Porto

Back in Aveiro, we stayed in the same room we had been in before at the hostel. Eric decided we were going to Porto next and lined up a reservation for the hostel there. We spent the day traveling.

We took a long and three transfer trip to Porto, a large and ancient port city. We were dropped off right in front of the hostel. Our room had this amazing view of the mouth of the Rio Douro river emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. There was a sea wall that breaks the waves into the esturay. I could see the waves. They were huge. If there were a tsunami, the whole area would easly be under deep water. It’s a little scarry just watching the size of the waves as they hit the sea wall. So much power, so much energy!

Eric was tightening the waste buckel on my back pack and the buckel broke. It makes a world of difference to carry the pack just hanging from my shoulders. It really hurts. So we had to find a replacement buckel right away. As it happened, it was a kind of treasure hunt that took us on a tour of the small back streets of Porto that we would not have seen otherwise.

First we went to the tourist info place and the lady let us leave our packs there while we went to find a buckel. She told us to go to Sports Zone in the mall to buy a buckel. We walked up a long street crowded with people. I’ve not seen this crowded of a city in some time. Even Lisboa was not this crowded. We had to ask several people and finally found our way to the mall. The mall was a huge indoor street with hundreds of shops. It’s like a little world in there. Then we had to find the store. When we got there, a girl told us they didn’t have any buckels, but we would find it at the Casa Corcodilo. She pointed to the Rua on the map. So we went in the general direction as she directed looking for the street.

When we found the street, it was narrow and dirty and very old. The shops were small, some of them really small with all their wares hanging from the walls. We found the Casa Corcodilo, but it was closed and there were a lot of people waiting for it to open. We stood conspicuously among the waiters. Finally the proprietor opened the shop, and everyone filed into it’s narrow space and disappeared through a door and was gone leaving us to ask for the buckel. We showed him the broken one and he said he didn’t have one that big. So he directed us to another store further down the same street.

We found that shop and it had lots of drapery things and buckels but she didn’t have any plastic ones like mine. So she sent us down the street even farther to a place and gave us the spacific name. However, when we got to the number on the street, we couldn’t see any indication of that shop by sign or notice in a window or anything. So we popped into one of the shops to ask and the lady there said this was the place we were looking for. Funny, doing business without a sign.

She had thread and buckels, but none like mine. So she sent us to another shop farther down the narrow winding street. We found it very near the end of the street with a wooden shoe hanging from the top of the doorway. It was a shoe shop and miraculously the man behind the counter showed us a buckel that was black plastic and the proper width for my pack. The trouble was it was not the same design to thread the strap through. So we would need someone to sew the thick strap on one side of the buckel. But at least we had it and we knew we could make it work if we could find someone to sew it on.

We picked up our packs at the Tourist Info place. We walked all the way through the city back to the train station and bought our tickets. Then we had a little time, so I wanted to get a charm. We went up a small side street and looked in several shops, but charms were scarce. Then we saw a tiny jewelry shop, but the door was locked. However, the proprietor opened the door and invited us in. He just sits there waiting for someone to try to open the door and then he unlocks it, locking it behind us. His wife spoke a little English, so he called her down from somewhere above. She was very nice, but said she had only a view charms. I asked her to show us one and she brought out a oblong box lid with a jumble of different odds and ends. I stirred it with my finger asking how much this one was or that one. Then I saw my charm. It was a Cockel Shell, the symbol of the Santiago de Compostela. It wasd not priced, so she just named a low number and we paid and were gone. We made our train for the long ride to Viana do Castelo and our next SERVAS family.