Europe 25: Porto, Day 4

So it turns out that you can in fact spend a good chunk of a day in a foreign city hanging out in your apartment and not doing much of anything. This is called “resting” and it’s actually a lovely way to spend time, especially if you don’t have a whole lot on your schedule, and this day was mostly about that.

We slept in and had a nice leisurely breakfast to welcome the day before heading off to the laundromat to see about getting some clean clothes.

When you pack for a long trip using only a carry-on and a personal item there will have to be laundry done at some point. We’ve gotten into the habit of trying to book places that have washers on site, but on this trip neither of the apartments in Florence or Porto had such facilities. In Florence we got by doing some laundry in the sink, but by the time we got to Porto it was clear that more robust action was needed.

Fortunately we’d been scouting out the neighborhood as we walked around and it turned out that there was a laundromat about a block away – actually on the back side of the block we were on, so in a straight line it was even closer than that.

Unfortunately a surprising number of other people had the same idea on a Sunday morning, so we returned to the apartment unlaundered with the promise of trying again later.

At this point we figured we’d go get our tiles, since they were sure to have been fired by then.

It’s a lovely walk from the apartment to the tile studio – up the street, hang a right where the road bends past the greengrocer, and continue on past the Colégio de Nossa Senhora da Esperança Santa Casa da Misericordia do Porto, or “the school” as we called it at the time. There’s just something vaguely comical about an institutional name that extends for that many words, even if it is a lovely building. Eventually you turn right again and the studio appears on the left after a while, in a fairly residential neighborhood that I suspect doesn’t get a whole lot of foot traffic from tourists.

We got as far as the nearest café before calling a halt, however. Vacation, you know. Can’t overexert. Wouldn’t be prudent.

The Molete Bread and Breakfast was doing pretty good business when we walked up, so I let Kim know what I wanted and headed outside to score a table where we could enjoy our refreshments and watch the people go by on a bright and rapidly warming Sunday morning. The place had a special going – for a mere three euros you could get a pasteis de nata and an espresso and since I don’t drink coffee I got an orange juice instead which meant that Kim got to have two espressos with her pasteis de nata so by the end of it she was ready for the day in no uncertain terms.

Across from the Colégio de Nossa Senhora da Esperança Santa Casa da Misericordia do Porto there is a very nice little park and we took our time walking through it. They had quite a few of the purple-flowered trees that you find in Porto – they’re surprisingly common there – and we had a good time with them.

When we collected our tiles there was a new teacher in the studio – I suspect that a lot of teachers rent space there and just rotate in and out – and when we told her which ones we were looking for she said, “Oh, you’re the ones who did those!” She really liked Kim’s diptych and thought my freehand tile was fun, and that was very nice to hear. Apparently if you don’t collect your tiles the studio gets to keep them and she had hopes for Kim’s that way, but she was also pleased that we hadn’t abandoned them.

Back at the apartment we gathered up the laundry again and Kim went over to see if there were openings and since there were she sent me a message to come on by with our clothes.

It was a very small laundromat, with maybe four washers and three driers, and all you needed to bring were your clothes and your wallet. You threw the clothes into an open machine and then went to the payment kiosk, put in your money or your card, and told it what you wanted. Detergent was free with your wash, which was nice. Since Kim is the one who folds the clothes afterward I stayed with the machines while she went out planting flowers for Pikman Bloom and taking in the scenery over by the craft show plaza.

Eventually we and our clothes ended up back at the apartment and we spent much of the afternoon just laying low and not doing much of anything. It was a very nice way to spend an afternoon.

As the evening drew closer, though, we decided that we’d walk back over the Dom Luis I bridge to Gaia and climb up to the Mosteiro de Santo Agostinho – the Monastery of St. Augustine – which is another place that provides lovely views of Porto from across the Duoro River.

I have a deep fondness for infrastructure which I have never been able to explain and at this point I’m just going to roll with it, so I enjoyed these jaunts across the bridge more than perhaps most people would. This picture is from the Porto side, and you can see the monastery on the left at the end of the bridge.

And these are looking back into Porto from the Gaia side, where the bridge ends and the road surface switches from metal to cobblestone.

This one is looking further into Gaia, with a lovely little park on the right side that was full of people whenever we’d go over there.

They very helpfully labeled it so there would be no confusion.

In order to get up to the monastery you have to walk a fair bit into Gaia and then make something of a u-turn to go up the long ramp past the military police buildings because that is the sort of thing that one finds next to monasteries I guess. You can stop at various points to take in the views, though, and that was lovely.

And at the top you get to the monastery, most of which was built in the 17th century though parts of it date back to the 16th. You couldn’t go in when we were there, but you could walk around the little plaza in front of it and admire both the round church and the sights in general.

They even have a little Tourist Thing where you can get your photo taken so you know you were in Gaia. A very nice gentleman offered to take our photo together. That’s the thing about places like this – people are often very kind.

Eventually you have to go back down, though, so we headed on over to the little park where we found these guys. The guy on the keyboard played upbeat songs while the guy in the red hat danced. You can see the crowds watching from up by the monastery. Those guys were having a grand time, and it was kind of infectious watching them.  That's the ramp up to the monastery in the background.

We walked back over the bridge, past the Cathedral, and back up toward our apartment but it was getting on toward dinner time so we stopped at Porto Best Kebab and Halal Pizzeria since it was right on the way. There are a lot of halal places in Porto, and in our experience you can’t really go wrong at any of them. We got kebabs and sat in the little concrete plaza in front of the place to eat, watching the city move through its day.

From there it was a short walk uphill to the craft show plaza where we found a bench and hung out for a while. It was full of people in a way that is rare in the US anymore, with groups walking by or just standing and talking, and a drum circle serenading everyone until they got tired of it and packed up their drums and walked off. It was a nice way to spend an evening.

We walked back to the apartment after that, stopping at a tile shop along the way. There are a lot of tile shops in Porto, and they have some really wonderful stuff. I ended up getting some magnets to bring home for Lauren and Oliver and they had some nice postcards as well, some of which were indeed made out of cork.

The rest of the evening was spent relaxing at the apartment, watching bits and bobs of Portuguese television, and making Father’s Day calls, which we could do for people who also use WhatsApp. It’s not a common app in the US, but it’s pretty universal in Europe and I’ve come to prefer it to regular texting. We called Kim’s parents and Oliver and Lauren, and I even got to talk with my brother so we could share thoughts of our own dad.

As days go it was a pretty relaxing one, and that is a good thing on a vacation.