Monaloca

we’re now on our last day in porto and are enjoying full sunshine for the first time in a few days. luckily the rain has come in short bursts and hasn’t hampered our enjoyment of the steep hills and picturesque waterfront of oporto, or its yummy port wine. but i’m getting ahead. to pick up where i left off, in quaint evora:

ciombra. we bussed five or so hours from evora to coimbra, a university town about the size of berkeley, in the northish of the country. meli didn’t sleep much, from what i remember. once there we had two fabulous dinners just blocks from our city-center hotel, and spent our one morning walking straight up a hill to the university itself. the highlight was the renaissance-era library (biblioteca joanina), with thousands of books dating back five or six-hundred years. they only let 20 or so people in at a time and you can’t get very close to the books themselves, but the seemingly endless rows of gold-plated spines are quite impressive. students can still look at books, but through petition only. my favorite tidbit: one measure to ensure the preservation of the books is to keep a colony of bats in the library attic. they’re let out at night to eat any insects that might have gotten in accidently.

oporto. we accidently took the slow train to porto and arrived to rain showers, but since then things have been looking up. (looking up unless you count attempting a load of laundry in our small apartment and blowing a fuse at least twice while trying to dry everything. we had to use a combo of the crappy drier, a space heater, an indoor clothesline, a hair dryer, and even an iron to get everything less than damp.)

we spent one afternoon across the river, in vila nova de gaia, tasting port at several lodges and touring the sandeman lodge. we finished the day back at the ribeira waterfront, at a small den called vinologia, where they serve up samples of port from indepedent lodges. we spent over an hour there with meli. she chomped on an apple while joey and i had a sampler of dry white, ruby, and 10-year tawny followed by a selection of late bottled vintage ports, or LBVs. delicious. i’m definitely a fan of the LBVs or the younger tawnies. my mom likes the sweeter rubies (if anything) and joey keeps asking the prices of the oldest tawnies. he had a sample of a 40-year for a little under 7 euro. gulp.

yesterday we trained up the douro valley. the tracks mostly follow the rio douro and eventually pass the beautifully terraced vineyards where all those grapes are grown for the port wine. we ended in a little town called pinhao, about 2 hours out of porto. we stayed all of 20 minutes, because there really was nothing to see and even most the restaurants were closed. for those familiar with california and even new zealand wineries and their tasting circuits, it’s pretty different here. most tasting is done in vila nova de gaia at the lodges where the port is aged, and not at the quintas in the countryside where the grapes are grown.

melina. traveling with a near-toddler has been a challenge (mostly at night) but also fantastic. having her grandparents with us had made it extra special. meli has been such a trooper: she naps anywhere – from in the stroller to the ergo carrier to joey’s arms – as long as she’s tired. we can spend the whole day out on the town and have dinner around 7 so she’s in bed by 9 or 10. (we’re on vacation time!) the only downside is that our normally great night sleeper hasn’t slept through the night once and usually ends up in our bed by early morn. it probably has as much to do with being in the same room with us as being in a different place, since she did best in lisbon, jetlagged but with her own room.

she loves all the different sites, sounds, and FOOD, and lunches regularly on tosta mista, or toasted ham and cheese sandwiches (which she probably won’t get at home since we don’t eat ham). she crawls and cruises all over the place, and makes friends in the seat behind her on any bus or train ride we take. at this very moment she’s using the stroller as a walker, pushing it around the internet cafe while daddy takes pictures.

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