Language skills. Moving on.

Our friendly driver, the one who collected us from Porto airport on our arrival, turned up at our hotel yesterday at 9.00 to drive a group of us back to Porto - service above and beyond the call of many tournament organisers!

I managed to keep up a kind of conversation in a kind of Portuguese most of the way. They sat me in the front seat as nobody else in the group even tried Portuguese. Behind me conversation went on in Spanish, Italian and English, with intermissions while people snoozed.

Meanwhile the driver and I went through football (Manchester United or Manchester City?), travel, nice places to go in France, memorable cities in Spain, regional languages. Occasionally he would forget that my Portuguese is rudimentary to say the least and launch into some quite lengthy explanation. A nod and a smile works wonders. Goodness knows what I agreed with!

I have often heard people maintain that language skills develop in a certain order: reading comprehension, listening comprehension, spoken expression, written expression. My Portuguese is not following that pattern at all. My reading skills are greatly assisted by my prior knowledge of Spanish and French. I can put together reasonable spoken sentences; my awareness of how words change from Spanish to Gallego helps me turn Spanish vocabulary into some kind of Portuguese. I haven’t tested my written Portuguese in a while but I know for a fact that my listening skills are abysmal! After a few words the language turns into a flow of shushing and zhuzhing and liquid ls! More practice needed! Maybe I need to travel around more with our Portuguese driver.

By the time we reached Porto the rain had let up and we had some blue sky and sunshine. Despite our having been told that we would be dropped at the airport, our driver volunteered to take us into Porto centre. There we successfully located a restaurant where we have eaten before: cheap and cheerful - fish soup, grilled sole with chips and salad, a bit of bread, a glass of wine and a coffee - all for less that €20!

Then we went and stood on Avenida dos Aliados, outside the posh McDonalds to wait for the bus to Vigo. There was the usual huddle of confused people who had been told that the bus left from there but were unable to find a bus stop. That would be because there isn’t one! You just need to know where it stops. It’s a matter of faith. Lots of open-top tourist buses came and went before eventually the AUTNA bus arrived.

When we got on, we found that AUTNA appears to have upgraded their buses. Plush leather seats and plenty of leg-room. Possible fewer seats that on the old buses, with ranks of twos on one side of the bus and single seats on the other. The seat belts were still rubbish though: difficult to fasten and then very restrictive of movement. Of course, almost nobody but us bothered to try to use them. Which probably explains their parlous state, even in fancy new buses.

Are all AUTNA buses on the new kind? We shall find out on Friday when we make our way back to Porto to catch a plane home to the UK.

Another adventure almost over!