Loureiro Festival

On Friday May 9 our official Portuguese residency cards arrived by registered mail, exactly one week after our immigration authority meeting!  Don't let them tell you otherwise: Portugal has the fastest bureaucracy ever.  Well, at least this time.  Now we can start on the other things requiring residency, like moving our belongings from the US.

Saturday and Sunday May 10 and 11 were two of three days of a vinho verde celebration at the Ponte de Lima expo center.  We went down for some Portuguese street food and a little tour of the offerings from a dozen or so regional vineyards.  The Ponte de Lima area is serious about its vinho verde grape growing and wine making, specifically the Loureiro grape (celebrated here).  There are several grape varieties which can be used in vinho verde, often blended together, but Loureiro is king in Ponte de Lima.  There are at least 40 winemakers in the Lima river valley, all making vinho verde, and about 20 of them were represented at the event.

The first day we didn't realize we could just get little tastes at the winemaker booths.  The offerings listed were only for glasses and bottles, so it didn't take long for us to be done with tasting.  We saw others getting little tastes though, so the next day we asked for that and tried many other wines.  Most of them were very good, and there was a surprising difference between vintage years.  But sadly the wines from our home village of Calheiros were the most disappointing.  We bought several bottles of our favorites, and had these dishes of a mixed grill for lunch.  Vegetables were on the menu that evening at home.

Part of the fun of the day was approaching a vendor and starting off in Portuguese.  Then we nodded and pretended to understand their reply from the occasional word we would get.  Usually that led to a mixture of Portuguese and English and a warm reception.  We tried pronunciation and got coaching, we asked what things meant, and the vendors really appreciated our efforts.  There was an older American guy there who just shambled up to the booths and started speaking English, not asking if they spoke it, assuming that the world revolved around him.  Embarrassing.

About 3 PM on both days the entertainment began: cooking shows, an accordion band, an ABBA tribute band, an excellent classical guitarist, and many others.  Fortunately we missed the ABBA band, but Gerrit was quite overcome by the guitarist and had to sit for a while trying not to cry at the beauty.  Pat captured a little snatch of the guitarist's performance here:

Ponte de Lima is a famous equestrian center also, with horse enthusiasts coming from all over Europe, and there were shows on the days we were there.  We watched some of the beautiful animals for a while.  Here are photos (from Facebook) of the equestrian center from the air and one of the competitors there.

(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.)

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