The one day I had in Oporto I didn’t have my camera on me so I can’t show you the dense schools of carp feeding on the fresh sewage pouring into the Douro.

The bridge a student of Eiffel built over the Douro, not far from the feeding fish.

Very, very creepy. In fact, when I visited the local market those carp on the fish row looked very familiar. Could they have possibly been caught while feeding on the turds of the city?

Fishy question aside, the Mercado de Bolão is right off of the main shopping drag, Rua Santa Catarina and is pretty terrific. It is an enclosed, yet open air market, packed with hundreds of merchants selling meat, fish, flowers, produce, spices, and kitchen equipment. You’’ll see mounds of pig snouts and buckets of chicken heads. Oh, where was that digital! The market building is a shabby mess but you can easilly summon up grandness of the past with touches of nouveau detail here and there. It won’t be too long before this goes belly up to tourism. And what a shame that will be. For the present, it is still terribly authentic. Tourists are viewed as a curiosity.

A few blocks away, the Majestic Cafe is a must stop. The coffee and pastry are lousy but the orange juice is fresh pressed and yummy. It’s the furnishings you’re after, and they’ll turn you into a shoplifter wannabee. The cafe opened its doors in 1921, and nothing from the Art Nouveau facade, to its deeply tooled black leather seats and curly mirrors have been altered or modernized. The trouble is how to look nonchalant when carrying out a chair? You see the problem.

Typical of the lovely detail in the city.

Three hours and change the next day (and this time with a camera) I was on a putt-putt train up the Duoro. It was hot. The older woman opposite me looked like she was going to pass out. The landscape turned dramatic.

(Note: friend who just had to jump into the water at the very place where Admiral Forrester was drowned).

Venus was brilliant over the mountains near sunset and a little while later Mars showed up as an orange ball in the night sky, just next to Orion’s Belt. Not bad.

And then there was the stomping of the grapes. You don’t really stomp, you dance in squares full of grapes. I felt as if I were walking on a soft pebbly beach. I was pulled into various folk dances, afraid I was going to slip and fall in to the drink. One teenage guy, flexed his testosterone, took a cigarette break, and blew smoke rings out the window. My legs were quite purple.

The sting and itch (probably from the tannic grapes) hung around for twenty-four hours, a reaction that made me think maybe there was something to beauty treatments based on grape detritus.

About wine? The port was great, especially the 1966 Taylors. But the dry wine? Eric Asimov had a piece in the Times this week about great wine from the Douro. Unfortunately this wasn’t my experience. The ones I came in contact with (and the ones I’ve tried recently in the states)–even if they were from Touriga Franca and not Cabernet Franca—they were treated in that please the world style—new oak and yeasted and often badly acidified. However, I had one of the sweetest fresh figs of my life, a plump runny fig that was worthy of a Victorian sexual romp.