Adventures in Oporto

For the last week I’ve been fairly quiet and stay-at-home after two or three weeks of visitors. I’ve been catching up with myself and I am finally getting around to talking about my adventures in Oporto last weekend, an age ago it seems now.

My friend Heidy was travelling back to the UK on Sunday morning, a most awkward day to catch an early plane from Oporto. Every other day of the week there is a 7.00 am bus from Vigo which, taking into account the time difference in Portugal, arrives at the airport in plenty of time for a 9.45 flight. Sunday – nothing until later in the day! It seemed rather unfriendly to pack her off to spend Saturday evening alone in Oporto so I booked both of us into a hotel there and we set off late Saturday morning, giving us the afternoon and evening to explore the old city.

Now, whenever I have travelled from Oporto airport to Vigo the bus has gone through the city, stopping to pick up passengers outside the wonderfully ornate MacDonald's on Avenida dos Aliados. So I was feeling confident that I could find our hotel easily, just a matter of crossing the avenida. Not so! We travelled with a different bus company which did go to Oporto airport and then into the city but dropped us somewhere to the west of the old town at the aptly named Praza da Galiza. The rather grumpy driver responded to my questions by directing me to the booking office of the bus company.

It was a good job I had gone equipped with a map and have a reasonable awareness of the points of the compass – this latter thanks to being married to someone who ALWAYS needs to orientate himself in a new city. This skill served us well. We worked out where we were and decided that perhaps a taxi was in order.

Then Serendipity, the god of happy accidents, set to work and we found the friendliest taxi driver in the city, I’m sure. I spoke to him in Spanish, managing to tell him in hesitant Portuguese that I don’t actually speak his language. We had a friendly language and culture lesson as he explained to us in slow, carefully pronounced Portuguese that really it’s just like galego / Galician (which it can be except that for the most part at speed it sounds more like Russian, full of shhhh and zhhhh sounds) and that he was determined to make himself understood. He talked about differences in the language while pointing out interesting buildings en route and before we knew it we were there, at the hotel: 5€ please!

We checked into our hotel, where the staff were multilingually friendly and extremely helpful, telling us exactly where to catch the metro to the airport on Sunday morning and incidentally answering questions that the grumpy bus driver had refused to do. So we dumped our belongings and set out to explore the old town.

First, since we were already there, the Avenida dos Aliados, an elongated square edged with fine stone buildings, most impressive in the sunshine. Today though, it was full, chock-a-block full, of strange figures, rather like Andrew Gormley’s men on the beach in the North West of England. Each one was painted and decorated by a different artist.

At the bottom of the avenue I finally found the explanation. This was an installation (I think that’s the word) called Homem T, an exercise in inclusion and anti-racism, reminding us that men come in all shapes, sizes and colours. They will remain in Avenida dos Aliados until the end of August when the fibreglass figures will be auctioned.

From this artificial crowd we moved in to the railway station, a wonderful old building with amazing tile-work depicting historic events. Even without the wonders of the main concourse, however, the station itself with its old platforms would have been enough. All it really needed was an old steam engine chuffing away.

Leaving the station we went downhill (in a south-westerly direction, I think – I’m really into this points of the compass thing now!) exclaiming and snapping photos of picturesque streets as we went.

Eventually we could tell we had almost reached the river, the Douro (Duero when it’s in Spain) making its way out to sea. By now we realised that it was a long time since breakfast, even more so as we had put our watches back an hour to Portuguese time. Serendipity did its (his/her?) magic again; we came across Chez Dany, pretending to be a French restaurant but really a few tables in the yard of a basement bar. Nonetheless, it boasted a menu with a range of omelettes, including the speciality of Dany, the French proprietor.

And so we found ourselves speaking French in Portugal and eating a very good omelette and chips, washed down with a beer each and followed by coffee, all for the grand total of 13€! We could have happily sat there a while longer: there was a cool breeze and we felt quite at ease.

However, we had the rest of the old quarter to explore and so we set off, following the river until we came to the tourist zone, the river bank packed with bars, restaurants, ice-cream stalls, tat (oops, sorry, souvenir) shops and crowds of people of all nationalities. The river is crossed by some six bridges and it is possible (indeed it is almost imperative according to the touts) to go on a boat trip to see them all and visit the Port wine breweries. This was not for us, however.

We crossed the river on the Dom Luis I bridge, a construction worth seeing. Gustave Eiffel built his tower in Paris (there is a street named after him in Oporto); this bridge was built by his Belgian partner/disciple Théophile Seyrig and it shows. Opened in 1886, it has two floors with cars crossing the lower one and a railway on the upper one. We crossed on the lower level but I have made crossing on the top level a project for the future.

Time was getting on and we felt an ice-cream calling. There were loads of ice-cream stalls around but we had set our hearts on a proper, preferably homemade one, not something made by Nestlé or some Iberian equivalent. Serendipity clearly felt that enough was enough and so reluctantly we made do with a pre-packaged ice-cream, rested our legs and then made our way back up hill, once more traversing a maze of old streets.

After a series of ups and downs we found the cathedral and admired the rooftop views and the cityscape. Then it was back to the Avenida dos Aliados where we stopped at a bar and refreshed ourselves with vinho verde but disappointingly no free tapas.

Eventually we gave in and went back to our hotel and fell into bed. Next morning we had to forego breakfast. My friend wanted to be at the airport for 8.00am and breakfast was not served until 7.45 by which time we were already on the metro. We fumbled our way to the metro station through a strangely foggy Oporto, the mist we had seen the previous evening out at the sea end of the town having invaded the whole place. This was not a problem though and neither was buying tickets for the super-efficient metro system

No, our problem came with “validating”. Helpful notices in English told us to be sure to “validate” our tickets before every trip but neglected to tell us how to do so. We could see yellow machines, clearly for just that activity, but no obvious slot to stick the ticket in. When we were told off by a ticket inspector (but thankfully not fined or made to leave the train) a helpful fellow passenger told us, in English, that we had to “show” our tickets to the yellow machines. Yes, and what did that mean? Eventually at the airport the ticket inspector demonstrated how to “validate”: you hold your ticket in front of a circle on the yellow machine. Sorry, Oporto metro, you need clearer instructions, maybe with a diagram for idiots like us!

Still, we made it to the airport without further mishap. My friend caught her plane. I met an ex-student who happened to be passing through Oporto (thank you again, Serendipity!) and had a further stroll around before trying to get lost finding my way to the bus-stop on Praza da Galiza. Despite my showing him my ticket, Saturday’s grumpy driver (maybe he works too many shifts!) would not let me on the bus until I had been to the ticket office. There they simply indicated which bus I needed to get on. Bureaucracy is a wonderful thing!

Don Gruñon (Mr Grumpy) gave us a hair-raisingly fast and bumpy ride back to Vigo and finally I strolled home through the evening sunshine – another adventure over!