Bike Ride Day 2 - Esposende to Caminha

The ocean wasn’t always on my left today. Sometimes it was on my right and other times it was not visible. Which probably means I was periodically off track, but I made it to Caminha, my last stop in Portugal. 

Despite two days on a sacred pilgrimage route, I still don’t have a solid overarching philosophy of religion. On one hand, I lost my phone but then it showed up. . . in front of a church. On the other hand, the Californians completely left me alone yesterday but then asked me to play cards with them this morning while we waited for the rain to stop . . . at breakfast. Is some higher power toying with me?

I didn’t wait for the rain to stop; I headed out this morning despite clouds and drizzle (a condition that I will not call “clizzle” or “droudy”) and although there were severe storm warnings out all day and the sky was often very dark and threatening, I never got rained on (Another sign? Am I overthinking this?). 

(Like you, I also think this one would be good to enter in the Frederick County Fair).

Much of the Camino de Santiago out here is composed of cobblestones like these, which is both charming and authentic, but after 70+ miles of riding on this, my ass is extremely sore. I would consider addressing it by jumping in the ocean but everything is pretty cold here. Although the Iberian Peninsula is not that large, one side borders the Mediterranean and the other the North Atlantic and, at least this week, the climates are very different. 

Last night in Esposende, a massive weather front moved in and I really didn’t want to be caught
walking around in it, so I ran to a little store and bought some bread and cheese to bring back to my room for dinner. Tonight I hit downtown Caminha and had a proper meal at this café, which was full of people who seemed to be having a good time based on my limited ability to assess the mood of people speaking Portuguese.

Bike Ride Day 1 - Porto to Esposende

Today’s ride took me along the Portuguese coast from Porto to Esposende. I was riding so close to the ocean most of the day that the guy who provided the bike said, “You probably don’t even need directions, just keep the ocean to your left for 70 kilometers.” “You’re on,” I thought, and that’s mostly what I did without checking the directions very much. I learned that keeping the ocean to your left isn’t as easy as it sounds, and I probably made it about 10 kilometers before I started getting lost. I undoubtedly rode quite a few extra kilometers over the course of the day trying to find the ocean.

Here is an example of where I found the ocean but lost the road. I don’t recommend travelling over sand dunes by bike.

I also learned today that I am actually following the Camino de Santiago for almost the entire ride. I’d thought I was going to be intersecting it here and there, but instead I spent much of the day riding past healthy-looking young to middle-aged white people with Osprey packs, carbon fiber walking sticks and the same granola bars as mine doing a quiet, contemplative walk to Santiago de Compostela, and who glared at me as I rang my little bell so that they would move out of my damn way so that I could zoom past them (apologies to any friends or loved ones who either have, or someday might, walk the Camino).

Despite my bad attitude about the Camino, I experienced the second miracle of my trip, this one while actually on the Camino. I was cycling through a small village which was, you know, like any of your typical medieval villages, full of hilly, curvy, cobbled streets, and I realized with horror that I had lost my phone. I need my phone to survive. It has my maps, my connection to family, all my trip documents, etc. I remembered taking some pictures of a church in the village about a half-mile back and attempted to retrace my route. Amazingly, all the way back at the church was my phone, lying on the cobblestone street where it fell out of my pocket. It hadn’t been run over, stolen, or eaten by livestock. So maybe there is something to this pilgrimage thing. I’ll know more tomorrow, when it is supposed to rain all day, which an omnipotent and benevolent higher power would never allow to happen when I am on a bike ride.

Goodbye, Porto

I find Portuguese to be completely baffling. With French and Italian, languages I also don’t speak, I feel like I can grab a word here or there, especially after a couple of glasses of wine. But Portuguese defies my brain’s expectations of acceptable linguistic sounds. Someone explained to me today that the name “Ramos” is pronounced “chamosh,” where the “ch” (representing the"R") is pronounced like it is in Yiddish, but that the letter R also has multiple other sounds depending on the context. I will stick to my cheerful Bom Dia! and Obrigado! and then keep walking.

I start my bike ride tomorrow and prepared for it today by doing a bike tour of Porto where I met some nice people from other countries who all asked me what the hell is going on in the United States, a question for which I didn’t have a great answer. They were all very nice and told me that things were just as bad in their countries, but I’m not sure I believe them.

Anyway, as it turns out, Porto isn’t just an old city with cobbled streets full of guys selling weed and hash. It also has a lively waterfront with a river, the Douro. 

There are six bridges that cross the Douro. One of them (the white one way in the back) was built in the 1960’s by the Portuguese dictator at the time who was on a Make Portugal Great Again kick and decided to stop inviting engineers and designers from across Europe to come and make bridges and instead do the whole project from beginning to end with Portuguese labor. When the bridge was done, no one would drive over it because no Portuguese people trusted a bridge that was designed and built by Portuguese people.  After about a year of virtually no use, the government had the idea of putting on a military parade where tanks and large trucks would go over the bridge; the point of all this was to show how sturdy the bridge was. And it worked, the bridge is still standing and used by lots of people every day.

This is the main market in Porto. I really wanted to take a picture of the flower section, but all of the flower vendors had signs up saying that anyone who took a picture also had to buy a flower. Thus, the fruit.

