Our friends have a lovely condo about a five minute walk from water (and probably fifteen minutes to the nice spots if you want to hang out) and their place catches lovely breezes pretty much all day. The design of their home takes full advantage; we don’t know the exact numbers but probably a third or more of their square-footage (or square-meterage here, I guess?) is outside on their huge patio. Think of a modern apartment’s open concept living and dining space, then knock out most of the walls. Because of the boys they actually turned the whole thing into an enormous catio, so the whole family can spend as much time as they want outside. These little once-feral dudes have no idea how well they scored in the humans department!

That said, other than playing with cats and enjoying the weather, it wasn’t really an adventure-filled trip. What we did do was eat well, especially seafood. During our cat-sit, we ate out at three restaurants, all very different, and all typical of what we’ve come to think of as Portuguese.

The first is Ondas Sobre O Mar (Waves Over The Sea), a beachside restaurant open all day specializing in, you guessed it, fish. A local institution, Ondas has been a part of the Perafita community Lots of locals here and from the size of it, it gets busy on weekends, perhaps at dinner time. We;d been here before, with friends, but never at a time we needed to make reservations. We started with pataniscas (shredded cod fritters) and bread with parsley flavored butter. Then we shared a whole fish, grilled Sea Bass (robalo), at the recommendation of the server and it was perfection. The fish was de-boned tableside (always fun) and came with rice and Rojões in the Minho style, and oven-roasted potatoes. The weather was fine, not too hot, and we enjoyed making up background stories for the various people — singles and in groups — walking the caminho on the boardwalk right next to the restaurant. An excellent start to the ‘sit.

1858 bbgourmet is an odd duck that friends recommended to us. A year ago, this century-old house on Rua de Cedofeita was in ruins. Today, it is part of the Oporto Serviced Apartments group and hides, on the first floor, the 1858 bbGourmet restaurant. Heading the kitchen is chef Elisabete Pinto, who produces interesting combinations that leave you satiated and excited to return. The group runs a hotel, serviced apartments, a gourmet grocery, home delivery, online grocery store, artisanal bakery, and several restaurants. Along with a well thought out a la carte menu, they offer two “tasting moments”, one of which (45eu) was what we had.

We started with Braised Salmon, Orange Sauce, Pickled Cucumber, a small portion, perfectly presented. The salmon was silky and vibrant with flavor accented by the pickly citrus additions. Next came the Salt Cod in the Oven, Chickpea, Spinach . The “Main” was an excellently prepared Beef Short Rib with an absolutely perfect Parmesan Risotto. Melt in the mouth tenderness, rich flavor, a true highlight. We finished with Guava and Cheese, which turned out to be white chocolate ice cream atop a guava sauce. Simple, rich, and a lovely end to the meal. A wine accompaniment was an additional 21eu and consisted of:

• Vicentino Rosé 2023, 100% pinot noir 100 grapes I’m not much of a rose drinker, but this was a lovely accompaniment to the salmon and cod.

• Passagem Reserva Red 2020, Douro, Quinta de la Rosa, blend. A rich fruity chocolate wine
  Porto Tawny 10 Years. A classic for a reason and a nice way to finish a superb meal.

Portions were good, we never felt shorted and would recommend this for a bit of a special occasion meal anytime.

Open daily, Caqui Brunch Bar (caqui means persimmon) appealed to us as a place to have breakfast on our way back to Braga. Plus, they offered pancakes! The day was pouring rain, so parking was a breeze — being on the beach it would be a nightmare on sunny days or high season. Excellent hot drinks — latte for Lisa, hot chocolate for John — and the orange juice was freshly squeezed. They offer a seemingly complete variety of brunch options — egg dishes, toasts, bagels, tacos, pokes, and the enticing pancakes. Lisa had the savory pancakes (bacon, cheddar cheese) with a fried egg. John had a couple of simple pancakes with honey. We both agreed that while the flavor was fine, the texture was weird. Lisa was disappointed that her pancake was simple with the bacon and cheese and egg just layered on top. (It made for a gooey mess. She wasn’t a fan.) John thought his were fine, but not worth a repeat visit. As we were paying and leaving, we discovered that the pancakes had somehow been marked gluten-free. Which explains the odd texture.

