Our jaunt to Aveiro was a quickie this time; just a couple of days respite from the heat. We may drift up and down the coast over the years, but it’s likely that our default “let’s get the hell out of Dodge” each summer will be here at the salt flats. A trip here can be gussied up with fine dining and guided tours, or it can be self-led street art hunts with street-side fare all day long. This particular trip we’ve been trying to navigate a middle path, with nice dinners but casual days, and it seems to have worked out just fine. Case in point, our final day had peak tourism plus simple grub.

One thing we did both days was have a midday meal at Bodegas Bar, located in Praça do Peixe. This is an unassuming place sharing the praça with several other cafes, bars, and restaurants that does a good job of offering “pub” food at good prices. I particularly recommend it for folks who are looking for something to eat in the late afternoon. You know, when you’ve got 3-4 hours until dinner, but don’t want a whole meal. Or it’s been 4 hours since lunch and you are feeling decidedly peckish. On both days we had a misto (the classic Portuguese grilled ham and cheese sandwich) and their picante (a grilled cheese and chorizo sandwich) with a glass of wine, bottle of water, and a Coke, all for less than 15eu. Of course, it barely needs mentioning, they were accompanied by batatas fritas (literally “fried potatos”, and often but not always french fries in some configuration). Their bread is outstanding — fresh made with a hearty, whole grain — or at least not ordinary white bread — and gorgeously grilled. Not too much cheese (or meat) and not overcooked. The chips were even particularly good. Overall this was a satisfying meal in several ways, and it was just the right size. Bonus, being in one of the central squares and next to the municipal fish market to boot, makes for great people-watching.

Our final nibbles out of the way, we packed into our car and headed out of Aveiro, but with one last, major stop along the way: Vista Alegre, which is… er… well it’s a lot of things. The simplest summary is that it is a pottery manufacturer with on-site outlet store. However, it’s a 200-year-old pottery manufacturer with a massive footprint thanks to its history as, essentially, a company town situation. Thanks to their bicentennial celebration there are some fantastic exhibits onsite that detail the history of the place; even taking them with a grain of salt since they are in-house productions, we found them wildly informative. The first picture has a map of the entire facility, and the hanging signs line up with various buildings to describe their purpose and some notable history for each. The second picture is a close-up of one of the signs. For each and every point-of-interest (not just this map display but others as well) they presented context from the points of view of the family that owned the factory, the workers, the families of workers, and specifically called out the female workers.

Vista Alegre has been hand-painting their work since the beginning, and as a result they’ve long had an interest in fostering creative outlets for their workers; not just painting, but also theatre and music. Don’t get us wrong, we get the problems with company towns (and they did the whole shtick, including paying in scrip that then got spent on services within the company ecosystem) but it’s still hard to be completely mad at a situation where there was a marching band and a community theater for the people who were interested, all paid for by the company.

Oh, and we mentioned they hand-paint their work? There’s a museum onsite featuring some of their work from the last two centuries. And afterwards, you can head into their outlet where, in a fit of romanticism brought on by all the beautiful work we had just seen, we almost bought an entire set of china. We caught our state of euphoria at the last second; we might still buy from them, but we want to assess our needs in the cold light of day, not at the end of a cleverly-constructed sales pitch (that’s how you end up with a condo in Boca Raton). Once done with touring Vista Alegre there was nothing left to do but scoot back home to our cozy nest in Braga.

Our second day in Aveiro could have gone a couple of different ways. There is a (purportedly) fantastic museum/shop dedicated to local ceramics manufacturing, a craft for which Lisa has long had a special admiration. There are also multiple beaches within easy reach; we had even packed bathing suits for this very reason. However, after a nice long sleep in the coolth of the coast, we found ourselves in the mood for a mosey, and so the agenda simply became “wander around and see what we see.” This turned out to be a lot more fun than it sounded when we first agreed to it.