This is the famous Porto train station. If you happen to have a spare 22,000 hand-painted tiles, I have an idea of what you can do with them.

And even though I haven’t started by bike ride, I experienced a minor disaster this evening when I learned that an extremely friendly, extroverted middle-aged couple from California is doing the same route as me on the same days. I haven’t yet told them that I travelled 3,500 miles specifically not to be with people on this bike ride. I suspect that this is going to be an undercurrent of the coming week. They told me their names, but I was deliberately not paying attention and will be referring to them from this point on as “The Californians.”

And so as not to end on a low note, here’s an entertaining story. JK Rowling lived in Porto while the ideas for the Harry Potter books were germinating. After the movies came out, some people thought that the staircase in a Porto bookstore resembled a staircase in the movies. Over time, more and more people came to the bookstore to take pictures of the stairs. JK Rowling issued a statement saying that she had never been to the bookstore and had never seen the stairs, only fueling the feeling among fans that those stairs were in fact the inspiration for Harry Potter. Sensing a commercial opportunity, the bookstore started selling entry tickets for €8 per person just to get into the store. When I walked by there today, there were at least 100 people waiting in line to get in and take a picture of the stairs that are not featured in Harry Potter movies.

Hello, Porto

When planning this trip, I added a couple of days in Porto, Portugal, expecting that it would be hard to find anything to dislike there, given its cobbled streets and balconies adorned with flowerpots. I expected this because of a New York Times article I found before I left that says “It’s hard to find anything to dislike about Porto. Its walkable center is crammed with cobbled streets and balconies adorned with flowerpots.” But then while I was in Barcelona this week the NYT published an updated profile of Porto – “First Lisbon; now Porto. The whole world seems to have fallen in love with the nearby beaches, old churches, seafood-heavy cuisine and historical streets, where the number of tourists has doubled in a decade.” 

While Porto isn’t very far from Spain, it has been recommended that during my visit I should speak English rather than Spanish – something about some misunderstandings that led to a few wars between the two countries several hundred years ago. 

And after Porto I head out by bicycle along the Camino de Santiago toward Santiago de Compostela – a pilgrimage destination for people around the world ever since a solid stone boat randomly washed up on the coast carrying the remains of St. James. But I get ahead of myself. Much more on this later. 

Although not yet on the Camino, I have already experienced my first miracle. Vueling airlines, which is known for its cheap fares, cancelled flights, lost luggage and overbooking, managed to deliver my backpack to the same airport that it delivered me to, despite the fact that I tagged and scanned it myself and then threw it on a moving conveyor belt amidst a mass of confused travelers doing the same.

As for Porto, so far I have found lots of cobbled streets and some houseplants but no flowerpots. And contrary to the NYT
article, I have seen as much pizza and hamburger as seafood-heavy cuisine. Also lots of American tourists and polite young Portuguese men asking me if I want to buy any hash or marijuana.

Barcelona Day 4

Catalonia (Barcelona’s province) is extremely political and has a very long history of unsuccessfully trying to gain independence from Spain. When I was trying to set up last night’s dinner with my two Catalonian friends Helena and Robert, Helena asked me “Robert es independista?”, suggesting that if he weren’t in favor of independence, it might cause her to reconsider the whole idea of us getting together – kind of like trying to match people in the US and having one of them ask how the other feels about Trump.

Anyway, I seem to always show up here just before a big election, but this trip I am here between two big elections. The first one, the Catalonia one, just happened last week and the pro-independence party lost. The next one for the European Parliament is coming later this week and the general feeling is that the right wing will sweep all the contests (welcome to our world, Spain). The poster at right is for Partido Popular (the bad guys). So everyone here is a little sad. 

Except for this guy, who did kind of what I did today and just zoned out, read a book, drank some wine and washed clothes with the mango and aloe hand soap in my bathroom. Except that probably only I did that last thing.

I have one more day here before I hit the proverbial road and head to Portugal to start my bike trip (which will end in Santiago de Compostela, which I can’t wait to write about because like so many religious origin stories, this one is extremely plausible). So tomorrow I plan to go to the beach, do some more reading, walk around in clothes smelling delightfully of mango and aloe, eat some tapas, and pack.

As a side note, it’s so nice that the people here are so willing to accommodate non-Spanish speakers.

 

Barcelona Day 3

 I really value time alone, especially in the morning, when the part of my brain that enables my ability to deal with other people is getting warmed up for the day. That’s why as much as I enjoyed the time with my German friends this week, I dreaded the mornings because I had to start socializing with them at breakfast within minutes of waking up. For me it was a painful way to start the day.

Today I got to spend the morning alone on my balcony and was very happy. 

And I’m really excited because tonight I got to meet up with my two favorite and closest Catalonian friends (ok, well actually my only Catalonian friends). They didn’t know each other before tonight. They are both really great people, we had a lot of fun and I’m sure they will each privately thank me for introducing them to the other.

The worst way for me to start the day is by sharing a table with friends and the best way for me to end the day is by sharing a table with friends. Yet I still wonder why people sometimes aren’t sure how to deal with me.