Coimbra is a university town, and the university here is the oldest in Portugal. To add to the university feeling it is graduation week, so the town is alive with young people enjoying their last week before setting off to work. Unfortunately a good number of them are enjoying it here in the campground. Last night we had about 15 or 20 of them partying across the street from us until 3 or 4 in the morning. On our side of the road by some weird coincidence 8 of the 10 RV’s were from the Netherlands and they did not appreciate their youthful exuberance and beat a steady line up to the campground office to complain in the morning. This evening the Dutch have mostly moved on, and the kids are still here. Hopefully, they will reign it in a little tonight.
We headed into town in the morning to see what Coimbra has to offer, it turns out it is mostly the university. The bus drops you off by the riverfront, but like a lot of medieval towns the main living area is on the top of a hill to help with defenses of the city. Coimbra’s hill is exceptionally defendable as it is very steep, and the university is at the very top of the hill. So the climb got us our workout for the day. At the top there were a lot of students walking around in their gowns, many with their families. We noticed that many of them were carrying baskets and talking to the tourists, finally a coed walked up to us, assessed us for a second and asked in flawless English if we wanted to buy a pen for €2 to help support their graduation. So we now have a cute pen from the University of Coimbra.
The University is quite large, though most of the buildings look like they are from the 1950’s. The historical buildings are supposed to be beautiful inside but they all cost money to enter. Pictures we saw of the old library look stunning but it cost €12 to enter for 20 minutes so we passed.
Because we are from Portland our next stop was the local micro brewery which was back down the hill and across the river. As we were walking across the bridge there was a rowing race going on with 2, 4 and 8 person boats participating. Looking at the racers I am guessing these are university crew teams.
The microbrewery was our first one on this trip, and it was excellent. Their featured beer was an Imperial Stout that had won the best beer in the world at the London Beer Festival. Since the British know their beer we decided it was worth a try, and it was world class. Ton made the call to order one main dish as she suspected the portions would be huge and she was right.
It was spitting rain off and on and threatening a big downpour so we decided to head back to François. Interestingly the big rain never came but several times we were hit with a few big drops, but it was like there was dirt in the drops of rain as the windshield is now coated in dirt.
