Portugal a month ago

It's been a few weeks since we've been back, but Portugal is too vivid to fade quickly from memory. We spent the last week of June wandering from Lisbon, to Porto, and into the Douro Valley. It's a trip from the coastal capital up to the north, and into the most famous wine producing region, the origin of Port wine. This isn't the usual trip of sun-seekers, who head south to the beaches of the Algarve. But we were looking for interesting food, wine and history, and we found it. Portugal is scruffy and simple. It's been the poor cousin of Europe for so much of the recent past, that it wears it's distantly historic grandeur a little uncomfortably. Everything is just a little -- and sometimes a lot -- crumbly and faded. But that's pretty damn fine if what you're looking for is simple. And simple was exactly what we were hoping to find. None of the pictures would stun you. Portugal is a lot less spectacular looking than a lot of other places, but we fell in love with it. What our trip lacked in visual spectacle, it made up for in almost every other way: people, culture, history. Did I mention food? Perhaps the best one-line review of the entire trip is that, consistently, the quality of the food was inversely proportional to the cost of the meal. Our top meal was a brunch of grilled baby cuttlefish and a rough shrimp and rice stew, which we ate packed into crowded communal tables in an out-of-the way neighborhood joint that Geri found. It was Sunday, and we were in with the post-church family crowd. The cuttlefish came out whole: cuttle, guts and all. And that's pretty much the way they get eaten, once you've cut off the cuttle. The ink sacs make for black teeth and tongue, which you see a lot of, because everyone is smiling so much at the taste. (The next day, you note that the ink turns other things black, too. And I mean BLACK.) But that was far from the only remarkable meal. I now know one of the world's great treats is grilled sardines and vinho verde (green wine). It's cheap, it's yummy, and it's one of those things you just don't get anywhere but Portugal. We had consistently great experiences in hotels, restaurants, shops, and just walking the streets of Lisbon and Porto. Even the language didn't stop us. I thought I'd have to bring out my butcher-block Spanish, but it's relationship to Portuguese is even more tenuous than I thought, and the Portuguese would rather speak English, anyway. In fact, we got the distinct impression that folks would rather speak either English or French before deigning to go for Spanish. When we go back -- and we will -- we'll head down to the Alentejo region, in the south. The reds from there are one of my great wine discoveries of recent years. We didn't go this trip because the region is largely desert, and can be hard to travel around. But while we were in the north, we drank a lot of Alentejano wine and decided that heat and bad roads can't compete. The wine wins. Click here to see more pictures of our trip to Portugal ...and Click here to see pictures of some of the most beautiful tiles we saw in Portugal