Grapes and quilt shops and francescinas

One of my favorite snacks is grapes, red grapes or green. We found these grapes on todays three-plus mile quilt-fabric recon.

They are the size of small plums. Crushing a whole grapes between your molars is like having a complete Concord grape jelly sandwich in there. You don't even miss the butter at all. 

And then there is Cereal World. You can't make up stuff like this, y'all. This guy has a shop with a half dozen tables and cereals imported from the US and other European countries. It says on his two-sided menu that cow's milk is free and the default medium. You can also get soy milk, vanilla milk, etc. He kind of lost me after a while. He also has cereal on ice cream, in milkshakes . . . You can pile up as many as five different cereals in your bowl; the price does increase, but it's arithmetic, not geometric. We checked it out. Gave it a bye.

Found this ceramic-tile-clad Evangelical Methodist Church (founded in 1877) on a quiet little park on the way to our first stop.

After the church, before the first shop, we found a confeitaria started by two women that serves amazing foods. The tile floor is such that I thought it was a carpet pattern. The owner came in with two small dogs that run where they please. We watched one of the cooks make a crepe dish of ham and cheese and a sunny-side-up egg on a circular griddle that was about fourteen inches in diameter. Got it all fried to a perfect tan, folded the outer circumference into a square, and moved it with two spatulas to the plate without breaking the yolk. It was artistry.

The first quilt shop was owned and operated by a fellow who learned English as an Exchange Student with a family in upstate New York. His wife started quilting; her friends followed her lead; she started selling supplies, then fat quarters, and, voilá, they have a quilt shop. Mostly imported American fabrics.

The second shop today was too snooty to talk to Kathryn ... I told it was because she didn't look like an oligarch's trophy mistress. But we -did- find a spectacular yarn shop where the lady told us about their wools from Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish sheep. Their primary mill had been supplying this same shop since 1926 and didn't give tours. Kathryn bought. Yes; she did.

Right before that yarn shop we found a three-story restaurant where K. got a soup, and I got a vegetable curry over rice. I asked the waitress if it was mama's recipe, and she replied it was an Indian recipe, because the cook Is Indian. 

The restaurant and two shops were on a small praça that had a memorial statue to the veterans of War I from Porto. I did render military honors.

Two more shops, one on a street that was getting under-ground utilities replaced ... foot traffic was even more constricted than you would even believe, and the original quilt shop we discovered.

The owner of this shop realized one morning that she was forty-four years old and had spent the last twenty-two years (half her life!) in the same office and really didn't want to end her life there. So she took her savings and hit the EJECT button. More fabric and a new pair of scissors that will travel in the baggage underneath.

Finally, dinner was a Francesinha each. It makes a Monte Christo sandwich avert its eyes and skulk off to sit quietly in a corner. Between two slices of bread are layered spicy sausage, a slice of beef, a slice of ham, a spacer slice of bread in there, toasted on the grill, covered in cheese which is melted on (Kathryn's was coated in a sunny-side-up egg, and set into what is essentially a tamale sauce. Served in a bowl with a knife and fork. I only made it a little over halfway through. Oh, and pomme frites on the side.

I ate more at that sitting that I have eaten at a single sitting this whole time.

We found a small section of town that was paved in black cobbles instead of white, and some humongous ship-and-bull pavings.

Every day is amazing.

And Life Is So Good.

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