A Trip to Portugal (page 9 of 11)
Day Eight – Porto
We woke up and went upstairs to the breakfast room of the hotel. This necessitates a little more coffee talk. The coffee in the hotels wasn’t
like the coffee we got in cafes. It was more like traditional American coffee: The coffee was in some sort of container that kept it warm and people drank it with milk. Every place we went put the milk in the same sort of container to keep it warm, but I never really thought much about it. I’d fill my cup with coffee and top it off with milk like I normally do. Breakfast at Pensao Astoria was a little different. A nice lady came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with two silver caraffes. ”Cafe con leite,” she announced. I nodded, and she proceeded to fill my cup 2/3 full of warm milk, and then she topped it off with coffee! I suddenly realized why every place kept their milk warm. I felt a little ashamed for
hogging the coffee earlier in the trip, but was glad to be set straight.
Edie and I decided that we didn’t really want to spend the day looking at Port lodges, so we decided to try to take a day trip to a small town upriver of Porto called Amarante. We had no problem finding the buses and catching one. The town, according to Lonely Planet, is dedicated to the patron saint of marriage. I felt like the trip was a bit of a waste for me since I’d already found my partner, but we had fun anyway. The church in the center of town is a typical highly decorated small-town church. Very pretty. It contains the remains of said saint, and Edie touched his foot. The highlight of the town for me was the river that
divided it right in half. Two bridges cross the river. One is an ultra modern highway, which is the bridge our bus crossed coming in. The other is a beautiful old stone bridge which crosses directly to the aforementioned church. Edie and I had lunch at a restaurant (grilled fish, our only non-sandwich lunch of the trip) whose patio looked out onto the bridge. The town is also famous for its penis-shaped pastries which are apparently especially popular during the festival of the patron saint of marriage, but Edie and I opted for a more tame desert. We looked around, took a pleasant stroll by the river (struggling not to look into a parked car that contained a hot and heavy couple), and went back to Porto.
The rest of the evening was spent sipping coffee by the river and watching
the sun go down over the port lodges. We watched kids playing soccer in a nearby square. We did a little souvenir shopping (including purchasing a bottle of port). We ate dinner at one of the many restaurants lining the river. Restaurants in areas with high tourist traffic are just never as good. I had fried sole, but it paled in comparison to Edie’s in Lisbon. Oh well. All in all, a quiet day.
