Solo (with Coco) in Porto

Coco and I have been here in Porto for two weeks and I’m not sure which one of us misses Denise more. After a few days, Coco stopped looking around for her at every turn and gradually accepted me as the best she could do for the moment. Denise is very busy dealing with our family matter in Los Angeles and things are going much better, so thanks for all of your concerns. I’m hoping that she will be back in a couple of weeks and we can start enjoying Porto together. 

My arrival in town was a bit stressful, as I had to balance the drop-off of our five-month long car lease with the check-in at our Airbnb. Since I had to drop the car by four p.m. but couldn’t check in until that same time, and I had a car full of luggage, I had a logistical conundrum to solve. If Denise had been there, or if I had planned better it wouldn’t have been an issue but, with Coco totally unwilling to carry any bags, and the doorway to the apartment being on the busiest downtown street in Porto, I needed help. Luckily, we had met and made friends with former Lush (and Servants, and Felt, and Jesus and Mary Chain, and too many others to name) bassist Phil King on our 2019 trip here and he was more than willing to step in and be my roadie. Phil and I bonded back then over our experiences as foot soldiers in the alternative rock wars. I picked him up at his place and we drove over to the apartment to drop the luggage. Phil stayed with the car, which was parked in a loading zone, distracting Coco, while I shuttled our belongings up the stairs. Luckily, Porto parking control is pretty lax and we were able to do the drop and get to a restaurant without any hassle. Whew! 

The apartment, located right across the street from the renowned and recently renovated Mercado de Bolhão, was immediately impressive, with good-sized rooms featuring high ceilings and lots of light. The balcony is big enough for a table for two as well as the all-important laundry-drying rack, and overlooks the interior courtyard of our block — nothing spectacular, but it sure beats the parking lot view back in Castiello de Jaca. The neighborhood is pretty touristy and the place is crawling with restaurants, souvenir shops, and hotels. Every day, all day, there are hordes of travelers dragging their roller bags behind them across the tile sidewalks and cobblestone streets, either arriving or departing in a never-ending tide. I’ve heard English spoken here more than anywhere we’ve been, outside of Ireland. I’ve become so accustomed to listening to the sound of the languages spoken around me rather than the words that it’s a bit jarring when I hear the mother tongue being spoken. Portuguese is surely the most foreign of all the languages I’ve heard over here: it’s fairly harsh and often angry-sounding, like something you’d hear in an Eastern European country. In Spain, you could, for the most part, get away with the phonetic pronunciation of a word but here the accent and inflections make that difficult. Even a simple word like “two” — dois in Portuguese — is a lot trickier than it looks. I end up asking “fala inglês?” a lot and, since I’m in the tourist district, there’s usually someone in the shop or the dog park who can help. In fact, most times that I enter a store, the person there will start talking to me in English. I guess I’m not fooling anyone. 

Most of my days begin with coffee and muesli on the patio, with Coco sitting nearby, ready to scavenge any dropped morsels. After that, we’re off to the dog park for some ball-throwing. Actually, it’s not legally a dog park — our host explained to me that that concept doesn’t exist in Portugal — but it’s been adopted by the locals for that purpose since the Covid lockdowns. It’s really just a grassy area above the Trindade metro station that we share with locals looking for a place to smoke a surreptitious joint or down a liter of super cheap Super Bock. Coco doesn’t mind, however, and will chase the ball until my arm hurts, and that’s when we leave for a walk around the neighborhood. There are many streets leading off of the Trindade plaza and I try to pick a different one every day and see where it leads. Porto has lots of old-world charm, even when it’s just a run-down residential district. It’s a very hilly place, and it often reminds me of San Francisco but, like that city, Porto has problems housing all of its residents, and many live on the street. This is shocking to me because I’d always thought that socialist governments would prevent this kind of problem. Of course, like that city, it’s a popular tourist destination and record numbers arrived this year, coinciding with a huge construction project to expand the Metro trains, making for a chaotic scene in the downtown. In 2019, I didn’t mind the tourists since I was one of them but now, as a long-term tourist, I wish they would all go home. 

After our morning walk and play, we come back home and it’s lunchtime for Coco and me: she has kibble and a dental chew while I opt for something from the human side of the menu, usually my leftovers from last night’s dinner. For the first couple of weeks, the Vuelta de España — the Spanish equivalent of the Tour de France — was on TV in the early afternoons and I got hooked on watching that. I wrote earlier of my love for the French race but the Iberian model is just as fun to watch and there’s no shortage of incredible scenery. My favorite days were when they raced into France, crossing some of the same mountain passes that we had in our time there, even riding right through our old village of Pierrefitte-Nestalas, and up the Col du Tourmalet, and the day they covered almost exactly the same roads that I had on my way from Santander to Oviedo. That was usually followed by live coverage of the US Open tennis matches from New York — of course, we were rooting for Coco Gauff —  and I got sucked into that tournament as well. I hadn’t intended television to be a big part of my travels but it really did help fill the empty afternoons when I was feeling Denise’s absence most keenly. 

