What we did on our Porto vacation.

Porto was to be our magical reset. Our rejuvenation spot, our sleep-in spot, our "live like a local" spot. Our spot to buy more than a days' worth of groceries at a time. Our spot to fix Jen's boot (again).

It was to be our spot to catch up on emails and pictures and blogs, our spot to finally try to figure out this Twitter thing. Our spot to park for a week in between jetting around coastal Spain and our upcoming whirlwind Morocco trip. Oh yeah - and our spot to actually plan our upcoming whirlwind Morocco trip.

Porto is a few hours from port country and less than an hour from nice beaches. To a tourist's eye the city is split down the middle by a river lined with bridges (but really, the river divides Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia). Allegedly, Lisbon comes to Porto for its wonderful restaurants. It's an artsy, gritty, rainy-in-winter town with windy narrow cobblestone streets you could wander for hours.

We picked it somewhat randomly as a stopping point figuring if we hated it we'd just hole up indoors for a week. Long-term travelers often do this in places you might not expect - Prague, Budapest, Barcelona - just to rest in a comfortable city which allows some modern conveniences. Luckily, we ended up really enjoying Porto. Aside from the windy cobblestone streets (and lack of nearby mountains), it felt awfully familiar... and the longer we stayed, the more comfortable we felt.

We still did lots of touristy stuff that week - the most touristy being a day trip to the Douro Valley. Usually people take a boat tour up the river but it was cold and rainy so we skipped that.  And then of those who take the train through the scenic valley, most stop in Regua for the wine tours and tastings. We were more interested in seeing the countryside, so we took Lonely Planet's advice and went the extra half hour into Pinhão, a much smaller village.

the 8km hike was beautiful

the vineyards and olive orchards were stunning

and we did squeeze in a tasting at Real Companhia Velha

because when in Porto...

(and also it was right next to the train station

and we had some time to kill)

Totally worth the day and Euro investment.

Back in Porto we visited the São Francisco Church and adjoining catacombs. The church is about 600 years old; during the 18th century artisans covered every inch of the interior with the most incredible gilded wood carvings. (Around that time, Napoleon also decided to use the church as a horse stable. Quel bouffon!)

3 meters high? maybe 5?
google it for better pictures -

we had to sneak this one

Beneath the church are rows and rows of tombs. The church is the resting place for thousands of folks awaiting Judgment Day... but don't get any ideas - burials were banned in 1866 due to health concerns.

plaster skulls adorn the rows

and the floors are tombs too

It cost a few Euro each to see both, again totally worth it.

We visited a few museums. Many are free or free from 10am-2pm on Sundays, and the one we did pay for (because we went on Saturday) was at a reduced price since they were between exhibitions. Three museums for €5 sounded good to us...

• Centro Portugues de Fotografia, our favorite of the three, is located in a former jail that's been remodeled. The architecture was beautiful and the permanent exhibit of cameras (from old spy cameras to Kodak disks to modern Canons) was pretty impressive.
  
  During our visit the main gallery featured an amazing exhibition by Gervasio Sánchez documenting the impacts of war in Central America, the Balkans, and Africa since the 1980s. Photographs of 10-year olds proudly sporting Uzis, villages in shambles, and bomb victim amputees were brilliantly composed and incredibly sobering.

the world's largest camera

was pretty neat too

• Serralves (the one we paid for) was a combination foundation, art museum, garden, arboretum, tea house, and agricultural center... and probably some other things but we don't speak Portuguese. During our visit the art museum featured a temporary photography exhibit by Ahlam Shibli, including photographs of Palestinian families who built living room homages to family members who'd martyred themselves. Sounds gloomy?  It was, but it was also really interesting and not something we ever would've seen in Portland.
  
  The Serralves gardens are massive and manicured. Apparently, each year they spend 0.5FTEs keeping the fountains clean and over 20,000 hours maintaining the park overall (no idea how many FTEs that is - and sorry for mentioning FTEs).
  
  As noted above there's also a large herb garden, an arboretum, and a livestock area where cows, sheep, donkeys, and geese were living in harmony.
  

the garden part

the agriculture part

It was a very bizarre but beautiful place and I'm glad we had a chance to visit it.


• The Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis was not really to our taste but the permanent exhibit of classic art and the temporary exhibit of digital works by Polish artists were still impressive, and the building itself was really beautiful.

AND???

