vacation is that you forget what your real house looks like, what your real life IS like. I would buy clothes in foreign countries that it turns out I never wear in my regular life back in America - because it seems out of place. I buy souvenirs without thinking of a place for them. I buy art without a plan on where to hang it - I only have so much wall space in my house, and it’s kinda full up. So this time, I made myself wait on buying till the last day in the city so I could make sure I got what I really wanted. And I tried to think ot myself how the thing would be displayed or where I’d wear it and with what.

I didn’t leave Porto till 2:15, and it was like I stepped back into a different skin when I had my trail shoes back on (after two days in sandals…ahhh my feet needed that rest) and the backpack on my back again.

As I left the buildings and the close little streets of Porto behind, the sky seemed to open out above me into a vast space, and in front of me, the River Douro widened into its delta and spilled out into the Atlantic Ocean, the horizon also suddenly vast. I hadn’t realized how closed-in the city had been…not bad, just different…and all the open space around me felt suddenly new.

It was a rocky transition back into the pilgrim’s life. There was intermittent rain this afternoon as I moved up the coastline. I hopped an e-scooter a couple times and ran the last one till it wouldn’t go anymore: out of its range. I was trying to make up for the lost time of the morning. (I’m sure plenty of medieval pilgrims hopped on the backs of oxcarts heading in their direction.) I moved about 15km today but only walked about 5 miles of it. At 6pm when it started to rain again, I called an Uber and got myself to the albergue - this one a converted primary school with just the minimums. I haven’t even opened my pack, probably will sleep in my clothes. Everything’s dirty by now anyway, and I just showered this morning, so I’ll make it one more day and hopefully tomorrow night’s albergue will have a washer. I wanted to move farther than I knew I would be able to walk, but I was sorry to miss so much of the first day along the coast today. I hope there will be much more of the same, and I feel sure there will be.

Up early tomorrow. So much behind me already. Lisbon, Fátima, the southern Camino Portuguese, Porto…a new stage is beginning now.