The elusive Pinguim
After much deliberation over taking a trip to a different city over the weekend to escape the monotony of mid-quarter student life, we settled on visiting Porto. The promise of relatively higher temperatures and sunshine compared to the bleak Dutch weather worked wonders for our optimism. Of course on reaching a rain soaked Porto, and losing a perfectly nice umbrella, it is safe to say that our attire wasn’t the only thing dampened.
We decided to explore the city nevertheless, armed with two important things – the city map and a print out of an email which would become the bible of our journey. The email was a quick scribble-down of all the places to visit in Porto including their locations, which a Portuguese friend had sent us the previous night, topping the list with all the pubs and night clubs and culminating with the museums and castles.
Nuno’s email was where we first found a mention of the Pinguim, a pub somewhere on Rua da Mauzinho da Silviera, along with a little café close by where the food was ‘traditional, good and cheap’. Mauzinho da Silviera is a wide cobblestoned sloping street that gently drops you off at the ribiera – along the Douro river filled with cosy little cafes where you can enjoy porto in a glass (port wine of course) while gazing at the little boats and the wine cellars on the opposite bank.
Walking around the city was an amazing experience, and checking off the places on Nuno’s list of ‘things to do’ proved fun! The longest distances we covered by bus or the metro and that too only if we were too tired to walk at the end of the day. Of course it was interesting to see how bus drivers make their job more interesting. We were waiting outside casa de musica (an auditorium probably more famous for its building than the performances it hosts) for a bus that would take us to the parque de cidade. We missed the first bus, only to find out that the next bus that came along wasn’t going where we wanted to. The driver told us that we should have taken the previous bus and decided to move along. Almost as an afterthought, the bus stopped and a lady beckoned to us, asking us to get in. We got in and were about to check our tickets when the driver stopped us and said “wait! Don’t check your tickets..” And then we realized that he was driving in all haste, almost beating red signals and chasing down the previous bus me missed! He finally got to the bus two stops later and we bade him mucho obrigado! When we jumped into the next bus through the back door however, we sidestepped the rules of getting in at the front only and were almost yelled at by the driver. Suffice to say that our excitement was short lived.
Of course there was one place that we still couldn’t go to and dint bother looking up on the internet since we were determined to find it the old fashioned way. We would have walked at least eight times up and down Mauzinho da Siviera through the entire course of our trip in broad daylight, pouring rain, and under cover of darkness. Nevertheless, the Pinguim just seemed to hide herself, eluding our searching eyes, our unsatiated appetite for food traditional, good and cheap and last, our need to tell Nuno that we visited at least one of his favourite haunts.