IT HAD A DUCT TAPE PIRATE HORSE

OMG

The other big tourist thing to do in Porto is to wander to Sao Bento station and Se Cathedral, and then walk across Ponte D. Luis I bridge to the port side of town. (They reeeeeeally push the "walking across the bridge" part which implies that some people opt to take the tram across the river. Our walk involved sideways rain and high winds; still would not have traded it for the tram ride.)

Anyway. From there you can visit tons of wine caves and fancypants restaurants, but we don't do that sort of thing and the weather wasn't great that day so we just took a few photos and headed back for pastries and coffee. The views were lovely when the sun broke through the clouds though.

to the north

to the south

We checked out Livraria Lello & Irmão and Chamine da Mota, bookstores famous for their staircase/Harry Potter inspiration and completely random antiques, respectively. They were much smaller than we expected.

We visited the Mercado do Bolhao market, also much smaller than we expected since most of the shops are closed for the season or no longer in business at all.  More on this in a follow-up post.

We wandered down the "art spot" - a few blocks of informal walk-in galleries featuring works by local artists. On the way back we checked out the massive Cemetery of Agramonte but only got a little ways in before another downpour.  Wish we could've spent more time there.

Oh, and have we mentioned the pastries? We ate a lot of pastries. Our favorite shop was Bakery Ribeiro, we went there twice and attempted a third but it was Sunday and everything but the museums was closed. Which brings us to...

Food notes:

• you're supposed to eat salted cod and something called a francesinha (heart attack on a plate, anyone?), but for us it was all about the pastries

yep.

definitely.

really.

all.

about.

the.

pastries.

• we also enjoyed the tasty €2 wine
• otherwise, we cooked in the hostels or at the apartment

Which brings us to lodging notes:

• Rivoli Cinema Hostel was fine for a few nights. Very centrally located, big open kitchen, great breakfast, helpful staff, noisy electronic fancy schmancy lockers, tiny rooms.

plus crazy, sometimes creepy aht

Fine for a few nights.

• But our Air B&B apartment rental was awesome. You mean Jen can get up at 6:30am to do yoga in the other room? (There's another room??) The heater runs all the time? We can do laundry for free? We don't have to listen to snorers or share a bathroom?

we have our very own kitchen?

Sold. As added bonuses, we also got a half bottle of port and some amazing sea salt with which to cook. We slept on a futon mattress on top of wooden palates but it was so much better than college. There must've been some fate involved because the co-owner of our apartment had studied viticulture at OSU...

... and had a very nice wine bar downstairs

How did we do on the "magical reset"? Well, we still walked a million miles. We still went to the grocery store almost every day. There is still a giant hole in Jen's boot. We didn't figure out our Morocco plan or Twitter.

But one day we slept in and only left our rented apartment to walk three blocks and eat pastry. And then we went back home, watched Sherlock, listened to traditional Portuguese music, made dinner, and went to bed early. That was a good day.

Think you guys call those kinds of days "weekends"? 

we have decided we need more weekends...

Friday five: to Day 300!

Five signs you have been on the road for 300 days, in no particular order:

• You know you should see more of the amazing city you're currently visiting (or finish that Porto blog post, or research your next destination) but all you want to do is hole up and watch Sherlock and Game of Thrones.
• You don't care where your fellow hostel travelers are from, where they have been, or where they are going.
• You have mostly forgotten your daily routine from your "past" life.
• You can pack your bags in approximately three minutes (five if it's dark and your dorm mates are still asleep).
• You are pretty sure you were in Poland a hundred million years ago but you still carry around that package of instant borscht - you know, "just in case".

we finally ate it in Tarifa

(but we still have that Calgary Clif Bar -

you know, "just in case")

To Day 301!

A day in the life.

You wake up before dawn, put on the same clothes you've been wearing for the past three days, and hope the hostel staff have put breakfast out early for you.

They have... most of the time.

You wolf down your corn flakes, throw your makeshift lunch into a backpack (almost forgetting to grab the bag from the refrigerator, which you've only actually done once but almost do every time), and head to the bus stop.  You wait.

The bus you know you need never comes.

You look for any sign of assistance - a ticket vendor, a posted schedule, a sign with your destination in the bus windshield, a young person who might possibly speak a little bit of English.  With assistance from one or many of those, you figure out where and when to catch the right bus.  You thank whoever helps you in two wrong languages before getting it right in their language.

They smile... usually.

