I sometimes forget how small the parking spaces in Europe can be. I mean they are very small. Some even look as though they’d fit nothing bigger than a clown car. On the way from Lisbon to Porto, we — my cousin and I — stopped in Coimbra for lunch. It’s about 120 miles north of Lisbon and a little over 75 miles south of Porto.
Driving through the city we were looking for a public parking ramp. Street parking was out of the question. Mostly since the street parking we could find were already two cars deep against the curb. Locating what we guessed was a public ramp we got excited and decided to park. Now, we are not driving a large car, it’s just an average size sedan. But while parking the car we had to instigate a 20-point turn to get the car into the spot (and then again to get out when we left a few hours later). The classic scene for Austin Powers comes to mind — half an inch forward, half an inch back over and over again until we were able to make it work.
While this comedic attempt is happening — a rather large Portuguese man comes out and starts to shout at us. Not aggressively shouting, mind you, but shouting nonetheless. In all reality, he was mostly likely either trying to help us or tell us that our car was not going to fit. But since neither the cousin or I speak Portuguese for all we know he could’ve been sharing the secrets to immortality or how to change lead into gold. We just stared at him like stupid Americans until he walked away. The park job was . . . serviceable. In the sense that while, yes, we were able to park the car, I may or may not have needed to crawl out of the passenger side window to get out of the car.
The photo does not do justice to the size of the dishes that eventually arrived.
Picking a random restaurant for lunch we decide order quickly — we are starving after all and haven’t eaten since our flight. The cousin decides on “Cod in Bread” while I opt for the “Rooster Rice.” Neither of us are expecting what eventually arrived at our table. The “Cod in Bread” ended up being cod, potatoes and onions in a bread bowl the size of someone’s head while my “Rooster Rice” came out in a taurine and appeared much more like stew. I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, maybe something similar to chicken fried rice or a chicken paella dish but not a stew.
It was delicious. Boney, but delicious. A lot lighter than I would’ve expected and a flavor that, while familiar I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It wasn’t until hours later while looking it up that I learned the the “Rooster Rice” is a traditional Portuguese dish where the chicken/rooster is cooked in it’s own blood with wine and vinegar.
That would explain the flavor I couldn’t quite explain. Well, one of the things I pride myself on while traveling is eating things I wouldn’t normally eat at home. And to be honest, I would actually order it again. It was tasty.