March 2024. Aveiro. Portugal.
See ! There will be pubs in this Portuguese mini-series. No-one does pubs like the British though. Except the Germans.
And no-one does trip planning like Mrs RM; five hotels in four cities in six days along Portugal’s east coast,
starting with a place I’d never heard of (translation : Aveiro doesn’t have a football team playing in European competition).
81,000 souls, roughly the size of Mansfield or Paisley; does Aveiro have the tourist allure of those two ?
Take a look at the overhead view and see if anything jumps out.
Actually, the highlight may be the first thing you see leaving the station after a 2 hour train trip from Porto’s Oriente (good luck negotiating the ticket kiosks);
No, it’s not a craft beer bar, it’s the old station building, and would certainly beat Maidenhead’s effort in a beauty contest.
Quite a bit of art in Aveiro,
but mainly crumbling buildings in pastel colours, which is nice.
Well, it was till started to rain, bucketing it down as the northern Portuguese coast is wont to do.
“Find us a bar ! QUICK !” shouted Mrs RM from under the umbrella.
Well, Untappd was no help, so I picked one with my name on it.
OK, it’s a cafe-bar, selling as many espressos as pints of flat Bass Sagres (the Portuguese Wainwright ?), but it was friendly, had a mixed 2pm crowd, didn’t laugh at my pigeon Portuguese, and seemed incredibly cheap.
Best of all, there were Bossa Nova versions of all your favourite UK artists dep cuts,
competing gamely with the sound of the rain lashing down.
We stayed for a huge pastry, and a coffee, and then I succumbed to the bottle of imported German wheat beer that seemed to be the guest ale.
Scubbah & Dinah York continued ploughing through their eclectic songbook; Culture Club (“Mistake No. 3”), the New Radicals, Gerry Rafferty…
Wow.
The rain eased. We settled up; about a tenner for 5 drinks and a huge croissant, and headed into the unknown.
retiredmartin 
“No-one does pubs like the British though. Except the Germans.” And the Czechs
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Czech-mate, Andy 😉
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Never been to Germany but yes, the Czech Republic gets pubs. Austria too.
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I remember some fantastic pubs in central Vienna taking the p**s out of my Austrian pronunciation of Helles.
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I enjoy your foreign travel blogs – just the thought of buying train tickets abroad makes me go cold – we even had to have help in Barcelona ( although I still blame the machine ) Pauline
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Thanks Pauline.
Yes, buying travel tickets is a pain, though bad enough here. Lisbon airport had some very helpful assistants explaining it all but we still didn’t understand the 50 cents card you loaded your fare on and whether you tapped out as well as in but then I have the same issue on London buses.
I like writing the foreign blogs, and reading Duncan and Paul’s posts, though there’s a bit less observational stuff compared to what you’d get in Maidstone and that’s not just a language thing !
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A Portugal bar?
You should have been drinking white rum, surely?
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Actually do you not think that notion about nobody does pubs like the British is a complete fallacy? Of course Britain has loads of amazing, traditional pubs but so too does virtually every other country, sometimes in different ways but often ancient inns like here.
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I agree that every country has amazing, distinct, places. These ones in Malaga and Bruges for instance;
My impression is that the British pub is (or was) more a place for conversation between locals than a place to drink beer or eat. I expect the Americans who read this would have an interesting perspective.
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