You double-check your destination with the bus driver.  He nods (because it's never a she).  This time you thank him in the correct language on your first try.

He smiles... almost always.

You sit near the front, tracking time and watching for city signs, street signs, destination signs.  You don't really have to do this because the bus driver knows you have no idea where you're going and he'll let you know when to get off.

But you do it anyway.

Sometimes the bus driver plays the radio.  Usually it's crappy American pop, but sometimes it's throwback '70s songs or music from the country you are visiting.  Or the news.

Usually, though, it's crappy American pop.

You listen to conversations around you.  You understand a word here or there but otherwise you have no idea what's being said.  Sometimes they ask you if you speak their language.  When you apologize and say no, they talk to you in their language anyway.

You smile... always.

Sometimes they speak a little English and you share an awkward but pleasant conversation.  You remind yourself to memorize "I only speak English" and "your country is beautiful" in every local dialect going forward.

(You constantly forget to do this.)

You reach your destination.  The driver waves at you to exit, and you step off the bus to find the nearest map or information booth.

Crickets.  Nothing.  Nada.

So you wander.  You pick a direction and see what happens.  Nine times out of ten, you end up where you intended to be.  Eight times out of those nine times, it takes you twice as long to get there than if someone pointed you in the right direction at the beginning.  Seven times out of those eight times, this is just fine with you.

(Occasionally, though, it sucks.)

You enjoy your destination.  It might be raining, or hot, or cold, or hard physical work, or windy, or steady uphill, or loud, or mentally exhausting, or crowded.

Or all of those.

You might enjoy it right from the start, or it might take a little while - an hour, a day, a month - to understand your enjoyment.

Doesn't matter, you enjoy it.

And each time you start the process all over again, you say a tiny little thank you to The Universe.

For everything.

This is not every day of our lives right now, but it's definitely half or more of our days.  And whether we're going into the town center, or 13km out of town, or to the next country, this has become our routine.

some days it involves a lot time spent doing this

and schedules annotated in foreign languages

and/or a blurry map

Most days it involves something amazing...

... like an awesome view

... or a ridiculous photo op

... or maybe an adorable goat 

Every day is good... but those are the great days.

On not even trying to be gluten-free in Turkey.

In case you're just joining us, I am not supposed to be eating wheat or potato.

Not eating the former is a joke in Turkey. A cruel, cruel joke. I mean, you could totally do it if you had to - fresh fruits and vegetables abound, and they do love their meats! It would probably be harder to be vegetarian than gluten-intolerant in Turkey, actually.

breakfast was always easy

until they set the bread basket down

But if you don't have to go gluten-free, why on earth would you?

I mean, the pide!

OMG the pide!

and all the lentil soup

requiring bread for sopping!

and the flatbread!

and the giant poofy bread!

and Nur's wood fired pizza!

and the baklava!

Not to mention the bread machine at our Help Exchange hosts' house. The temptation was too great and the audience, too willing. Cinnamon raisin bread, cinnamon swirl bread, corn bread, flatbread, rustic bread, garlic onion bread, herb bread... Anyway, like I was sayin', bread was the fruit of the sea for those five weeks. And still no major digestive issues. I even used live yeast instead of dry in the bread machine and I was generally okay. The only real issue was eating so much %*#! bread...

Avoiding the latter, my good old friend potato, wasn't terribly hard. Sometimes the soup ingredients were a mystery; luckily we knew how to point and say "patates?" and when in doubt, Patrick was always willing to taste test for me. Sometimes the doner kebaps were topped with french fries; when I picked them off and ate the kebap anyway, I suffered from the traces of starch so I ended up skipping the doner and going for just the kebap.

sometimes that didn't work either, though

Sometimes my hosts made potatoes for dinner; they were always on the side and I always had a substitute option of couscous or rice. But sometimes I skipped it all. Mucking up after horses didn't consume that many calories, and even though wheat didn't really disagree with me, I'm pretty sure that all the starch and carbs (from the bread or rice or whatever) definitely made me feel more sluggish over those five weeks.

Snacks (other than bags of chips, which were easily accessible and oh-so-cheap) were a little more challenging...

... but ...

... we ...

... managed

So "Operation Avoid Wheat and Potato" continues to be half-successful. Approximately five pounds later, though, I'm either going to have to give it 100 percent or buy some running shoes...

does this ginormous falafel sandwich

make my butt look fat?