Minha Morada em Portugal

Marco from the shuttle bus called me right as I got through passport control, and met me outside for the 90 minute drive. Such a pleasant drive, I was pretty sleepy and napped a bit as I looked out the window. Not much to see on the highway, but I realized as we passed signs and businesses that I remembered some words from 10 years ago (“Cozinhas” stood out, since it was sort of randomly on a building that must have been selling renovation fixtures and materials on the side of the road, but even out of context I remembered it meant “kitchen”). Halfway through the trip we took an exit to meet another shuttle driver, Manuel, who finished the drive. He spoke english and was from Coimbra and as we drove into the city, he showed me some sites – the University area, the oldest church and bridge, the downtown area. It wasn’t bright and sunny, but there was blue sky and sun peeking out and it was a very beautiful and somewhat dramatic site to see this approach, it’s the view at the top of the blog. Quite gorgeous.

Nuno, my Airbnb, landlord, met us at the house and brought me up to the place on the third floor. The building is from the 1400s and he says that it has been in his family for at least six generations. He explained that ever since his grandfather’s father was running the building, it has been used for supplemental income, because “Portugal does not have any Social Security.” Most of our time together was spent on figuring out the heaters – the building is not heated, so every room has its own version of portable heaters. There is a gas heater in the living room, and I haven’t seen this kind before – it requires kind of pumping a pilot light. I saw how he did it, but so far I’m a little nervous to start lighting fires.

The building is in the heart of the downtown, cobblestoned area, definitely the most touristy area in town, but also full of students from the university. The university is the second oldest in Europe dating back to the 1300s (the Sorbonne is older, Manuel told me). There are indications of students all over the place – mostly in the graffiti and murals on the walls of these ancient buildings (“The Media Hates Trans People” is scrawled on the wall next to the apartment building), and the clotheslines full of graphic tees hanging out the windows (I tracked on a Bowie tee, there were others too but I’m not remembering what they said). The students at this university are famous for wearing capes as they go to class, and possibly influencing J. K. Rowling as she wrote about wizards and Hogwarts. I didn’t see any capes as we came into town, but I’m thinking there are two possibilities; yesterday was Saturday, and also students may still be on some kind of intercession or break, I think, because I saw a sign in a shop window on a walk that indicated that the ice cream store would be on vacation until February 9. Now, it’s ice cream, so maybe people aren’t eating ice cream in January, but in my head, I’ve made up a whole other reason where the closed ice cream store = no capes. This may be stretching it a bit. So I will be on the lookout on Monday for students in capes.

The apartment is pretty amazing. It’s old, faded and crumbly just like my memories of Lisbon, and just what I had hoped for. The pictures in Airbnb were very accurate – including the spectacular views. The apartment itself is sprawling, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room. It has very high ceilings, definitely more than 10 feet high, and a few of the rooms have original detail on the ceilings and chair rails. There are long vertical windows in each room, some of which go out onto a small iron rail terrace.

There are views on all sides of the building– four of the rooms look out onto the vista over the Mondego River and the overview of Coimbra, and the other four windows rooms look out onto clay – shingled rooftops and courtyards of surrounding buildings.

There is absolutely nothing fancy about this apartment – it’s just charming, eclectic, artsy, all of that. Everything seems to be in good shape, things like windows, fixtures, water pressure in the showers…

Wait, scratch that. It’s raining very hard today and when I just went into the kitchen, there was a leak clearly coming in from the roof, and water was all over the counter and floor. On noticing it, it looks like an old leak that has resprung – when I spoke to Nuno he said it has happened before but not often, today there are very high winds and that did something to the roof. Someone will come by tomorrow to look at it, but we should just put down towels until then. Deja vu, this just happened in Astoria (or keeps happening in Astoria) so, it’s just like Home. I guess ceiling leaks follow me around.

Anyway, back to yesterday, after unpacking, I went out for a walk to the market (Mercado) which is a big structure under the highway with many stands inside, mostly food, but some souvenirs and clothes, but the big draw are the butchers and fishmongers who have really fresh stuff out. There’s also a cheese maker, and olive guy, a Halal guy, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and a few restaurant stalls. For lunch I had a grilled fish, which I ordered in Portuguese with Google Translate’s help, and some batatas (potatoes).

