Rio Douro

I had a chance today to go walk around the oldest part of Porto. Here is the Rio Douro, seen from a spectacular steel bridge that you will see in a minute. It has many of the oldest buildings in town, as well as the warehouses for a lot of the port wine companies that make it famous now.

The second photo is a look at the Douro on the other wise of the bridge that also shows a short section of the old city wall just to the right of the bridge. Very interesting set of contrasts, a medieval city wall and a very state of the art bridge carrying subway traffic on top and car traffic underneath. Portugal has used a lot of the money it received from the EU to catch up with other countries on infrastructure, which was useful. But I have heard people say on this trip to Portugal that it might have been smarter to use more of the money for investment in education as Ireland did, instead of loading it so heavily into roads, etc. It is true that Portugal has to work hard now to bring its workforce up to the level of Spain, Ireland and others that had lagged behind others in Europe but are beginning to catch up.

The third photo shows some classic Portuguese architecture and tile work from the era of the height of their empire. This is from a palace on the other side of the river, in the main part of Porto.

The fourth photo shows the view back over the river from the level of the riverbank on the same side as the palace above, just a steep five hundred feet lower. This is roughly the view from a restaurant where I had lunch the other day. I was sandwiched in between a couple of young Germans on a bike tour and a very whiny couple of English tourists who were annoyed with the waiter, who they thought was rude. Truth be told, I thought they were the rude ones. It made me happy to be a place where I knew the language well enough to chat with the waiter and not be a tourist struggling with the language, which was probably the core of the problem of the English tourists, they assumed the waiter understood their every word in English.

The last photo is of the restaurant in question. Very cute place with great fish, and a great big German Shepherd dog, with a weakness for chasing bikes. Fortunately the German bike touring couple were clever enough to walk their bikes until out of his turf. It makes me happy to see people put a little energy into figuring things like that out.