One of the big draws for us in any major (English-speaking) city is the theater scene. We’re both suckers for a good play, albeit some of us more than others. Lisa likes to get out a couple of times on any trip, while John will happily take on an IV drip to park his butt in aisle seats, dawn to dusk. It’s never really a crisis, what with the lengths of trips requiring some discernment, but between the time available to us and the offerings in London’s vaunted theater scene, trouble might indeed have brewed. Fortunately for us, we had a wild card up our sleeve: Susan!

“Susan,” you ask? Why yes, Susan! A dear friend of ours in Braga, Susan (hi, Susan!) (ok, I’ll probably stop saying “Susan” so much now…) has only been to London a few times but she has fallen, hard, for the West End and all of its treasures. Turns out, she had already booked a guided tour into parts of England, and it was easy peasey for her to amend her itinerary to begin with a few days in London to meet up with us. In fact, our hosts were gracious enough to let her bunk in the guest room since we’d ensconced ourselves in the main bedroom once they were gone. Win! The upshot was that Lisa could take in the plays she wanted to, and John could link arms with our friend (you know who) to fill in any gaps. “But couldn’t John have just gone by himself,” you ask? Sure, but if you don’t haveta, why whouldja?

The long weekend of theater debauchery began with “A View From the Bridge”, by Arthur Miller. A little weird for the Brits to invest so much in a thoroughly American play by a thoroughly American playwright, but they knocked it out of the park so who are we to judge? John had seen the play 20-ish years before, and… ok fine, Susan had never seen it, so they went in with keen anticipation. Only, about 5 minutes in when a pair of illicit Italian immigrants appeared on stage Susan whisper-exclaims to John “oh I have seen this!” Which of course led to a phenomenon wherein we now keep an eye out for sketchy Italians to tip us off that we’re in a repeat episode of something. But I digress… (drink!) The nice thing about well-produced theater is it doesn’t really matter if you know the story – otherwise, there wouldn’t have been a production of “Hamlet” in the last 300 years. The cast, led by Dominic West (aka McNulty from “The Wire”) was excellent and it is an excellent if maddeningly fatalistic play, so a good time… well, an entertained time was had by all.

The next adventure for the theater buddies was “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club“, which is the same play as plain ole “Cabaret” but they’re doing a thing, apparently. It’s the same production that was moved to New York and just kicked up a fuss a the Tony Awards (writing in the year of our Lord 2024 for our future readers…). “Cabaret” is probably on the fringe of the “canon” of great plays, so the buddies were very sheepish, at first, to admit to one another that they didn’t really have a good time with it. Like, it’s a dark play about the rise of the Nazis within the crumbling husk of a decadent Berlin, but even so… great performances that will stick with us, but we both more or less felt like the thing didn’t hold together as a coherent show. You don’t need to tell us how wrong we are, we are aware that it’s a minority opinion. Nevertheless.

Lisa rejoined the troupe for “The Play That Goes Wrong“, which is a play you’ll either love or hate. There’s no message, there’s no life take aways; it’s pure farce. You either laugh or grind your teeth your way through the production. Fortunately, all three of us laughed riotously! Susan had actually recommended it, having seen it before, but from her giddy giggles you’d never have known that she could almost recite the script to you. For pure yucks with no interpretation required we all thought it was a great hit. Lisa then left the troupe again on our final evening, for “Showstopper! The Improvised Musical“. If you have ever seen the musical bits in “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” you know how this goes, only they produce a single, two-act play that more-or-less hangs together, filled with musical numbers based on topics and genres suggested by the audience. It’s kind of like a magic show, where sometimes you can sort of puzzle out how they make it happen, but to what end? Just enjoy the musical sleight of hand while it is performed before your eyes. The buddies enjoyed themselves and would probably go back again if the opportunity presented itself – it’d be a completely different show, after all!

