White Port Smelled of Delicious Dried Apples. And Paige’s Meat? Less so.

Location: Porto, Portugal

Saturday June 5, 2010

On our way to Estadio de Dragao (where all the metro lines end… we now know where the Portuguese need their transportation…), we met the nicest Portuguese lady and her son at the metro stop. She was kind enough to show us how to “recharge” the tickets we bought at the airport and teach me to say “obrigada” for thank you, since I’m a girl (boys say “obrigado”). We went to the stadium/mall because some of us *achemKevinandSelinaachem* are sports/shopping fans. The stadium was closed, so we peeked through the fence. Ismael had told us that the shopping mall was the biggest shopping centre in Porto, with over 50 restaurants. 50! Haha, but honestly, visiting Mall of America last summer made this Porto mall seem like a runt. If you want to see a big shopping centre, Ismael, you should go to the mall with three Auntie Anne’s (yes, fatties can’t bear to walk across the mall to dip their just-baked, cinnamon-sugar-coated pretzel into its warm cream cheese frosting.). Paige and Amy got cardigans to survive the night, while Selina bought a pair of Hello Kitty pajama shorts. Both she and the Portuguese have a fascination with the anime character. I personally think there are more interesting Sanrio characters than Hello Kitty. What about Keroppi, the easiest frog to draw ever, or Badtz-Maru, the emo penguin who’s always angry at life?

The other kiddos had not seen much of the historic part of Porto during the daytime, so we headed back into the city centre to show them the different buildings we checked out on the first day. We crossed the bridge to the historic section of Porto that continued on the other side of the Douro, where Porto wine, or simply Port, age in giant-ass barrels in the numerous wineries. Of course, that’s a gross simplification of the art of wine-making. After saying no to some bartering salesman trying to sell us a ride up and down the Douro on his typical boat, we happened upon some kind of street fair. There were stalls set up by different vendors and a group of people doing a traditional Portuguese dance in a circle with onlookers joining in. Man, we should’ve joined in even though we didn’t know the steps. It would have been magical like that scene from the Knight’s Tale or the T-Mobile Dance, if you want a more modern take on everyone suddenly magically knowing how to break it down at the same time. At the street fair, I took my merienda by having free samples of chocolate liquor, cheese, jam and bread, and sausages.

We went on a wine-tasting tour at Sandeman, one of the most famous wine houses in Porto with

its own museum (@sushimonkey: total self-call, no?). A short, young, brown-haired lady, dressed in the black Spanish sombrero and the black Portuguese student cape made famous by the company’s logo, took us around the large stone cellars of the old monastery-turned-winery. She told the group (in English) about the differences between white, ruby, tawny, and vintage port: how they’re made, which barrels/bottles they’re aged in, and how the wine technicians take care of them. The musty smell of age in those cellars was wonderful. And talk about barrels upon barrels of wine! Ruby port aged two or three years before bottling, is stored in gigantic 50,000 liter tank-like barrels. That’s about 66,667 bottles of ruby port per barrel. Phew. The tour guide also sat us down to a video about how port is made from the grapes in the Douro Valley to the process of mixing the wines before bottling.

A lot of the tour felt like a staged commercial, because the company basically brags about its

product the whole time. Yet I could see why they were bragging when I tried the white and the tawny during the tasting. Port is a dessert wine, so I was ready for a sweet wine. But I didn’t prepare myself enough, because boy is it sweet! I loved the smell of the white port. It was like smelling dried apples, maybe even warm apple pie. I could have sat there smelling the white port for the whole time. I think the tawny tasted better though. It was less sharp and pleasantly sweet. I was craving pieces of milk chocolate as I drank the tawny and cheesecake as I drank the white. It was too bad Sandeman didn’t sell desserts in their wine store, because that would be a good moneymaker.

We ate dinner at the most authentic place we could find back across the river, think: decently-priced, a restaurant off in a side-street, with “prato-do-dia” (plate of the day), and only had Portuguese customers. I ordered the tripe, beans, and rice dish, because it was on the list of typically Portuguese food that Ismael gave us. The other kids rooted me on for trying tripe (offal of a cow). But when I got the dish, I realized I’ve already eaten it before in phở. Boo.

We were quite right in finding an authentic restaurant. But we were quite wrong to think authentic Portuguese food was entirely good. Selina enjoyed her calamari dish immensely, Lauren liked her pork, and Kevin finished whatever he got. My tripe was texturally good but was too salty, especially because the chef was scanty on the rice. Amy’s sausage dish was also too salty. And Jade didn’t enjoy the texture of her calamari. But Paige got it the worst. She ordered the same pork dish that Lauren did, but she couldn’t take a bite of it, saying that the smell bothered her. At the end of the dinner, we all found out that her meat smelled like shit, literally. We even took turns sniffing a forkful of it. I told her that she should tell the waiter to get her money back, but she didn’t have the heart to hurt the feelings of the grandpa and grandma who were cooking downstairs. Besides, she didn’t how to say “My meat smelled like shit” in Portuguese anyways.

Photos credit: Selina Wan