Europe 25: Porto, Day 5

Well rested from the previous day, we decided that we’d venture further afield. Naturally this is when Porto started to get hot – it was 90F/32C and brightly sunny for pretty much the entire rest of the time we were in Portugal and the nice temperature break we got from leaving Florence evaporated accordingly. But it’s summer in southern Europe and you have to expect that sort of thing, especially as the global climate changes.

And yes, folks, the climate is changing. Or, more accurately, the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out the new normal these days and seeing how much further the changes will go. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to sell you something or so disconnected from reality that they should be confined to a padded room, looked after by caring staff willing to ignore nonsensical babbling, and given nothing sharper than a banana.

Aveiro is about a 45-minute train ride south from Porto. The region has been continuously inhabited since before recorded history and was a center of the salt trade from the time the Romans occupied it until fairly recently, according to a quick internet search that I just did. It also has a small network of canals, which is why a disturbing number of travel-related websites insist on calling it “the Venice of Portugal.” It seemed like a lovely place to spend a day.

We walked down to the São Bento station, found our train, and took a short ride to Porto Companha – all of four minutes – where we changed trains and headed south to Aveiro. The first train was general seating, but the second was reserved and we found our seats without much problem. Why they sell reserved seat tickets on European trains is a mystery since rarely does anyone check for tickets at all, let alone that you are in the proper seats, but so it goes. This would become important later on.

It’s a pretty ride down to Aveiro from Porto Companha – you can see the countryside go by, and the trains are comfortable. It’s a genuine crime that the US doesn’t have a real passenger rail network anymore, as the rump system leftover from the 19th century continues to be slowly strangled by the automobile and oil industries and the lackeys who serve them. Trains are still the most efficient and effective way to move passengers and cargo across land, and it was very nice to be in a place where people still value them.

The train station in Aveiro is one of those big, modern buildings that was constructed to serve a purpose and does so without being interesting or attractive to anyone who doesn’t already love train stations, but the old train station that sits right next to it is gorgeous. Built in 1916, it’s bright white with the sort of blue tile murals that let you know you’re in Portugal on every wall and in every corner. You could easily spend half an hour just walking slowly around it.

It’s equally lovely inside, where there’s an entire museum dedicated to the tilemaking industry in Aveiro.

Welcome whoever comes for good!

Our goal was to get to the historic center of town and the kind folks at the museum handed us maps and told us that it was about a 20-minute walk straight down the main boulevard in front of the train station. It’s a nice walk, really, and as with Porto the sidewalks were decorated with tiled designs. These were all over Aveiro – not all of them were on the boulevard – but they’re interesting to walk by.

We didn’t get far before we realized that we were hungry and as luck would have it the boulevard was lined with restaurants. We ended up at a place called Delícias con Alma which advertised itself as a Brazilian restaurant but which mostly seemed to offer hot dogs covered in shoestring potatoes, fries, and savory tarts. They had tables out on the sidewalk and it has to be said that the food was good and the people working behind the counter were very kind, so if you find yourself in Aveiro not far from the old train station you can go there with confidence.

I like eating at sidewalk tables in general because you get to see the people walking by and there is no better way to pass time in a public place than by people-watching with a good meal in front of you.

We continued walking up the boulevard, making interesting discoveries the whole way out.

Among other things, we found what may possibly be Kim’s new favorite store. It’s called The Normal Store and for Americans you can think of it as a blend of a discount Walgreens and an IKEA in that it is full of the sorts of health and beauty items that you’d find in an American pharmacy store – sunscreen, shampoo, makeup, toothpaste, and the like, as well as assorted snacks and beverages – but it forces you to walk through the place on a set path the way IKEA does. The one in Aveiro was two stories tall and we saw all of it before we left. There’s one in Stockholm as well, and I still have a tube of toothpaste from there in my travel kit.

Also, the buildings in European cities always seem to be more colorful than the ones in American cities.