The long weekend of shows was extra nice since we’d had some less-than-stellar fortune with other plays. As we’ve reported, “the Player Kings” was a bust thanks to ole Butter-toes McKellan, and we haven’t even bothered to mention (until now, ahem) a rained-out theater-in-the-park production. Thankfully the last few days all went off without a hitch!

This next part of our London stories is meant to feel like our time there did; a lot of normal living, albeit in heightened circumstances, along with a smattering of “holy wow!” The daily routine was established pretty quickly; dogs will do that to a schedule. We started off getting up around 7:30-8:00am, but a couple days in there was clear evidence (ahem) that we needed to get an earlier start to the day. After some tweaks we settle on 6:30 as a safe bet to wake Molly from her bed and take her straight to a walk, which works like a charm. Bookend that with going to bed at a decent hour (because we’re going to be up at 6:30!) and we had the bones of a pretty regular schedule. We did little batches of shopping, which had as walking through the neighborhood every day or two to get to the market for a backpack full of vittles, and went about our usual hobbies; writing, reading for pleasure, hanging out or even staring at the boob tube. Of course, that was just the routine, from which we occasionally deviated…

When we initially scheduled this particular trip to London, one of the first pins we dropped on our map was for the “Sargent and Fashion” exhibition at the Tate Britain. (The Tate organization(?) also has the major “modern” art gallery in the city, but we’re fuddy duddies and gravitate to the elder institution.) Most people know John Singer Sargent, if they know him at all, as the guy who did the (infamous) Portrait of Madame X, or as Lisa calls it, “The Woman Who Glows”; she’s not wrong! He was a very in-demand protraitist whose client list would sound like a “who’s who” of high society… if you were rich at the turn of the 20th Century, at least.

Funnily enough, we didn’t get a great look at her on this trip – she gathers quite a crowd, natural light coming in from the ceiling windows led to a glare from some angles, plus – and this is one of those things we hear ourselves say and still don’t quite believe it – we’d already had plenty of time with her when we saw her at the Met in New York City. Instead, we explored this Sargent<-> fashion connection in greater depth. Well.

The link to fashion was frankly tenuous, but it turned out that we didn’t care. Apparently he was known for paying extra attention to how his sitters were styled. They couldn’t just show up in a favorite frock, he told them what to wear and then tended to work with the cloth to produce specific effects. One example is his Portrait of Lady Sasson (link to the image). From the exhibit:

Sargent manipulated the cloak, wrapping it around Lady Sassoon to foreground the play of light on the fabric. The bright pink lining of the cloak, barely noticeable in real life, creates a sinuous diagonal streak which guides the viewer’s eye across the surface of the portrait.

The collection included many we hadn’t seen before including children playing with Japanese lanterns in the garden (Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose), and the ridiculously sensuous Dr. Pozzi at Home. The latter’s vividly scarlet dressing gown made for a particularly dramatic contrast with the starkness of Madame X.

There were dozens of his pieces on display, and he truly was gifted within his chosen subject matter, so it was a delightful afternoon in the galleries.

Then it was “Bonus!” time. This is a consistent phenomenon (that John has decided to name right this very minute) wherein we discover an exhibition outside of the scope of what we were ostensibly visiting a museum to see but is really cool in its own right. We’ve tripped over an extensive review of Beatrix Potter’s sketches and drawings paired with an exploration of her pioneering conservation efforts. Recently in Vienna we went into the Albertina museum to see the sketches by Albrecht Dürer but wandered into an exhibition of spray paint abstraction that was created completely in situ; John particularly loved this one. This time the “Bonus!” was Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, which cataloged a selection (certainly not all) of female artists who were passed over or ignored by the art establishment for centuries. Note that the timeline is mostly set to have a nice round number; it’s not like women have been on easy street in the art world since 1921, alas…

Going out for a day like this is about as long as we were comfortable leaving Molly alone for. Our hosts had told us that we could stretch it further comfortably, but you know how it is when you’re taking care of somebody else’s pets (or kids for that matter) – they can take whatever liberties they want, but the last thing you’d ever want is to push the limit and have an issue arise. We trotted back home and wandered the streets with our sleepy little tour guide. Another day down, another day richer.

