What happens when you book a flight first and figure out the rest at the airport.
The Ryanair gate closed twenty minutes early, the way it always does, and I was the last person down the jet bridge. By the time I landed in Porto I had no hotel, no map, and the only Portuguese word I could remember was obrigado.
This turned out fine. Porto is the kind of city that rewards walking without a destination. The streets bend in ways that don't make sense on a phone screen, and every tiled wall looks worth photographing until you stop trying. I found a room above a bakery for thirty euros a night. I ate too many pastéis de nata and drank port at eleven in the morning because the bartender said it was traditional. Whether that was true didn't matter.
The Douro is everything they say. The bridge at sunset is everything they say. The old town is everything they say. But the part that stays with me is sitting on the steps outside a church in Foz, watching the Atlantic do its slow thing, with a sandwich I had bought from a man who spoke no English and who I trusted completely.