The fellow at the front desk when we checked in, to his eternal credit, pointed out that while the hotel offered a breakfast buffet, we were in fact surrounded by better options. Remembering this in the morning, we walked ~2 minutes from the front door of our hotel, scanned the sandwich board menus of 3 likely candidates, and settled in back at candidate #1 for omelettes and fresh squeezed orange juice. As I have said elsewhere, on the list of small things that bring large pleasure here in Europe, the ubiquity of fresh squeezed orange juice is very high on the list. The proprietor of this particular shop was Spanish and, somewhat amusingly, doesn’t seem to have made any effort to transition to Portuguese despite running a restaurant in the middle of the country. Still, he was a nice guy and the omelettes surprised us by being particularly good – in general, omelettes seem to be one of those foods that are named the same thing as a food in the US and bear some resemblance, but you’re well advised to approach with an open attitude of “let’s see what’s behind curtain #2!” These might have upset the locals but we enjoyed them tremendously.

After breakfast, the entirety of our agenda was “let’s go that way” while one of us points a finger. This turned out to be quite a lot of fun. The homes in this area of town are mostly kept up very well, and while there were plenty of examples of traditional tile work there was also some experimentation that we haven’t observed in Braga. There’s not a lot to describe in a moment-by-moment fashion the way some of our blog posts turn out; fortunately, Lisa took oodles of pictures. To wit:

Those photos represent several hours of just trundling through the neighborhoods, partly sight-seeing and partly idly drawing up a pros and cons list of living in Aveiro. (It’s doubtful we’d move there, but after all everything is new to us and we’d be fools not to even consider it.) While it was much cooler here than it was back in Braga (by 10 degrees C, give or take), that was still walking around in the sun on a summer day, so we were a little pooped. Fortunately, every inch of the lagoon that can support a tavern has a tavern, so in short order we were having a cool glass of vinho verde and catching the breeze under an umbrella. Thus refreshed, we went back to our room and freshened up for dinner.

After last night’s fabulous meal at Laguna, we felt like it would be a home run to go to a sister establishment; Cais do Pescado (which means ‘fish pier’; ‘Cais’ is a very popular word in naming things in Aveiro’s tourist area). Somewhat disappointingly the meal “only” rated a B, maybe stretching to a B+. That’s not a bad meal at all, of course, but Laguna had been an ‘A’ and graduating with honors, so we’d let our expectations get away from us. That’s on us, of course, but still. One funny moment – as we sat down in their outdoor seating area, directly on one of the lagoons (but I didn’t need to tell you that, now did I?), a fairly stiff breeze had come up. Between that and a comfortable evening temperature in the high 60s or so, and it was pleasantly cool. This caused the manager to scurry over to Lisa and ask her if she needed a blanket. She laughed and said ‘no thank you’, only to then look over at her dear, shorts-wearing husband who was catching more of the breeze and was in fact a bit nippy. Alas, Portuguese machismo clearly disdains things like blankies when it’s chill-chill, so the manager didn’t even bother to ask him and he, like a champ, endured.

It was late-ish by the time we were finished so it was back to the room and then back to bed. We shan’t bore you with a whole additional post about Day 3, as all we did was wake up, partake of the thoroughly mediocre hotel breakfast (to be fair, we had been warned!) and then retraced our route from our arrival to hop a train back home. All in all, the trip to Aveiro was a win; it would have been a cute getaway all on its own, but the escape from the heat back in Braga was worth it all by itself. 10/10 would go again.

I’m not sure how much our readers know about Celsius temperatures, so here’s a good rule of thumb: if it sounds right above freezing in Fahrenheit, it’s $*&@ing hot in Celsius. (100° in F is 37-°ish in C; 0° in C is 32° in F.) So, when our weather apps showed nothing but solid yellow circles and numbers in the mid-to-high 30°s, we knew we were in trouble. We did our best to manage the heat for awhile; opening the windows up at night to air out, sealing the apartment up by 8 AM or so, judiciously placing our fans and, occasionally, huddling in the living room with the air conditioning turned on. But when the nights don’t drop below 23° it just isn’t ever *cool*.

Eventually we decided that we needed to get the heck outta town and made plans to escape for a couple of days. A quick perusal of places we thought we’d like to see, cross-referenced with weather forecasts, led to our booking a quick jaunt to the coastal town of Aveiro.