Right off the bat, we’ll tell you that we aren’t going to knock our stay in London down on a day-by-day, post-by-post experience. The whole point of wanting to spend a long stretch of time in a city like London was to do it in a more residential fashion. Whole days went by where the big excitement was taking our furry ward, Molly, on a novel route for her afternoon stroll. Sometime the adventures consisted of things going wrong! Not that nothing happened, just not multi-paragraphs worth every single day. Case in point: one of our first big events was to go and see our good friend, Sir Ian McKellen (who is totally not really our good friend), in a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV-based history plays in which he was taking the lead as Falstaff. As our other good friend, Robert Burns, wrote: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men…

The first event that felt like it was going to go wrong was a long-planned (as in, over three visits and almost a decade) spending time at the British Library, and it didn’t take long to manifest. On our first full day in London “on our own” we were up, had brekkies, and made the lovely 15-minute walk (did we mention that our hosts have a hellaciously good location??) to present ourselves at the Library to see their Treasures of the British Library Gallery, a basically permanent exhibit of some of the most intriguing elements of the holdings. This is a room we’ve known about since our first visit to London in 2007, but any time we’ve tried to carve out time for it we’ve either been dead on our feet and unable to concentrate for long, or our schedule went off the rails and we basically dragged our friends through a 15-minute Point-and-Oggle-a-thon. This time we were getting to the Library nice and early, and we had even checked on the website to make sure that they were open that day (a hard-won lesson from other trips *cough Louvre cough*) We knew the Magna Carta exhibit was (temporarily) closed,* but otherwise we were golden. Soooo you can imagine we were a bit nonplussed to see this sign outside the gallery.

Fortuitously, we were there on June 17th and decided to wait. (If you’re wondering, as near as we could figure the sign had been up for at least several days already.) A little after noon the gallery opened, and we were let in to see the treasures. “Hodgepodge” isn’t quite how to describe it, but it’s definitely more of a “greatest hits” vibe than a single unifying theme. There was a gorgeous collection of ancient (as in, some went back almost 1000 years) religious texts from all over the world, including a Gutenberg Bible. An interesting exhibit exploring what a book lined one wall, including books in non-traditional shapes – including one that you wear around your neck (see image_. Other oddities include the original lyrics to “Hey Jude”, the original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland, and a sequence of “first folios” that actually include the first four iterations. There were hours of quiet meandering and contemplation.

The next “might go wrong” event actually did go wrong, spectacularly. It almost even went double wrong thanks to my spam filter, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As mentioned above, we made a point of getting tickets to “Player Kings” once we confirmed that we were going to London. It’s a variant of an exercise that is actually fairly common, condensing “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Henry IV, Part 2” into a single production. If you don’t know, productions of Shakespeare’s plays are almost always cut down, sometimes quite significantly, because tastes (and attention spans) in theater attendance have changed over the centuries and we don’t commonly sit still for 4+ hour plays. (If you’re curious what that’s like, check out Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 production of “Hamlet”; sit comfortably if you do.) Splitting the story of Henry IV into two whole plays almost never cuts the mustard. Besides, to modern audiences (and even audiences of the day perhaps, but I super-extra digress) the main reason to see these plays is for the tragi-comic character of Falstaff; he gets great line after great lines. The character is/was so popular, in fact, that he was brought back again as one of the protagonists(?) in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”; he’s the “Better Call Saul” of the Elizabethan Era. Aaaaannyyyway… point is, condensing the Henry’s and highlighting Falstaff is not uncommon; what was uncommon was getting Ian McKellen as Falstaff. We were super excited… so imagine the disappointment when my news feed somewhat randomly spit out an article that McKellen had suffered a bad fall from the stage the night before and this night’s show was cancelled. The official notification from the box office had hit my spam filter, so if I hadn’t checked the news we’d have made for the theater completely unaware; eek. In the end we decided to make the most of it and honor the dinner reservation we made at J. Sheekey – a meal so interesting that we’ll be publishing a completely separate review of it shortly! The end of the “Player Kings” story is a dud, sadly. Sir Ian clearly wanted to tough his way through his injury in classic “show must go on!” style, but first one show, then two, and finally the rest of the run of the show was kiboshed. They had been cancelling/ rescheduling his performances, but once he was definitely down for the count his understudy was called upon to take the stage. I’m sure they are a fine actor, but there was a reason Sir Ian’s name was on the marquee. Having secured refunds for the tickets we decided to bank our losses and live to another day.

