On Saturday Dec. 28 the weather was beautiful and a bit chilly. We set out for a day trip to Ponte de Lima to look around our future home town again. Feeling cocky, we got into Porto with no help from the GPS apps, figuring we could make our way up the A3 freeway all the way to Ponte de Lima. Then we got into a spirited discussion and missed the A3 freeway turnoff entirely, without realizing it. We zipped pleasantly along, chattering merrily, and soon crossed a river. Hmm, there isn't another river north of the Douro is there? We began seeing signs for Gaia, our home town, and realized with a very disorienting jolt that we had turned completely around, crossed a different bridge across the Douro, and were now back in Gaia. Our first clue should have been that we were driving into the sun, not away from it. Good grief! We went all the way through Gaia and Porto again, this time making the turnoff correctly, and were on our way. We're thinking of it as taxiing around Gaia and Porto before takeoff.
An hour or so later we were in Ponte de Lima. We explored the old town a little more and got some maps and brochures from the tourist office there. We crossed the Lima (but not across the medieval bridge, it's pedestrian-only and we would have mowed down too many tourists) and explored the other half of the city and environs around there.
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Ponte de Lima old and new
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Old Ponte de Lima building
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We had a quick lunch in a small roadside café: tostas mixtas (toasted ham and cheese sandwiches), a small muffin called bolo de arroz (rice cake), and two beers, with table service, for €6 ($6.26). The cake was soft and only slightly sweet, and tasted more like cornbread than rice. The beers were Super Bock draft, the overwhelming choice in northern Portugal (in the south it's Sagres -- north and south compete on everything). We thought it would be kind of characterless and cheesy (like the name) but it's actually quite good and we're developing a taste for it. And did we take any pictures of our delightful little meal? Oh no, we did not. Honest, we're going to get better at this.
Next we drove the route from Ponte de Lima to our soon-to-be new house, Casa da Rocha, about ten minutes away. Google Maps takes you one way which is quite difficult toward the end, very narrow with weird blind corners and hills, so we experimented with a slighly longer route which is merely sort of difficult at one hairpin curve. We will record this easier route for guests. The gate was closed, otherwise we would have loved to snoop around the Casa some more too.
On the way out we found Café Martins, a place that the current owners of Casa da Rocha tell us is very helpful. We bumped into it totally by accident: Google Maps was directing us to some other place much farther away, and we just saw the real Café Martins as we came around a corner. Gotta watch out for those mapping apps. Café Martins is only a couple minutes from the house, and it looked like a nice little place. I'm sure we'll be dropping in there frequently.
We went shopping at the mega grocery & variety store Continente on Monday and went berserk as usual with a whole load of goodies. While waiting for Pat to find something Gerrit noticed that a customer was helping a clerk stock shelves. The clerk had been having to pick up boxes out of a crate on the floor and stock them on an upper shelf. The customer noticed this and began pulling the boxes out of the crate and handing them to the clerk on her step stool. It went so much faster, and both the clerk and the customer were having a great time and joking around. We know, this is just kindness which happens everywhere, but it seems so typically Portuguese.
Gerrit also bought a shirt there. It was designed in Portugal, but we don't know how Portuguese the label actually is. We just thought it was really sweet and unexpected: "Wear it as long as possible". In English too.
This residency lag is leaving us in a kind of limbo, unable to get some Portuguese documents we need. As we've mentioned, the agency here which is responsible for qualifying new immigrants (AIMA) is overwhelmed and understaffed, so hundreds of thousands of us have expired visas, are unable to get driver's licenses, can't register with the health service, can't register with the tax authority, and so on. Fortunately we can buy a house without official residency and we will be busy setting up our new home, but some of the rest of this stuff needs to get done too.
There is a big fireworks display in Porto tonight for New Year's Eve, but we think we're going to skip it. There are supposed to be 100,000 people there, parking will be impossible and the metro is due to be on strike, it will be cold, and the display doesn't start till midnight. We're too old for all that. There is a good local Porto TV station, so maybe we can tune that in. If we can stay up that late.
Also note that Gerrit miscalculated the age of the town of Ponte de Lima in a recent post. He only missed it by a century though: it should be 899 years, not 999. That post has been fixed. He says it's a good thing he's not doing engineering any more.
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)
