We awakened to the sounds of squabbling seagulls outside our window. Apparently they had swept up the Douro River from the seaside for a conversation.

The night had banished the rain and the cobbled streets were bustling with sanitation workers emptying trash cans, students working their phones, a scattered tourist or two and locals traveling this way and that to work or errands. Cyndy was jonesing for some American style coffee and Starbucks, it turned out, was right across the street. Feeling a little guilty, we bought two old-fashioned, big cups of coffee, not the smaller espresso's or cappuccinos we had been drinking throughout Chile, Argentina, and Lisbon, and sat outside in the bright, chilly air at a small table to people watch.

Our train from Lisbon took us along the Portuguese coast to Porto, Portugal’s oldest city and the nation’s namesake. This was a local train so many stops were necessary: Pombal, Nazarré, Granja do Ulmiero Alfarellos and Coimbra. It sometimes rattled and screeched on unsure rails, and at other times rolled so seamlessly you wouldn't know rails existed at all.

Prosperous and scrubbed is the way you would describe some towns, others were crowded with trash, unkept parklets and warehouses; some are industrial, others pastoral. Mostly the views from any train passing through urban areas are notoriously devoid of beauty. It's the green open spaces that catch your eye: the sleepy sheep that seem drunk in their corrals or great swaths of green farm lands, or, far off, the sea and it's crashing surf.

Beyond the Square and we passed a through slender archway and entered Rua Áurea (Golden Street). Among the retail shops, small mercado's and bakeries sat a stone archway hung with slick, black, rubber curtains, with big white letters that read: "Girls! Dancers! Peep show!" Within I could make out the strains of "I'm never going to love again."