PORTUGAL: Heart Is Where the Home Is?

By: MJ + PJ

Flying from Tunis via Paris, we arrived in Porto. We had noticed by this stage of this travel game that every time you arrive in a new city you need to decipher how the public transport system works. After asking some questions and obtaining tickets clumsily, we hopped on a train into the city, hoping it would take us there.

See our HUMANITY: People of Porto post which explains the experience we had that occurred in the time between these two paragraphs!

Once we hit the streets of Porto we devoured the sights like kids in a candy store. It was difficult to focus or decide which way to go – the surrounding streets competed with their calls for exploration. It seemed everywhere you looked there was something that caught your attention and you wanted at least a quick look at! Click HERE to see more of our photos from Portugal.

For the next six days we explored the city. Besides some metro rides to get our exit train tickets organized, and to ride on the iconic riverside tram to and from the breakwater area, we walked everywhere. Our legs and feet, well rested in Tunisia after weeks of walking in Great Britain, were tired daily. Besides along the river, the streets of Porto are constantly winding and rolling.

We saw more groups of elderly gentlemen seated on park benches and outside coffee shops. They seemed to have a role to play – like the grandmothers in Spain – to keep an eye on everything and everyone as the days roll by. Always well dressed, they cast as much an eye over us as we did them.

There were some excellent street musicians to listen to. Most notable was the guy playing outside of the McDonalds cafe on Praça da Liberdade – he seemed capable well beyond the setting. Besides the music in the air, there were plenty of pieces of street art to stop and examine. There are numerous walking tours for the street art.

On the first day, after walking the river westward and taking tram ride back into the city, we did a walking tour. This was another Sandemans tour, being the same company we had taken a tour with in Dublin and Edinburgh. Later on we took their port wine tasting tour, and filled the few hours between obtaining train tickets.

Somebody probably goes to Porto and does not go port wine tasting. That’s not us. PJ knew little about port wine, and MJ used to live in Australia. We took a tour in the early evening on that first day. They happened to have spaces available so we thought why not just join in and make it a long day! Crossing the lower span of the main bridge gave us our first visit to the southern bank of the Douro “Golden” River and a chance to look across at the city building-scapes on the north banks. The tour was, of course, educational and skill building. We learned a lot about the history of port wine, and skilled our taste on several samples. What surprised us was that we both really liked the white port wine.

Our walking tour guide had given us a few good recommendations, and so we were sure to visit that library, see the interior of the McDonalds (which has beer on the menu), climb the church tower (best 5 Euro ever spent), and visit the narrowest house in the city (four rooms and four stories high wedged between two churches). 

After visiting the Long Room Library in Dublin, we had a yearning for old libraries. A particularly fine example beckoned us in Porto: The Livaria Lello bookstore. Next door to the bookstore is where you obtain your ticket (for crowd control!), which gains you entry to the fully operational store. Yeah – pretty popular place it seems given the line we waited in! Once inside you have the chance to explore the shelves, admire the interior design, and even pick out a book. The main reason you are probably visiting is to see the staircase… which sounds like a weird reason to visit a bookstore. As you can see from the pictures below, this is no ordinary staircase, and walking up and around it is an experience. We were headed to Barcelona in a few weeks, and this reminded us of Gaudi’s design style. It’s a little challenging to get a good picture because of the layout, lighting, and tight space… even using the digital cameras we have today. Notably, J.K. Rowling lived near this bookstore when she was married to her Portuguese husband, so there is a little essence of Harry Potter in this building.

Airbnb offers suggestions of things to do and see in each location you take a trip to. We had mostly ignored these as most were out of our price range or were not child compatible. There was one in Porto that piqued our interest and so we booked it: A Walking Music Tour with a local musician. This was about two to three hours in length. The musician walked us around some varied music spots, played a tune at a free piano at one of the city venues, and we ended with a sip of port and a few songs in a city center park. 

One of the leads the musician gave us as we walked around was for a place called MiraJazz. We were not entirely paying attention to where it was but should have. It is a small live jazz venue, located on a rooftop nestled amongst old residential buildings just up from the river. He took us to this location briefly during the tour, at a particular time, as they have various small ensembles play jazz in mid-afternoon. It was a warm sunny afternoon and the small balcony and inside room place was packed. We figured we would come back again while in Porto. We tried three times on the following days, finally finding it open, and with only a few people there. Luckily for everyone AJ had just bought a ukulele, so there was some “live music”!

How did he end up with a ukulele? The long story is that MJ had proposed getting a ukulele for this trip, but we had other smaller instruments that fit in our car and bags. We had visited a few music stores (Asheville, Cusco, La Paz, and Sucre) but only to satisfy curiosity… and to keep MJ content. The Porto instrument store we just happened to stumble across one day. We found it had a plethora of ukuleles. (It also had Portugese guitars – OMG! what a beautiful thing to look at!) There were so many ukuleles there that you could easily develop an acquisition problem. AJ took an interest and it seemed genuine so we left (under huge protests by said child) so that we could let the idea simmer, establish some guarantees, and contemplate logistics (amusingly, we have too much stuff already!). At this point in our social media history we appealed for funding so we could all get something, and luckily no one did – we’d have bought that store out of stock! We returned a day or two later to choose a ukulele, which we used as a good omen to find MiraJazz.

There is a great playground that AJ visited three times, that lies on the western side of the Crystal Palace Gardens. It’s a great space to just hang out in nature as well. On our final brief stop there we were on our way back to our Airbnb. AJ beat us there an almost instantly made friends with a Brazilian family thanks to the ice breaker – his ukulele! (It’s not just an instrument!) We sat with them and had a chat about Brazil and travel and kids and work and study, talking easily for 20 minutes before dark set in (park closes then – find the main gate if you want to get out!). It was one of those times when you wish you had a few hours to continue your conversations – good people, in a great spot, at the right time.

AJ is into Banksy. We are not sure how this started, but it probably came from all of the discussions we have had in the last six months about what is graffiti and what is art and what is vandalism. It’s a grey area! Something about the story of Banksy caught his interest. His curiosity over the unknown aspects of this artist had slowly been developing since we were in London. It just so happened that in Porto, while we were there, a Banksy. Dismaland and Others exhibit was on. Seriously. He became adamant that we were going to that exhibit, despite us offering no resistance to the idea. It was pretty interesting to say the least, and we got to see works by local street artists from Portugal as well. 

There was simply too much we did! Here are some things you should seek to do in Porto: have lunch on the riverfront near the Luís I Bridge; get a flower ice cream from the shop next door to the bookstore; walk over to the west of the city centre where there is a narrow lawn area overlooking the river and sit with the students as the sun is setting; take a day trip to the coastal towns to the north or south; explore the garden terraces of the Crystal Palace and visit the playground there; stop and look at the numerous examples of street art; go into and look around the huge old stone warehouse on the river edge; and hang out with some locals and hear what they have to say about their city.

So that was Porto, Portugal! It is a place where the people are the definition of congenial. It is a place of history and fun and port wine and hills. It is a place where we agreed, very early in our visit, that we could live here if we had the opportunity.

But that’s not all Portugal had to offer! On our exit day we had to go south to Cambria, from which our midnight train towards Madrid departed. The town of Averio lies about halfway to Cambria so we figured we could stop there for a few hours and look around. We did this, and yes they do have bag storage at the train station! One super fun canal cruise later, and after a walk around the city streets, we made it back to the train and on towards Cambria. Confused about a non-arriving connection, we boarded the wrong train that took us to the right destination. Once in Cambria, we sat for about three hours to wait for our 11:32pm train.