I picked up some vegetables for the evening from the market, and I went to find a supermarket, but ultimately wasn’t successful. The streets are really confusing because when you see something on a map you don’t know if it means that it’s the next street over, or if it’s a street above or under you– so far the maps I’ve used have not been helpful with that. There are so many hills and stairs that it’s really confusing to try to find something that actually looks like it’s parallel to the street that you’re on. So in the end I gave up and found what was basically, a 7-Eleven/Tesco minimart and got a few things there, rice, cakes, cheese, Liete sem lactose (lactose free milk). For dinner I had cheese, rice cakes, and a makeshift guac that was actually really good. For dessert I had a part of a huge, beautiful merengue that I saw in the window of a café. Meringues are generally gluten-free as long as they don’t tamper with the recipe, and when I spoke to the woman about it, she showed me tons of other gluten-free sweets they have there, including one that looked a little like a pasteles (which is the national sweet of Portugal which is all dough and custard and I have never been able to try one). So I will be going back for that pasteles thing, but I took home the meringue. I had about a third of it after dinner. it was quite delicious – not as life-changing as the merengue I remember in Sevilla, but I will be getting more of these, most definitely.

I had really nice interactions with everyone I spoke to in the markets. I tried to at least greet people with a few words of Portuguese, and then apologize for only speaking English, but most people seem to want to practice their English.

So now we are at today. After sleeping a fitful, seven hours, I felt better, and was able to get up at 8:00 and get out of the house to find the real supermarket. I had a very leisurely, exploratory time at the supermarket (which I love doing in foreign countries, just not at home) which is about 10 minutes away (again straight downhill.) I bought a lot of basics for the kitchen, including lactose free stuff, oil, spices, butter, all of that. Bought some more cheese, fruit and veg, and stocked up on lactose free yogurt. I have promised myself that when I am alone in the apartment and others aren’t there, I will be cooking for myself, and not going out to eat. I’m not even great at doing that in Astoria, so this will be quite a feat if it comes to pass.

I had a lot of nice interactions in the supermarket, again with people wanting to practice their English. Also, I took a Bolt rideshare, which went well. The streets are so narrow in the central area, that a car really can’t go down the street that I’m staying on, so they will drop me off down the block in front of the old cathedral. It’s completely walkable, but I had four bags of cooking basics this morning and it was a tough haul to get over all those stairs and cobblestones. However, all was fine, made a nice lunch, and worked on setting up my space for work.

Later in the afternoon, I went for another walk, mostly to look for a laundromat. There is a washer in the apartment, but no dryer and people dry their clothes on clotheslines outside their windows. I would be OK with that except it looks like it’s going to rain for the next few days, so I need another option. I tried Google maps, like before, where it looked like the laundromat was a block away, but it actually was straight down many hills so it took a tremendous amount of trial and error. I found it for a rainy day and also found a crazy, ancient, dangerous, jagged staircase, going straight down to the waterfront right next to it. I hadn’t been to the waterfront yet, so for some reason I decided going down the staircase was a good idea. I will not be doing that again. It was terrifying, and at some point there was no going back, so it took about 20 minutes to get on solid ground because I was grasping the side and moving so slowly, so as not to slip off the rock. There were people going both up and down the stairs at the same time, although it was a deep and very narrow stairway 🎵, and we were all clearly in agreement about the treacherous thing we were attempting to do. There is no way that many people haven’t plummeted to their deaths on the staircase – other than a little plaque that you see once you’ve started to descend the staircase, there is no decent signage, and if some student is coming home happy from a night out with buddies, possibly in the rain (like it was today) and the dark, it would be impossible not to lose your footing. There isn’t even a gate of any kind at the top of the bottom of this crazy staircase. The last thing I’ll say about this – because I’m never taking that staircase again – is that this fall and I climbed the pyramids outside Mexico City, and the staircase was way scarier.

I did end up on the waterfront and took a very nice walk in front of the hotels and start of the business/downtown District. There are some very cool buildings there and lots of cafés were open. There’s one beautiful one called Café Santa Cruz that has been an operation for 500 years that I’d like to go soon when I have a buddy here. There’s one or two modern hotels, but most of them are clearly from the 18th or 19th century, maybe even earlier, with tiled walls. Most of these look like they’ve been closed for a while, and I wondered if they were closures post pandemic. Also notable was how quiet it was in town – there were some people out, but I still think that it may be intercession. They just didn’t seem to be a lot of students there. I’m going to see if I can figure this out. If Break ends on February 9, I will be disappointed because that is the day that I leave and I really have to see one of these capes before leaving.

Dinner was courgette (zucchini), rice, Dourada fish (very tasty- The person at the fish counter said that it was the national fish, and I said that I thought that sardines were the national fish, and she said that sardines were the official dish of Lisbon, but not necessarily the whole country.) And as Tony would say in a certain departed comedian’s voice, I did not know that.

Oh boy – The jet lag just hit me so hard again. Boa noite!💤