* Closed because climate activists damaged the case protecting the document. Thankfully, the irreplaceable document was undamaged and even the damage to the case was minimal. The two octogenarians responsible have been charged.

On John’s list of long-term goals (“bucket list” is too morbid for his taste) “living in one of “the great capitals” for a long stretch” rates very high. Not moving to one necessarily but spending more than just tourism-time there. Paris, New York, London, Rome, somewhere like that. The idea is that he has the barest understanding of what goes on in a place like those for people who live there, and the hints he’s picked up have been tantalizing. Concerts, plays, exhibitions… all sorts of events that are too “small” or too fleeting to make any sort of news in the wider world, but absolutely intriguing if you know about them. Plus, the difference of living in a neighborhood like a resident rather than just a vacation rental customer. Welp, serendipity is a hell of a thing. By definition you can’t plan for it, you just ride the wave when it comes along. When friends of friends needed a pet sitter for several weeks and their usual source – the mutual friends – weren’t available, we were asked to step in. We’d probably have done it in any case, but the fact that they live in central London was a stroke of good fortune.

The details of the sit were straight-forward enough. Their friends (well, our friends too, now) live on a Mews, which is not a thing we really understood before; history aside these days they’re just small streets sandwiched between larger avenues, and they allow for relatively quiet stretches in the midst of all of … everything. It’s a mix of residential and a few businesses, zoning not being so much of a thing in London apparently. They have one elderly pooch, a sweet girl named Molly who doesn’t need much special care, just the usual love and attention, with maybe a few extra, short walks because none of our bladders are like they used to be, eh? She had recently taken ill and had a condition that could make her very wobbly (almost like bad vertigo) but it comes and goes and under (the “new”) normal circumstances she was a snoozer and a sniffer. A good girl, in other words. Their home is a lovely place that could be described as “rambling” only vertically; four stories with a Merry Poppins view from the terraces on the roof – seriously Dick Van Dyke was out there somewhere, racking up overtime.

When the day came we made the almost normal trip for us, Porto in the morning and landing in Stansted airport by lunchtime. One train, the Stansted Express is a direct line from the airport to Liverpool Street Station and runs every 15 minutes all day every day. From there we took a black cab later (we later figured out how it could easily have been a second train, but alas…) and we were walking ourselves up the Mews and into Molly’s abode. Our hosts (who Lisa had met once but John only in Zoom calls to date) instantly made us feel at home and we spent the day settling ourselves in and learning our way about while they went about their normal lives and packed up for their trip to the States. One of their hobbies is tinkering with home automation – they didn’t just hire someone to come in and install a fancy, bespoke system, they’ve been learning how to integrate software with devices that lock and unlock doors, adjust lights, raise and lower blinds and so on. It’s really neat and has John pondering a new hobby, but it also requires knowing what’s-what so many buttons and switches were fiddled with.

Our hosts took us to Moro for dinner. It’s a charming little place in the neighborhood serving — of all things — Moorish cuisine with a Spanish influence. Although it’s an old favorite of theirs, we each tried different things. A tomato soup with fig and cumin, wood roasted turbot tranche with tomato, chickpeas and fried aubergine, charcoal grilled lamb with roast carrot salad, charcoal grilled sea bass, spinach, pine nuts and raisins, and a mixed vegetable mezze made for a filling meal. The flavors were complex, but not overly spicy. It was perfectly delicious; we loved it and will return again. Once we got back to their home we got another round of walkthroughs for care and maintenance, a last stroll of the pooch, and then all heads down for the big shift change on the morrow.

