At long last, we three boys were rescued from an overdose of testosterone when Brooke, Luke’s wife and Masi’s mother and my daughter-in-law (that’s a lot of things to be for just one person!), finally arrived from the states. She promptly told us we were washing the dishes all wrong, took over the TV watching schedule, loudly told us which turns to make in the car even in places she’d never been before, and made us stop playing beer pong with Masi. Which was a bummer because we were making good money off of him.
Nah, I’m just kiddin’, she’s a sweetheart.
But after being with us for a while, she did ask me where the best place in Portugal was to get drunk (that’s exactly what she was saying in the picture there), to which there is an easy answer: Porto, where Port Wine and Portly people were invented.
Okay, she might not have phrased it that way, or even hinted at it, but I sometimes endeavor to not let the truth get in the way of a good story.
But we did go to Porto.
On the drive up from Lisbon we stopped in a town of about 50,000 residents named Pombal (to be clear, just the town is called Pombal, not all 50,000 residents), famous for giving Portugal the Marquis de Pombal. Marky, as some liked to call him, was a Portuguese leader in the 1700s. He is widely credited for being the driving force behind pulling Lisbon out from under the destruction caused by the November 1, 1755 earthquake and resulting tsunami, which had wiped out two-thirds of Lisbon. Since November 1st was a holy day, thousands of candles had been lit in celebration. Unfortunately, many of them fell over during the quake, which ignited all sorts of fires, resulting in even more destruction.
So first you get a quake, and then a bunch of fires, and then a tsunami rolls through the city. It was a disaster of Biblical proportions and sent Lisbon to the sidelines for centuries. It also resulted in most Portuguese abandoning the idea that God controls anything. Ever since, the Catholic church has been rendered essentially powerless within Portuguese politics. I guess it’s not a good idea to mess with the Portuguese. They’ll even give God a hard time if he annoys them.
At the time, Lisbon was one of the world’s top two or three cities. It’s really only been recently –just a short couple of centuries later– where it’s once again making its mark as a beautiful and important city. It’s now often nominated as the best tourist destination in the world, as well as the one with the most Lisbians living in it.
Pombal also features the 12th century Pombal Castle, with the usual awesome castle views as well as a charming young staffer who actually laughed at some of my jokes, so the whole thing now gets a five star rating from me.
We also made a brief stop in Coimbra, the fourth largest city in Portugal and home of the University of Coimbra, the oldest university in Portugal and one of the oldest universities in continuous operation in the world. I don’t know what you were doing in 1290, but to think about how long ago that was, 1290 is the same number of years away from 2025 as 2025 is to the year 2760. The song “In the Year 2525” seemed rather farfetched year-wise when it came out. Not so much when you think of it that way, eh?
Like Lisbon and Porto, Coimbra is a fairly hilly city, which makes for some great views of the non-hilly parts. Actually this might’ve been taken at the Pombal Castle, I’m not sure. Ach, quit whining and just enjoy the view.
Once we got to Porto we took these two photos to help those who are reading this while wearing 3D glasses.
Being a veteran visitor to Porto, I knew that the Livraria Lello (Lello Bookstore- click on that link if you want to see pictures of the inside, because we didn’t take any) would probably be busy, but lordy, I didn’t think it’d be that busy. I’ve been inside it before, and it is impressive, with a gorgeous red-carpeted spiral staircase, intricately carved wooden panels, a beautiful stained-glass skylight, and, not surprisingly, a bunch of books. It’s also famous for being an inspiration for J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter stories, but she snorts derisively when asked about that. Well, maybe not snorts, but she does say it’s a misconception.
Since we were all so hopped up on the idea of seeing some books, we stopped into another store that happened to have them. They were only for decoration, actually, which was good because one of the ones on the top shelf really caught my eye. I mean, literally, my eye had popped out and… okay, sorry, nothing eye-popping to see here.
Luke’s camera takes these uber-wide shots so they sorta have to be placed here one at a time, but that works well for Porto because the panoramas do it far more justice than the narrowamas. Porto is a tale of two shores, with the Douro River creating both by running right through the city after its journey through the Douro Valley. The Douro River originates in Spain, and flows roughly 897 kilometers (about 557 miles, or 1.96 million cubits) during its journey to the Atlantic.
On one side is the main part of the city, with lots of tourist shops, restaurants, and historic buildings. On the other side, port and wine tasting shops dominate. Porto is sometimes referred to as the “city of six bridges.” This bridge is one of them. Duh. Which in Portuguese is pronounced Douro.