Turns out, this was a very good idea.

We left for the train station in Braga around noon; this is not at all unusual, as our sleeping and waking have been occurring at irregular hours thanks to the heat (and the managing thereof). We had two options, a commuter train with more stops that would take roughly 2.5 hours, or the zippier route with fewer stops that would have us there in about 90 minutes. We did that one. The ride is uneventful, which we’re still getting used to – outside of the Northeast of the United States there aren’t a lot of commuter routes that get a lot of use, but (as anybody who has been to Europe already knows) over here it is de rigueur*. The train station in Aveiro is at one end of an avenida that ends at the waterfront. It’s a lovely, 15 minute walk during which I decide it reminds me of the Champs-Élysées. This is a ridiculous thing to say – it’s a four lane street with some trees, not a world famous boulevard suitable for parading conquering armies. However. The Avenue Dr. Lourenço Peixinho is dead straight, with wide sidewalks between the road and the businesses that run along it, those sidewalks being broken up with frequent stands of trees. I can’t explain perfectly, it’s just one of those things I flashed on, ya know?

In any case, it was a straight shot to a lovely hotel that Lisa found – the Hotel Aveiro Palace. It’s centrally located in the Aveiro pedestrian zone and is also smack dab on the lagoon, so it has a lot going for it. The rooms themselves were tidy and comfortable if not overly large; I don’t have a formal review in mind but, in general, if you’re going to Aveiro you won’t be mad if you stayed there. The plan was to spend the afternoon checking out some easily accessible sights so we popped right back out and onto the streets. And the lagoon!

About the lagoon. Aveiro is known by some as “the Venice of Portugal.” I get why this is said, although I suspect the Aveiro tourism bureau is where you hear it the most. The thing is, the city is situated atop a lagoon… which can be toured in its entirety in a 45 minute boat ride. You don’t use the boats to get from point A to point B as you would in Venice; you take a single tour on them – the water ways simply aren’t pervasive enough to be much use in practical transport. That said, the boat tours look like a lot of fun.

We didn’t need a boat to get to our main destination, though – it was a teeeeny tiny walk to the Museum of Aveiro, principally home of the artifacts of Saint Joana, a Portuguese princess and quasi-nun (hang on, I’ll get there) who was canonized in the late 1600s, roughly 200 years after she died. Sidenote: if you’re into European art and history, even lapsed Presbyterians such as myself become passing familiar with Catholic lingo. Santa Joana Princesa retired to this convent in the 1400s. Due to… I dunno? “Rules.” Specifically the intersection of Catholic rules and Portuguese nobility rules; she couldn’t become a for realsies nun, but she apparently really liked it there and made up her own version of the holy orders, which she swore to and lived out the rest of her life there. Once she died, however, everybody was reminded that she was also royalty because she left piles of wealth to the order. It makes for a lovely museum with some truly amazing work done in the various chapels – wood carving, tile work, the works.

After leaving the museum and strolling for a bit, we arrived at our dinner reservation at Laguna. Honestly, I picked it primarily because of it’s location – Laguna is a boat docked in the lagoon. To be even more honest, I picked it from my list of potentials largely on photos that didn’t pan out – they have a bar and some seating on the roof, but apparently it’s not always in use and in fact, we were seated inside. Doesn’t matter; we had a fabulous meal. Laguna is one of those places where the proprietor cares passionately about every teeny bit of their menu, and it was all delicious. The manager also paired wines for Lisa that a) she never would have selected for herself and b) she adored. All in all it was a fantastic experience, and being on the water was great even behind glass.

After dinner we had a lovely walk back to our hotel, and by “lovely” I mean it was 19° with a steady breeze coming in off the water. Given that it was 30° back at home we counted this as a major win. We took our time, wiggling through the streets of the pedestrian area leading back, and then settled in for a long summer’s nap. The next day would be devoted to full-blown tourism!

*a french term that means “for shit’s sake you mean to say you’ve never seen a train before criminy and you people ran the world?