At the train station, a tourist draw, the lobby walls are tiled with elegant blue and white scenes of laborers and Crusaders.  Outside the Se a talented violinist serenaded the passing throngs.  Inside we got the first stamp in our credencial before wandering around the cloister, nave sacristy and and treasure room.  The 12th-century cathedral got its start as a Romanesque and Gothic building but is now gilded galore and of course contains walls of blue and white tiles.

At the guesthouse I had another chat with Bruno and learned some more words.  He said people will underrstand me if I say them but they’ll think, “She sounds like a robot.”  I don’t quite have the smooshing/swallowing Portuguese pronunciation technique down.

We boarded a bus about five to return to the town center; there was so much traffic we could have walked faster.  Our goal was the Vodafone store to get SIM cards so we could use our phones in Europe for a reasonable price.  Every trip to Europe we agonize over what to do about phones, and every time we come up with something less than desirable.  “Just get new SIM cards,” Chris told us.  So we did.  The pleasant, helpful and very good English speaker Diogo (“no one can pronounce it,” he told me, by which he meant no one not Portuguese, and he is right) had my phone switched over in about five minutes.  Maurice and I looked at each other in wonder, and work commenced on Maurice’s phone.  But—no surprise—we soon realized we were sinking into our family’s standard inexplicable tech issues.  After an hour Diogo was off duty but offered to walk to the metro with us and help us get tickets, as he was sending us to a mall in another part of town that had an Apple store.  Kind Diogo.  But he called the Apple store first, and they said they could do nothing about our problem.  Our only recourse was Apple online tech support.  We bid Diogo a fond farewell but Maurice continued to fiddle with the phone.  Soon he received a different Portuguese message.  We took another number and waited to be called by a new Vodafone representative, who had no idea what our problem was, but told Maurice to turn the phone off and on again and voila!  Everything worked.  A Camino miracle, and we haven’t even started the Camino.

Off we went to Cafe Santiago, the best place in town recommended by Bruno for the specialty he told us about, the francesinha (Portuguese for “little French girl”), a hot sandwich he practically salivated describing.  It is sort of a grilled cheese on steroids, a stack of bread, sausage, steak and melted cheese drenched in a spicy sauce and surrounded by French fries.  It was…something…that Maurice enjoyed but I don’t need to have again.  Fortunately we also got an excellent fresh salad dressed in good fruity olive oil.  (What doesn’t evoo improve?)  It was almost 8:30, the sun had set and it was getting chilly, but on our walk home we stopped by last night’s cafe to get a couple pastels de nata to go.  Yes.  Couldn’t quite recall if we liked them or not so thought we’d better try again.