1) I wrote my morning pages on the terrace by the small pool overlooking the wide river. The breeze was chillier than expected with all that sun. Before bed I had flirted with the idea of a late-night swim if I woke up again — but that never happened.
1a) Across the river I noticed a haze across the water, which I assumed was fog. My English friends corrected me via Whatsapp that most of Portugal was ablaze with wildfire. Remember this detail.
2) The hotel breakfast room included one long sturdy community table for ten, with very short tables pulled up to lounge furniture scattered through the rest of the room. I chose the latter, and my knees were just over the tabletop. The buffet had to be explained — different things in different parts of the room — but it was a lot of things I enjoy: delicious baked goods, meats and cheese, and tiny chocolate croissants. And most excellent coffee.
3) It’s worth noting that the hotel’s toilet paper was colored bright schoolbus yellow. I had to wonder if that was just them, or the whole country.
3a) If Mother had been along on this trip, she would have kept a sample sheet to put in a scrapbook. That’s what she did when she and Daddy went to Switzerland in 1970.
Look at how the designers used the carnation for the zero in 50. Beautifully achieved.
4) Once I got my train tickets — I am getting much more used to QR codes — today’s Nice Man with a Car brought me to Apolonia Station for the noon train to Porto. The train had been specially decorated to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that ended the Salazar dictatorship. I suppose in America the corresponding year would be 1826, or 1915 for the Confederacy.
5) My seat in second class, “comfort class,” was in the center of the car with a convenient table, and my journey all the way to Porto was, in fact, completely comfortable. The car became full after the second stop — full of people with roller bags and full of confusion. Eventually everyone got settled enough so that the Nice Man with the Trolley could come through with refreshments.
This will give you a little idea of the wildfire smoke. It got thicker further north.
5a) Smoke from the wildfires became more prominent after Aveiro, and especially crossing the Douro River into Porto.
6) Disembarking down escalators and moving through corridors, the crowd moved like radioactive molasses — very active but hardly moving. Once I got through it I realized this was in part because the corridor terminated in two escalators, and most people couldn’t figure out which was which.
6a) Happily the Nice Man with the Car was there — I saw my name on his little screen from about ten feet and two minutes away, we caught each other’s glance and nodded — and then he got me out of the crowd and the station through the winding streets of Porto. On this ten-minute drive I got the impression of a tiled Malta.
The daintiness! Freshly baked almond cakes, grapes, and sparkling water.
7) My hotel in Porto is very posh, intimidatingly posh — like the Danieli in Venice, where I got to stay for a night in 2013. I was overwhelmed at the front desk with requests for passport and credit card and signature while simultaneously being offered a hot washcloth and a cup of tea. I can tell I’m going to enjoy it here.
8) The hotel is also near many of the must-see items in Porto, and I figured I’d go first to the famous Livreria Lello, a jewel of a bookstore. IF YOU GO: You must book a ticket online in advance; this is no place to book tickets on site. There are lines for each of the timed entries at 15-minute intervals.
8a) Lello has become less than a bookstore — it’s an Instagram Moment. Everyone wants their moment on that staircase! So there is a lot of (im)patient waiting for people to get that perfect shot.
8b) They aren’t that easy to manage, those stairs, and my attempt to descend as Dolly Levi nearly ended as Agnes Gooch.
8c) They do still sell books, and I picked up a volume of Portuguese history for me, and The Little Prince for Younger Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged and his wife to read aloud to their Sweet Precious One.
Many Portuguese buildings are tiled on the outside. I love it.
9) Having thrown down the gauntlet to Porto, I needed some dinner, and repaired to the hotel bar. This turned out to require a lot of patience; I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes, but it took me a long time just to get a menu, and then to place an order with the slim and smiling waiter.
9a) The place started to fill with a couple different collections of Bluff Hearty Types of both sexes who required a lot of attention. They may have been gathering there for drinks before dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. My attention wandered between them, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent and His World, and — darkly — waiting for my drink.
9a) Which was lovely when it finally arrived, a succulent manhattan. Followed eventually by a loin of beef with mashed potatoes so smooth they were served in a bowl with a soup spoon. I preemptively ordered a second drink.
Dessert. Pretty much anything involving chocolate and hazelnuts works for me.
9b) Two ladies who arrived well after I did were also experiencing delays in service. While I waited for my dessert, I was giggling a little too loudly over someone’s Instagram post of questions received by NYC librarians in the mid-century. I could not contain myself over “What lassitude is New York City on?” This led me to apologize to them — and broke the ice for a very interesting conversation.
9c) Just before I left, a group of ladies left the bar, one of them making a special point to thank my waiter. “You have just absolutely made our stay here these last few days!” or some such. So it may just have been an off night.
10) And so to bed! I was damn near wiped out. Looking out my window, I could see the full moon dripping blood red in the sky, tinted by all the smoke.