I have had a couple of actual human interactions since arriving, lest you think that I’ve been a total hermit. I went to a gig by Phil’s band, Population 5, made up of three Porto locals and two English expats, in the basement of a record shop not far from my place. They’re a great outfit and hearing live music is always a shot in the arm for me. Best of all, it was an early show and I was back home by nine!  I also had coffee with Meredith, a friend of my friend Bob’s in Chicago, and got to pick her brain about life in Porto. She and her husband have been here for a few years, working as digital nomads, and she had a lot of intelligence to share about the pros and cons of living overseas. Outside of that, I smile a lot at people who stop to admire Coco, and sometimes use the handful of words I’ve picked up, and hope that the shopkeepers I encounter can speak a few words of English. 

Somewhere between the finish line of the Vuelta and the marquee matchups of the Open, Coco and I set out on our afternoon walks, usually to a different park in a distant part of town. There isn’t a whole lot of green space in the center of the city so we often have to stroll quite a ways to find her a new place to do her business. Porto eschews the midday break that France, Spain, and Italy enjoy, so their rush hour is more in line with the US model: by six in the evening most people are at home or in a café, giving us a little breathing room as we explore the city. As is true everywhere, Coco attracts a lot of attention, and she has no problem stopping and preening for passersby as they give her curly head a scritch. But Porto also has a fair amount of people who recoil from her approach, as if I were walking a wild boar down the sidewalk, and I’m not sure which reaction entertains me more. Before arriving, the travel websites made Portugal sound like a dog-owner’s paradise, but the truth is that here, dogs aren’t welcome in businesses the way they are in Italy, Spain, or even France. I’ve even been asked to leave trashy souvenir shops, even though anything Coco could do in those places would only improve things. 

There are few things I enjoy more than exploring a city on foot, and these morning and evening walks are usually the highlights of my day. My dinners are usually pretty boring affairs, usually a protein and a veg or salad, washed down with some cheap Portuguese wine or a cider. I can buy a juice box-sized local wine — the perfect size for one person — for 60 cents or, If I want a step up in quality, a half-bottle of Alentejo red will set me back 1 euro 70. Even at the small, urban Pingo Doce supermarket located at the foot of the stairs to my apartment, the prices are comically low compared to US prices. I haven’t been eating out very much in an attempt to save money: with Denise in LA and me in Portugal, our food budget has doubled. After dinner, Denise and I connect on WhatsApp and she fills me in on Finn’s progress. As you can imagine, it’s very stressful to have a child going through a crisis when you’re so far away so it’s good that at least one of us can be close by. I feel kind of useless here but I think it’s best that Denise is there with him: she’s better suited to giving the kind of care that Finn needs. I would probably just suggest a STAT colonoscopy…

After dinner, I’d watch the tennis matches but, now that it’s over, I have discovered AMC, the movie channel familiar to US basic cable viewers, and have been watching several mediocre movies that I’d forgotten about or — like Forrest Gump — never got around to seeing (really? FG was a popular movie??Yikes! ). Unlike Spain and France, the Portuguese choose to keep the original actors’ voices and use subtitles instead. (Apparently, it’s also partially a financial decision, owing to the relatively small size of the country. Spain can afford a dubbing industry- Portugal can not.) Not only does this help me enjoy the movies but I’m also picking up a few words in the lingua franca. Here’s a couple of shots of the television…

The bed here is definitely more comfortable than the last couple places so my sleep is better. The nights here have been cool, a welcome break from the heat and humidity of the daytime, and I’m rediscovering the comforter, something we haven’t needed since Ireland. I’ll let the pictures tell most of the stories since, as you can tell, life without Denise here is somewhat regimented and dull. I’m definitely “batching it,” as they say, and I usually go a few days between showers and changes of clothes. There’s something nice about the solitude but it’s far outweighed by the monotony of the routine. It’s fair to say that I’m wallowing a bit but I’m not worried about it. I’m saving the cultural stuff for when Denise is back with me when we can leave Coco for a few hours and really savor the city. By the time she returns, I’ll know my way around town like a local. 

Denise has sent me a large group of photos from her time in Los Angeles so I am planning a photo-heavy post of those soon. Obrigado por ler!