The city of Porto has a population of around 250,000, but perhaps more like a billion during tourist season. I mean, there were a lot of frickin’ tourists, more than I remember seeing the last time I was there in the summer. I actually walked around rather smugly because I have a long-term Portuguese residence card and so technically am not really a tourist, so I can give all the tourists the evil eye when I walk around the city. Because, you know, the damn tourists are ruining everything. My family doesn’t count because they’re family.
One funny little anecdote from the trip was when we first arrived in Porto, we struggled to find the short term rental house because sometimes housing numbers in Portugal go from 12 to 543 to 138 to B. Heck, on my street in Azoia there aren’t even any numbers, which often makes deliveries something of an adventure. Anyway, we looked like a gaggle of lost puppies, so an old Portuguese woman came out to see if she could help. After she ended up being almost as befuddled as we were, another elderly woman came out to try and help as well. The gaggle was growing but it was still not finding. After a while, a college-aged student, who spoke excellent English, strolled over and there we were, all seven of us, wandering up and down the block looking for a house. We finally found it mostly by process of elimination, but the help was so kind and very appreciated. You gotta love the Portuguese.
This was what we looked like after finding the house. Or maybe this was after all the port tasting, I’m not sure.
Behind Luke and Brooke is a statue of a guy pointing toward the direction he wants all the tourists to go.
Like Lisbon, Porto is home to a myriad of old buildings and even older hills. I tend to think of Porto as “Lisbon lite.” Of course, you expend just as many calories walking up and down the hills of either, so it’s not that kind of lite. Still, that might not be a bad name for a beer.
After all that walking around we needed to refill our tanks, so we stopped at the first Portuguese-themed restaurant we could find. Oh, well, at least it was the most impressive building to house a McDonalds that I’ve ever seen, but they still featured the same 15,000 calorie meals. Did you know McDonalds has about 44,000 restaurants around the world? It is estimated that 1.3 to 1.6 million calories of food are served per McDonald’s restaurant per day, which means that over 70 billion calories a day are served by McDonalds alone. If you put a piece of paper down and stacked all those calories on top of it, do you know how high the stack would go? Actually, you’d still only have a blank piece of paper because calories are units of energy and not physical objects.
(This blog is like the Swiss army knife of travel blogs: you got your travel photos, your trivia, your math, your history, and your science lessons, all wrapped up with a bow made of Dad jokes. And all for free!)
On the main walkway in a bustling and touristy part of the city is this ledge without any kind of railing or warning, just Darwin’s theory ready to pounce. I marveled at it because just about anyone could fall right off and break at least one bone or twelve. You can see the hubcap down there, I assume it was the only remaining evidence of some poor soul who took a wrong turn. The rest of the car has probably floated to the Atlantic by now. It was also interesting to see all these fish swimming in front of some sort of outlet that might have even been a sewer, I’m not sure. I just know I wouldn’t want to eat any of them until I knew for sure what they were swimming in.
Porto is the city that gave Portugal its name, and actually had that name from very early on, like 200 BC. (Hey, using the same calculation as the 1290 university thing results in the year 4250. Wow!) The Porto metropolitan area is home to over 1,700,000 people, making it the 13th most populous urban area in the EU. Since the city itself has only 250,000 people, if you have any amount of math skills at all you can calculate that the surrounding area is chock full of people, but you’d never know that by just driving around. (A “chock” is like a million or more things. Or something.) Unlike these gaudy American tourists, the Portuguese are pretty adept at keeping a low profile.
We took this as a sign from God that it was time to go port tasting. He sent a stream of light pointing right up the hill where one of the restaurants was.
And nobody was happier about that than Masi. After downing his first full beer in Germany, he was primed and pumped to see what all this wine and port stuff was all about.
It didn’t take him very long to find out.
Facial expressions: like mother, like son! Actually, that was Brooke after more than a few port tastings. Like me, she began to laugh at everything. Masi just kept on drinking.
This was just one of the many tastings offered to us that afternoon. Brooke and I ended up giggling most of the rest of the day, while Masi staggered around trying to sneak in naps when he could, and Luke just looked at us like we were pathetic rookie drinkers. But we had a good time!
And so the sun set on another great adventure in Europe with my family. We will all remember it forever, except for maybe the last part of that afternoon after the port tasting.
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