We began our last minute-ish excursion to southern England at 3:30AM. E-frickin-gad. This allowed us to get cleaned up and repack the few things we’d used while being in a sleepy state and still get down to breakfast just as it opened at 4AM; one of the benefits of a hotel that caters to airport commuters, they know why people stay there. This requires no explanation if you’ve been in Portugal for awhile, but breakfast was mostly pastries. I swear these people; we love ’em, but would someone please show them a sausage patty or something? Then followed one of the biggest surprises we’ve had in travel in quite some time. Cliffhanger!

Not much of one, though. The big surprise was that we had a perfectly smooth travel experience, from checking in with Ryanair in Porto to collecting our bags and finding the shuttle bus in Bristol. Everything was smooth, no weird delays or ridiculous extra steps in the boarding process. Heck, we even had gangways(!) although, to be fair, since we were boarding from the back of the plane we actually went down the stairs and walked across the tarmac to get to the back steps on the plane. Still, we’ll take it! Heck, we even had our “leave the middle seat empty and maybe nobody will take it” strategy paid off for once. Score! And so it was that we made our way to the train station in central Bristol, from whence we would scoot out to where our car rental spot was.

This is where the shockingly smooth portion of the travel ended, although it wasn’t really a nightmare or anything. We mis-read which side of a minor highway the agency was on, so we walked 5-10 minutes in the wrong direction, turned around, got to the crosswalk and then got to the right side of the highway. Then there was the vaguely industrial-park vibe to where the rental agency was – it was Hertz, but I think most of their trade was long term van rentals. Put it this way, we were the only people who even vaguely looked like tourists in there, and rolling our bags along just completed the picture. Nevertheless they were lovely folks there and we were gone in no time with our hybrid (woo!) Toyota Yaris thingy. An hour or so later and we were in the driveway of our new, temporary, home in Dursley. I don’t think we’ll be sharing any pictures of this place, because I see way too many social media posts from clever dicks who can figure out where you are from almost no evidence and, well, it’s not our house. No reason to scream “the owners of this home are gone for a month!” to the internet.

So, we settled into our new digs for August. It is charmingly, well, normal. Suburban bordering on rural – not sure how locals would describe it, but we’re in a classic developed residential area (winding streets, a lot of houses that look almost identical), and we’re 5 minutes from cafes and shops, but we can also look in 3 directions and see sheep farms and rolling hills. Anyway. We met Oberon (Obie for short), the resident cat. Like most cats, after an initial “who are you what’s going on I want nothing to do with you” it became clear to him that we were the source of food, water, and the stick with the jingly ribbon on it and now we’re on the “ok” list. You can tell that we don’t play with the toys properly, but any port in a storm as they say and he grudgingly gives in.

The next several days have been us slowly figuring out what our rhythm for this trip actual will be. This was mildly complicated by the fact that we had talked past each other a little; this is what we call it when we’ve had what seemed like a thorough conversation about something only to find out that we still thought we heard something different from what we were told. Once we figured out the pace that we actually wanted to move at and were in agreement on, it locked in nicely. Granted, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

We said we were looking forward to this because the weather reminded us of Seattle in April or May. Well, yeah. As if to hold up a sign that says “be careful what you wish for” our first trip out, to Lacock Abbey where there is (we are told) a lovely garden, was rained out. Like, we haven’t forgotten how to be in rain, but it was coming down hard enough that we watched visitors who were dressed for rain walking out of the place in large clusters. Literally, we pulled into the car park and John turns to Lisa and says “we’re going home, right?” and she says “yep, we’re going home.” So, another hour or so through the English countryside.

It hasn’t been all bad, though. We had a lovely sojourn to Painswick Rococo Garden which, aside from its normal loveliness, does a “fairy walk” during the summer where they sprinkle little wicker-esque fey folk all throughout the gardens. It really is a charming touch and sends you hunting around all the nooks and crannies. It is privately held as opposed to being part of the National Trust; this isn’t a bad thing per se, but the Trust-managed properties have a certain spit-and-polish to them that the private sites often do not, although that can lead to charming quirks as well. Like, well, wicker fey.

Tomorrow we begin a new phase of the trip, journeying farther afield than we’ve been going, with planned trips to Bristol and Cardiff as well as a southern jaunt to Avebury and Stonehenge. Knock on wood!