The boulevard takes you out to where the canal boats live. We really enjoyed the little bridges over the smaller branch of the canal, which are festooned with ribbons. On a lot of bridges in Europe – and, increasingly, in the US – you will see padlocks fastened to the railings. These are put there by couples as a statement of their love for each other, which is a great thing except that padlocks get heavy when you have enough of them and the bridges aren’t built for that kind of weight. Someone in Aveiro had the brilliant idea of substituting colorful ribbons for locks, and then people could write whatever they wanted on them before tying them to the railing. It’s a very humane and thoughtful project and there should be more of those in the world. I hope the idea catches on.

We decided that we wanted to go on one of the boat rides, so we found one of the many boats selling tickets and reserved our slot and then had a while to explore a bit before our appointed time.

We found a lovely little church – the Igreja da Apresentação Paroquial da Vera-Cruz – and went inside to explore a bit. It was in many ways typical of a lot of the smaller churches we saw in Portugal – somewhat spare on the outside, though with some lovely tile work as decoration, and exuberantly Baroque on the inside. This one had interior walls lined in tile, which was a fascinating effect and apparently common in Aveiro in our limited experience.

The buildings near the boat dock were also interesting, and behind them there was a little memorial to a struggle that is apparently well known enough in Aveiro to require no further explanation for visitors. “To the memory of the people of Aveiro who suffered for freedom,” it says on the marker, and that is a good thing to remember in these parlous times.

Eventually it was time for our boat ride. They don’t really do the salt trade in Aveiro anymore, so most of the boats have been repurposed for tourists. You climb into the boat and find a seat along the side, wait interminably while enough other people do the same that the boat company feels it’s actually worth starting your tour, set sail and go down the canal for a while, hang a right and explore some of the docks, return past your original starting point to get to a lagoon near what was once the main tile factory in Aveiro, and then return back to the dock. There’s a bunch of these boats plying the waters and you wave at them as they go by and they wave to you. The boats are completely open to the sun, which is a bit of a trick on a bright hot day but there you go.

Throughout this experience our guide (the guy in the white shirt and black pants in the second photo) kept up a running commentary on everything we passed that was mostly inaudible and only vaguely in English but very cheerfully delivered and repetitive enough that eventually we could work out what he was getting at, so in the end it was interesting. The whole boat ride is about 45 minutes and it’s definitely something you should do if you find yourself in Aveiro.

Afterwards we wandered around for a bit until we found ourselves at a little pastry shop that sold ovos moles. Ovos moles are to Aveiro what pasteis de nata are to the rest of Portugal – it’s the default pastry that everyone gets when they’re there. The story we were told is that the local nuns in their various convents in the area would use egg whites to clean their habits, which left them with a lot of leftover yolks. They’d mix those with sugar, heat them until they thickened up a bit, and then wrap them in what was basically communion wafer dough and bake them. Apparently they often come shaped as shells or other ocean-related things, but the ones we had were more like barrels.

Like pasteis de nata they’re fairly inexpensive and you can find them pretty much all over town – every shop selling pastries, coffee, snacks, or groceries had them, and they’re cheap enough that the cashier told me she’d rather I paid for them with my phone than have to make change from a twenty-euro bill, which is all the cash I had at the time. I liked them, though Kim thought they were too sweet. They are definitely specific to that place, though.

Having snacked, we then headed over to the big shopping mall right on the canal and found an American-sized Diet Coke at the McDonalds there because sometimes that’s just what you need. It’s a pretty nice mall as malls go, and the part where the Diet Coke was located was air conditioned, which we appreciated on a hot day. It was a good place to rest for a bit before moving on.

From there we walked up the main pedestrian shopping street until we found the Igreja da Santa Casa da Misericordia which was one of the more impressively-tiled churches we found in Portugal. A bored but friendly young woman sitting on a tall stool in the shade of the alcove by the front door took our nominal entry fee and shooed us inside, and it really was quite something to see.

We continued on our way up the pedestrian street, which was lined with interesting buildings, until it met a fairly large boulevard with more interesting buildings. The false façade on the last one was a bit jarring, but otherwise they were lovely.

