Bernardo, our new real estate agent, is the kind of guy you want on your team. We visited three listings with him last Wednesday, and he was a powerhouse. Not only did he interpret for us, but he asked pointed questions and observed minutely. He caught many things we would have overlooked. He took video of each place, walking around and adding his commentary. He strode up to neighbors and chatted them up, asking about the neighborhood. We discussed each place thoroughly as we drove to the next, and he has excellent ideas and observations. He's frank and disagrees when necessary. Being a student of architecture, he has a great eye for proportion, quality, lighting, floorplan flow, color, and landscaping. When a seller's agent contacted him the following morning for feedback he was clear and serious with her about improvements we would make and why the price needed to come down, getting her ready for negotiation.
His girlfriend Carolina came along and lent an expert eye too. She is very good at assessing houses, loves doing it, and added greatly to our discussions.
One of the three places we saw was seriously interesting. We are double-checking our top contenders and might view a few more from this group, but we can't stop talking about how drawn we are to this one. Bernardo is arranging an independent inspector to take it to the next step.
On Saturday we got together with our friends from England, Jess and Julian, whom we visited in England in early August. They are vacationing and home-scouting in the Porto area. We lined up a port wine tasting with them at the Cálem port house here on the Douro river in Vila Nova de Gaia for the afternoon, and it was great fun. At least it was after we got there late and sipped some so-called vinho verde at a very overpriced tourist joint waiting for the next tour, anyway.
Our tour guide was Columbian who spoke English well with a Columbian Spanish accent. We saw vast ancient barrels and learned about the port making process. Did you know that the vines need to be somewhat stressed to produce the best grapes, and that the "poor soil" of the schist-rich Douro valley is ideal for that?
At the end we all gathered in the tasting room, where we each enjoyed three glasses of port: white, late-bottled-vintage, and 10-year tawny. As we finished, Julian realized that we had not gotten the full-boat chocolate and cheese sampling tour we had signed up for so she asked our guide about that. He was very helpful and apologetic, setting us up in another room with our chocolate, cheese, and three MORE sample glasses of port. Halfway through that we were getting pretty jolly, laughing uproariously, and we noticed that nobody was sitting anywhere near us. The other tasters were either reading or engaged in polite conversation at the other end of the room. We hushed up with some giggles and embarrassment, but an English-speaking woman a few tables away who had been smiling along with us said it was no problem, she loved to hear the laughter. In our well-lubricated state we bought a bottle of 20-year tawny port and made our way out.
|
Two serious and scholarly port wine testers
|
And two more
|
|
St. Gerrit prays for redemption
|
|
Jess and Julian headed back to their AirBnB, but before we left we bought a bag of delicious roast chestnuts from a street vendor and sat on a stone wall overlooking the Douro river and the colorful houses of Porto on the other side to enjoy them. It was like being in a storybook! We have to pinch ourselves that we're really here.
The lot we parked in was 8 storeys tall, built up the steep side of the river bank, and to exit you had to spiral around all the way to the top. We did so, and then discovered (when we couldn't get out) that we should have paid down on the ground floor. Sigh. Gerrit got a little exercise elevatoring down and back, and não faz mal (or "no harm done").
Today, Monday, it was a warm and beautiful day at the end of October, so we took a scenic drive south along the coast. There is a large lagoon just inland from the coast called the Aveiro Lagoon, with a two-lane road which runs down the ocean side of the lagoon. We followed it to the very southernmost tip, a town called
São Jacinto. We snooped around a couple little seaside towns on the way, too. Everything was closed down since it's now well past beach season, but it was beautiful today and we had the places all to ourselves.
We followed a boardwalk at Praia de São Jacinto ("beach of São Jacinto"), and then found lunch in town. We had
tostas mixtas, a popular Portuguese toasted ham and cheese sandwich.
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click in the black area outside a photo when you're done.)
