Halloween is over and thus I am allowing myself to think about Christmas. Only 7 more weeks!! There better be snow when I get back to Chi City. Before you judge-I've improved over the last couple of years- I used to start listening to Christmas songs once August hit.
This is the first chapter on my week in Portugal.
We left before the sun rose on Friday morning and got to Portugal a few hours later. Our first stop was Porto, in the northernmost part of Portugal. After stopping by the tourism office and dropping our bags off at the hostel we set out to visit one of the many wine cellars in Porto. We chose to walk so that we could explore the town a bit.
Many of the buildings were decorated with beautiful tile designs. While many of the buildings were beautiful, they were also old and not kept up very well. Many of the streets closer to the river were very narrow and could only be reached on foot. Clothes-lines hung everywhere and all of the houses had orange tiled roofs.
This was the beautiful bridge that we walked over. We thought it would take us to the river's edge, but instead it runs completely over the river. To reach the river we snaked down streets lined with buildings so tall that we couldn't see where we were going. But we eventually reached the wine cellars!
We stopped for lunch before venturing down to the cellars. In the tiny café we experienced our first real run in with the portuguese language barrier. There was no menu. Menus are my friend in foreign countries. I can use them to point at what I want rather than look super dumb. So I ended up using spanish to order the same thing some other woman had. It was EXACTLY like the food in Bolivia. Over the course of the week I discovered that I do not like Portuguese food. We ate fried fish, cabbage, and french fries. I found myself avoiding the cabbage because I was reverting to my habits in Bolivia. The locals in the restaurant all seemed to know each other. I felt like I was in Greece or Italy. All the old ladies were yelling to each other. Then this lady sitting next to us decided she should include us, and she said something to me in her attempt at spanish that I took to mean "there's a cathedral over there." I looked out the window and, alas, there was a cathedral! I'd seen the church already though but I politely said "ohh.. sí..muy linda." (Oh..yes...very pretty). She kept looking at me and smiling and nodding. She said something else then, so instead of trying to understand her I asked in spanish how old the church was. She didn't understand me. The lady behind her did, and she interrupted and translated for me in Portuguese. Then the lady I'd originally been talking to yelled to another woman behind me, asking her how old the church was. That lady speculated, and then the translator lady corrected her guess. Eventually I learned it was built sometime in the 1400s. I think. In all this spanish speaking, french words were slipping out of my mouth. Where "sí" and "gracias" used to be my reflex, it is now "oui" and "merci." That first day I asked someone how to say "thank you" and "hello" in Portuguese. We learned that those translate to "obrigada/o" and "óla" or "bom día."
We took a tour and learned about Port Wine, which is different from table wine. Port Wine has a higher alcohol content and is much sweeter. It comes in tawny, ruby, rosé, and white. We also learned that the barrels (made of oak) that are used to age the wines are given over to whisky makers after around 60 years, and the residue from the wine in the barrels gives whisky it's color.
The tour ended with a taste of ruby and tawny Port Wine. Jennie and I decided we... do not care for Port Wine. It was so sweet!! It literally tasted like it contained syrup.
After walking around some more, we went back to the hostel and I took a much needed nap. I'd gotten about 4 hours of sleep the night before, and it wasn't a restful sleep either; I kept dreaming about missing my flight. At dinner the waiter brought over a basket of bread (pão) and some appetizers. We thought that was very nice and we each ate a piece of bread and some of the appetizers. We'd been duped. They showed up on our bill later!! We couldn't exactly protest because A) we didn't speak portuguese and we'd already had trouble communicating to the waiter, and B) we ate the food. They even charged for the bread! We read the next day in a travel book that 50% of the time a restaurant in Portugal will charge for bread. We didn't touch the free bread the rest of the trip, and the next day at lunch when a waiter tried to bring us food, I told him we didn't want to pay for it so he took it away. Anyway, I had wonderful gelato after dinner. They had a flavor that was chocolate with raspberry flavoring! It was divine.
We left the next day for Lisbon. The Lisbon leg of the journey was really awesome, and I'll have more on that later!
Love,
Hillary
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