When I started this blog I intended to write the posts in the form of letters. That soon proved impossible to hold on to, because the format is simply too constraining. From time to time I actually DO write a letter though, with envelope, stamps, the works. Like this one to my mother which should be arriving on her doorstep Monday. It’s an excerpt. All I’ve added is a few thumbnails and a link or two.
Just got back last week from four days in the north of Portugal. I was sent there for work to attend an EU meeting of Foreign Ministers at Viana do Castelo, a small city about one hour north of Porto. I flew into Porto via the Mediterranean island of Majorca and took a taxi north to avoid waiting three hours for a bus.
The driver spoke beautiful French as did a surprising number of Portuguese I met. He may have talked my ear off, but at least I got to know one man’s life history in less than an hour, how his parents took the family to France in the late sixties so his father could find a decent-paying job, how he came back finally to take care of his ailing mother, how much Portugal is changing.
At the end as I was about to get out and as he was filling out the receipt he asked me what date it was. Then it hit me – and I had to tell him – I said that today was the 60thanniversary of my parents’ wedding. I was looking up the mountain at a beautiful cathedral as I said it, and this memory I think will always be with me.
Another burned-in memory of that day was seeing the city of Grenoble suddenly pop into view on the first leg to Majorca. About a half-hour or so into the flight I was looking out and thinking to myself that with the gently folded, layered mountains and rolling landscape, it looked a lot like the Jura – we must be over France, not Germany. 
Then about 10 minutes later I looked out again and there it was. A city of my youth laid out before me like a glimpse back in time. It was so unexpected, so overwhelming, I was quite moved. Scrambling for the camera stuffed in my bag under the seat in front of me, I just managed to get off one shot that shows where I used to live, the neighbourhood I hung around in, the road from home to school, the park overlooking the city, the places I used to ride my bike on the weekends. Even the start of the route I took leaving the city headed toward the Rhône Valley on my cycling trip through Spain to Morocco you can trace in the picture.
I thought of the people I used to live with, how close we got to be, how much I looked forward to their letters and to writing them, and how our contact has slipped away to nothing. I read somewhere an item which said you lose one friend a year between your twenties and forties. Can that be true?
You two loved the Algarve and I don’t know whether you ever made it to the north of Portugal, but in many ways it is much like the south. Life takes place out on the street and there is a great mingling of people. Unhurried in their affairs, they have time to sit and ponder and enjoy things as families or groups of friends. I especially enjoyed the people-watching. I think you know what people I prefer to watch, eh?
The town of Viana itself was not that interesting beyond the cathedral up on the hill I mentioned, which I unfortunately never had time to visit. It’s like that on a lot of these trips. I fly in, work, fly out, never really seeing the places I’ve been to. But because I had a late-afternoon flight Sunday, I left my hotel before sunrise and took the train to Porto. Good move.
Once in Porto you change to a commuter train whose tracks follow the high riverbank slowly downward. Just as you start to get a good view of the many bridges, you plunge into a tunnel to emerge in a magnificent old train station bordered on two sides by cliffs overhung with tiny apartments clinging to their faces.
I left my luggage in a locker and headed down to the port area. Every shop was closed but a few people haunted the empty streets. An exhausted-looking young couple, drunk and quarreling and a trio of men holding onto each other for support made a perfect foreground for the run-down buildings and gritty sidewalks.
At the the foot of the hill a sign said: next boat 10:30, so I hopped on for a one-hour tour of the port area. 
Loved it. We cruised under the famous bridge built by Gustav Eiffel (of Paris tower fame) and five others in total, all spanning the immense gorge over which Porto is built. Best 10 bucks I’ve spend in ages. They let us off on the other side and suggested we take a tour of any one of the port-wine cellars there. But I didn’t want to have the very few hours I had on my own to be so structured, so I so wandered along the shoreline, up a winding street to get a good look at the bridge, then over the other side to have lunch at a small restaurant along the quay.
At a table next to me, two men with strong northern English accents and three Portuguese women – all in their late-20s I guessed – were having an animated conversation about the city of Porto itself. I thought this rather strange, and as I listened more closely, got the impression the women were students of English doing an oral exam, because not only were they speaking clearly and carefully, the whole conversation was being recorded on a digital dictaphone placed in the middle of their table. They told stories of people they’d met that weekend, of an old lady who’d told them she remembers having to shovel bullock shit from the sidewalk in front of the family doorstep and dodge donkey carts, but that now she is sometimes prevented from crossing the street for how closely the cars are parked together.
After their little gang paid, the two Englishmen left and I went over to ask them what it was all about. They laughed when I asked if they were students. „Do we look that young?“ one of them asked. I explained about the dictaphone and the somewhat careful way the three of them had been speaking, and they said no – they were actually doing an official study project for the EU on how to improve the city of Porto, and were gathering all the information they could from residents on how to go about doing so. They even asked me my opinion, but I said only: keep it the way it is.
Because if you remember anything about how people live there, you’ll remember how relaxed the pace of life was. What I loved about Porto was how even down by the water near the bridges in an area that in most other cities would long since have been taken over by kitchy kiosks selling bric-a-brac to bus tourists, people actually live – hang their laundry out to dry, stick their heads out the windows to talk to their neighbours, lounge around, kids playing stick-ball or riding their bikes. It’s gritty and run-down in places, but so what? This is how people live, and I hope it stays that way.
Dear Grandma:
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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