First glimpse , Portugal

The week of the 6th of March saw major industrial action in France, bringing the center of Paris to a standstill on the Monday and Tuesday.  Our flight to Portugal on KLM was scheduled with a layover in Paris because of their partnership with Air France and we got an email letting us know that if we liked we could re-book on a different flight for no change fee.

Anne had picked a Tuesday evening flight because the ticket prices were half that of weekend flights.  Our thinking was that with the 5 hour time difference I'd be able work in the airport on Tuesday and we'd get to our AirBnb before my next day's work started (1pm in the afternoon).  Rebooking turned out to be out of the question because although the change fees were waived, the tickets were double what we had paid and KLM then allowed us to check in for the scheduled flight so we were going to take our chances.

We were also told that JFK was going to have many delays so we should be at the airport four hours before our 5:30pm flight.  I had to take a couple of meetings while going through customs and again at the gate, which was problematic.  Taking a vacation day to do this was an option but I think all considered I was able to put in a solid day's work outside of the disrupted meetings.

Anne had a cold that she'd picked up in Zicatela (symptoms started in Mexico) but it wasn't more than a mild annoyance and we have both been wearing masks in public transport so we felt comfortable about traveling anyway.

It was impossible to sleep on the flight - the seats are fairly close together and the people in front of us decided to lower their seat-backs which made it really hard to go to the bathroom without bumping their seats several times on the way out and back which annoyed them a bit... but not as much as I was annoyed about the seat being in my face all the way to France.  I looked around and most of the flight had kept their seats upright which I think is polite practice for most flyers.

We landed in France really early and I think because our flight was a connection we transitioned through Schengen customs and to our connection without any delays.  The flight to Porto - our next destination in Portugal - was delayed by about 30 minutes.  Our pilot informed us that it was due to the strikes but it was far better than getting stuck in Paris.

We were in our AirBnb by about 1pm - an hour before my day started but I needed to get 90min sleep to keep me sane for the day.

We have been doing this 90 min ritual for a few years of visiting our daughters in England.  With little sleep on the plane we figure that a shower and one REM sleep cycle will get us enough gas in the tank to last until the regular bed-time of the country we are visiting.  It works well and we've been able to slot into the new time zone fairly easily.

On Tuesday evening Anne had a tele-consult with a doctor in Romania of all places because the cold had gone to her chest and was affecting her breathing.  The doctor sent her a pdf prescription for medicines to treat her asthma and infection which I was able to fill at the pharmacy around the corner from the AirBnb.  The medicines cost a fraction of what we pay out of pocket for them, after medical insurance, in the USA.

That night Anne couldn't sleep because she had a fever and the chest infection had caused a major asthma attack.  I was oblivious to this and she didn't wake me, so when I did wake up at about 10am she was really struggling to breathe.  She said that we needed to find an emergency room.

The Uber came quickly and I told the driver: "Não falo português" which google translate had told me means "I don't speak Portuguese".  The driver was very chatty and went on and on in Portuguese I think telling us how many Uber drivers there are in Porto and how you long you wait depending on where the driver is.  I think he was just trying to be friendly but we could only guess what he was saying.

Hospital waiting room (Anne's photo)

Despite being a Latin language and similar to French and Spanish the pronunciation rules for Portuguese are so different that knowing some Spanish is pretty useless.  Spanish is spelled phonetically with few variations on how vowels and consonants are pronounced.  Portuguese has rules for how some letters are pronounced depending on where in the word they are, whether they are the last letter of a syllable and depending on the letters that follow them (or not).

I made a tactical error of not listening to Anne while the Uber driver was jabbering.  She was saying - "to the emergency room" as we went past the sign "Emergency Room" and we ended up getting dropped at the general admissions which forced Anne to walk down a hill and across a parking lot without being able to breathe.  Later I asked her if this was as bad as when I formatted her C: drive and lost all her email and lesson plans in 1989.  She admitted that 1989 was much worse.

We spent the whole day in 4 different waiting rooms - seeing the first doctor within 3 hours of arriving and then getting some medication that made her feel much more comfortable within 30 minutes.  After that we were shuffled to X-Ray, blood-work and an ECG and then waiting till 5:30pm before seeing a second doctor. 

The COVID tests were negative (we did two before we left for the hospital and they did one) and the diagnosis was acute asthma triggered by the infection.

The most amazing thing about all of this was that as non-residents we had to pay the full price for the day's treatments and diagnostics.  The final total came to roughly what I owed once our medical insurance had paid their portion of my last 15-minute annual dermatological skin exam in the USA.

The medicine kicked in overnight and Anne was breathing comfortably enough on the Saturday for us to take the Metro into Porto itself for some sightseeing.

A view from the Metro stop in Matosinhos, near Porto

It was overcast and bleak but the city is very quaint with narrow streets and tall multi-colored apartments.  The city is build on a river not very far from the sea (our AirBnb is right near the beach on the outskirts of the city).

We walked down one of the narrow streets towards the water.

Street musicians.

Wall art.

And beautiful mosaic tiles in a station

and near the river bank.

We decided to pay for the rather expensive boat ride on the river to see the city from the water.

What was astonishing was the number of river frontage buildings that are abandoned and run down.  We read an article describing how Portugal suffered from the housing bubble bursting, leaving people with properties that they couldn't afford.  I have also read that there are laws in Portugal about renovations and inherited properties that make them too expensive to manage.  Added to that are the difficulties in managing rental tenants, often resulting in the properties being left to disintegrate rather than pouring money into them.

We ended our Saturday with a ride in a little scooter - what we called a "Tuk-tuk" in Guatemala - driven by a man from Chile who agreed that Portuguese is hard.  He said that in Brazil it is easier to understand the Portuguese but that the European Portuguese pronunciation was really difficult.

I'm determined to learn how to greet and how to order food in Portuguese - also how to apologize, which it turns our is very important in a country where you know nothing.