This is what you come here for, right? The “Talking Heads Special” – more blogging about buildings and food.

Aveiro actually has a small cathedral, and in some ways it was one of the more interesting ones we saw on this trip because it’s just so new. It’s built on top of a church that goes back to the 15th century CE and there are features of that earlier church that are incorporated into the cathedral that exists today, but the whole thing was redone in the early 20th century – finished in 1938, in fact, only a year before my dad was born – and it’s very modern that way. It’s an interesting contrast to pretty much every other cathedral we visited.

After the cathedral we meandered our way back the way we came, ending up on a fairly large plaza surrounded by official-looking buildings, the most interesting of which was this one.

This was where Lauren called us from home to iron out details of her upcoming travels where she would meet us in Sweden and then head out for further adventures. I’m always amazed at how easy it is to call people and talk with them these days, especially if you have WhatsApp, which works pretty much anywhere in the world and requires no plan. I am old enough to remember when long distance telephone calls made over landlines during off-peak hours to save money were the state of the art when it came to that sort of thing. Truly we live in an age of marvels, and it is a sad commentary that we so rarely get to step back and consider that in the rush of current events. It was lovely to talk with her, sitting on a ledge by a large sign in a plaza in a small city in Portugal.

We made our way from there to the docks because you can’t go to a seaside town – especially one with as long and rich of a commercial history as Aveiro – and not see the historic docks. They’re really quite lovely. The big loopy thing in the background of the first picture is there to hold up the circular pedestrian bridge that you can see underneath it. We went down one side of the water, over that bridge, and back up the other side just because we could.

We also found this little church, which we didn’t go into. It was enough to see it from the outside, particularly since it came with a fascinatingly modern sculpture of the Virgin Mary right in front of it.

By this point it was starting to get toward time for our train back to Porto, so we found the boulevard and started meandering slowly back to the train station, taking a few detours along the way to look for a particular store in the mall (found it, decided not to buy anything) and a grocery where we could get some snacks. Right up by the train station was another pastry shop where I fulfilled my daily quest for a pasteis de nata.

It was still early when we got to the train station, so we found a woman wearing the train company’s uniform to ask if we could switch our tickets to an earlier train. Unfortunately her attention was monopolized by a Blowhard who absolutely refused to let her pay any attention to the small crowd of others who hoped to ask questions or listen to the answers she was giving to his questions, which did beg the question of what exactly he was hoping to achieve. Eventually he wandered off and we asked our question, but apparently you can’t switch reserved seat trains that way so we found a place to sit on the platform (not easy!) and waited until our train arrived.

This is where we discovered that there was some guy sitting in our seats – both of them, in fact – who was deeply annoyed that we would ask for them and motioned angrily for us to sit elsewhere.  In Philadelphia I would know how to handle this, but it’s hard when you’re in a foreign country and don’t understand what the customs are or speak the language to know how quite to respond to that – is this worth a confrontation or not? and how exactly would you do that in this situation? – but there were plenty of seats right there so we found a couple and nobody ever checked anyway.

Oddly enough, a conductor did actually check our tickets on the four-minute, one-stop general seating train that ran from Porto Campanha back to São Bento.

By the time we got back to Porto it was nearly 9pm and we were hungry for dinner, so we found a place called Loio’s right there by the station and had a perfectly fine meal there, outdoors by the construction barriers. They’re building a new subway line in Porto, one that will eventually go right by Loio’s, but in the meantime it’s just a lot of pink walls since it will be the Pink Line. Porto’s metro lines are color coded. Construction or no, there were a lot of people wandering past us as we ate and it was enjoyable to watch them go by on a warm summer night as the sun went down. Also, I couldn’t tell if the two waiters working the outside tables were twins or just looked that way and that was fun bit of speculation as well.

We walked back up to our neighborhood to discover that the lights on the side street near our apartment were turned on. We’d noticed them in our travels around the neighborhood but figured they were meant for Christmas or some other holiday like that, but here we were on a random night in June with no real crowds around us and they were lit up and festive.

It was a nice way to end a day.