Oporto, Oh Porto

The gulls rove in gangs around the city, shouting their eternal aria for all the residents to hear. Many are bigger than geese and they sing night and day on the eternal prowl for trash and the fingers of tiny, young tourists to eat. They, seemingly, live in peace with the alley cats — who don’t just stick to alleys, but roam freely, owning the rest of the city. The gulls have their statues to perch upon and the clear blue sky. The cats have the rest of the land.
An occasional rooster or peacock caw throughout the night and day. I don’t know exactly where they live on the steep, little street my studio is located, but I hear them nonetheless. The park is not nearby (maybe they have escaped?) and the port houses are across the river (can either of them fly that well?). Maybe they take the funicular to the Eiffel Bridge walk across and up from the Ribeira past São Francisco, up a large staircase which turns into a winding road next to decaying church with a dusty, gravel front yard near my apartment. That’s probably where they go at the end of each day to sing in harmony with the gull’s siren songs and yowling kitty cats of the dark alleys.
The air smells fresh except for Sunday mornings in certain colorful alleys where people have been drinking all night prior. Tourists and denizens of the city alike flood out on Saturday nights and rule the alleyways in one bar after the other. There, on the street, they drink plastic cups of Super Bock and piss in neglected corners. Sunday smells of piss and beer, but the rest of the time it smells of the sea. A certain fresh scent that they try to bottle in laundry detergent, but never get quite right. I can smell the faint hint of the Atlantic coast’s salt in the air amidst the sharp smell of the Portuguese soap that I have bought on this trip. It feels like San Francisco in some ways. Steep hills and certain smells…
The city’s buildings are in decay and the plants have begun to take back the land. The salt and humidity have eroded the stone structures that have existed longer than most buildings in America. The plants come out of walls and roof shingles. They climb up fences and nest in the crocks of stones. A rolling stone gathers no moss, but the green hue of most buildings suggests that most of these stones and bricks do not roll and subsequently gather a ton of moss. Reds, yellows, oranges, and tans are the colors that the moss tend to cover and look bright in the epic Latin sunshine. The gothic, sand castle cathedrals with grandiose, golden, gaudy entrails hover over the city making for a bleak landscape during the fog or like a page from a medieval manuscript in the sunlight.
A woman named Cristina, who says she looks like a normal Portuguese girl, and is anything but normal (in the sense of the ubiquitous) takes me to a tea garden and introduces me to native Porto artists in a street full of art galleries. We reminisce on the subject of photography and our fathers; discuss imperialism and the new America. We laugh at the Best of.. TripAdvisor sticker on a cathedral she walks me through and we give our review, “We really loved the graphic nature of the stations of the cross. The blood was very vivid.” We laugh with frequency that you normally share only with close friends or family. She buys me traditional Porto pastries and we part ways for now.
On my last night, I enter the dragon. Dragão Stadium to be proper about it. Portugal manages to combine its ancient heritage with modernity in a nod and wink sort of way. It is a mix of old and new that doesn’t seem to take either too seriously. After days of languorously climbing hills, staring off vacantly towards the Duoro, and being your typical Porto tourist (which I equate to stuffing my face with Francesinha and reveling in not getting ticketed for drinking beer while walking down a street), I am amidst a sea of blue and white in the belly of the beast.
A mania envelops the crowd as they chant the cantos of Azuis e Brancos. A camouflage of blue and white clothes and face paint is the uniform of the people and they look as though they are ready to go to war in the sky. Flags larger than your narrator are held aloft for the duration of the game; they hold strong even at halftime and, then, even as the game comes to a draw. My neighbors, a mother and her 4 daughters, take me under their wing by sharing their popcorn and teaching me their melodious chants. My cultural and lingual limitations are null and void as long as we cheer Dragões. The stadiums are one of the only places in Portugal that has laws forbidding the sale of alcohol. Despite teetotaling, the mania is palpable until the very end. We are inebriated on fútbol.
The next day, as my train to Lisboa departs the station and the clouds part to allow me one last glimpse at this enlightened city, I comprehend that I am still drunk. The last four days have left me intoxicated with fútbol, the Portuguese people and language, and literally on port & super bock. Vestiges of the future were illuminated by that sunlight, though I have yet to parse which paths will be traversed.
