The photographer in the couple spent much of yesterday complaining about the light. At the end of the day she was unhappy with most of her photos. When we woke up this morning she was very happy because the light was fantastic.
It really was a beautiful day, the sun was out and the temperatures where in the low 70’s. Having now figured out the ticketing system for the Porto metro we had a much smoother start to our journey, and even passed the muster of a ticket audit. Porto like Portland our hometown runs the transit system on an honor system. You buy your ticket, but there is no turnstile or other way to control access to the system. Periodically workers get on the train and ask for your ticket. If you do not have one than you are fined a substantial amount, I like that as it makes entry and exit to the trains much simpler and there is something about trusting people to do the right thing that makes me feel good.
Our first first stop for the day was Livaria Lello which is a bookstore near the university in town. JK Rowling when she lived here and was writing the Harry Potter books was inspired by the interior of this bookstore for hogwarts. It has a beautiful interior with a wooden bridge/balcony that crosses from one side of the store to the other. Unfortunately there are a lot of Harry Potter fans and now the store charges an admission fee to get in, and even at 11am there was a line way down the block waiting to pay to get in. We are not Harry Potter fans so we passed.
But the walk to the neighborhood was not a waste of time because in the plaza near the store we found a canned sardine store that we really enjoyed. In Brittany, Galicia, and Porto we kept running into these very high end cans of sardines. In the US we consider canned sardines to be cheap food, here they are a luxury item. We kept looking at cans of sardine that in the US would cost at the most a couple of dollars, and here they were around €9.50. Today the guy at the store explained the difference and gave us a chance to taste a sample. In the end we walked out with 5 cans of expensive sardines. Even if the sardines don’t taste 5 times better the cans are works of art in themselves.
Next door was a store called the Portuguese experience that we wandered into and ended up eating our lunch there. It was a simple lunch of a cod and cheese croquet and a glass of port. The building was really nice and we had a third floor dining area overlooking a square to ourselves. It was a simple but nice lunch.
Yesterday we did not cross the River Duoro to the south side of the river where all of the port wine houses are located. The river on that side is lined with many port houses. The grapes are mostly grown a few miles inland from Porto along the Duoro River valley. But historically the shipping was done from Porto so the major buildings for the houses are in Porto.
Part of the reason we did not cross over was that neither of us are huge fans of port wine. But since it was a nice day, and Ton thought she could get some nice pictures of the city we went over there. We had walked past most of the port producers when we came across an old market building that had been refurbished into a food hall. It looked like a nice place to take a break and we sat there for a while enjoying a glass of local non-port wine.
Next door to the market was a port house we had never heard of called Porto Ramos-Pinto. Ton liked the building and while she was shooting some pictures I went in and took a look around. It was a beautiful tasting room and the charge for a tasting was pretty inexpensive. So we decided to test our poor impression of port. Our tasting tray arrived with 5 pretty healthy pours of port which we thought was nice. Then a couple of minutes later two of the employees showed up with another taster tray with 5 more glasses and profound apologies for the misunderstanding. We laughed because we had no idea what the misunderstanding was but we appreciated their honesty and sincerity but were worried about the amount of wine we were now committed to drinking. We also were happy that we had a long walk back to the metro station to get rid of some of the alcohol after we were done.
Our appreciation for port went up quite a bit. We had never experienced white port before and found it very appealing. The red varieties were also much better than we remembered. In the end we are glad we stopped in at Porto Ramos-Pinto, both for the good service and the good port.
The walk back to the metro was a slow one as the hills are steep, and we had a lot of wine to walk off. We both needed to use the bathroom when we saw a sign for the most beautiful McDonalds in the world. It was in a nice building and will have to take them at their word on its beauty, but we did appreciate their facilities.
