The dramatic storm front that threatened to drench us yesterday was, like most things Baroque, needlessly exaggerated. A sprinkling here and there, but, for the most part of the day the lowering clouds swept overhead, disappearing by evening when we took a walk up to the top of the Coimbra campus for the dazzling view.
Today it didn’t look like rain was in the offing, so we made for the botanical park a block west of our Airbnb on the other side of the Roman aqueduct.
Dropping into the park past the stone fountains in the center of a few Baroque gardens, we came upon an art installation in a greenhouse. The student sitting outside the greenhouse told us it was free, so we popped inside and followed a path around a leafy burbling stream girded by a mossy stone wall and vertical blue and red neon rods spaced evenly apart. Hidden speakers played a recording of a woman reciting a poem that started off “Cutting the throat of the sky,” before alluding to “The sphinx without the riddle,” and then getting down to the nitty-gritty where, “The damp of our sex/Vomit our desires/Into your slippery love” admitting in the end that, “All language is queer.” Greenhouse eco-erotica isn’t my forté, so maybe I missed some important lines, but that was the gist.
From the poetic burbling brook, we took a turn descending deeper into the park where we found ourselves in a forest of towering bamboo. Imagine tunneling through the Gothic bamboo arches of some Chinese fairy tale.
Around the next turn I expected to find our Porto taxi driver in robes, long tapering white beard touching the ground, bent over with both hands resting on a weathered wooden walking stick. As we approach, he wags his finger at us, “Coimbra no Coimbra!”
Every trip we’ve taken overseas since Rome in 2015 I’ve always found a spot where I wouldn’t mind stopping to die. This has a lot to do with my fear of dying in Albuquerque. No mystique in that. Death seems all too prevalent in our dear city. It’s such a cliché. But to pass away somewhere sublime in some country far away…that’s the fantasy. And in Portugal in this bamboo glade, that would suit me perfectly.
Further into the botanical gardens we came across a domed chapel capped in green moss similar to a Buddhist stupa.
It reminded me of a tour I once took at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (where the infamous Doomstown blast footage had been recorded in the early 1950s). No nukes had been detonated since Kennedy had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but on the site there remained the outer casing of an H-bomb that Teller once tried convincing the military into detonating in outer space. It was covered in a mossy green fungus.
Exiting the botanical gardens, we veered left and headed up a street on the east side of the Mondego River. We were searching for the gorilla wall sculpture.
We took a pedestrian bridge across the Mondego River. With New Mexico going up in smoke, I can’t get enough views of wide rivers flowing under my feet.
I won’t explain the ridiculous Google directions that had us circling the Santa Clara Monastery Museum we were hunting down.
That’s the 13th Century monastery that actually served as a convent. The basic takeaway from the story about the monastery/convent is that it is unwise, no matter how faithful you are, to build your church on level ground near a river. The river rises and all that hard work gets soaked.
The monastery/convent conundrum made me wonder if my inner monk wasn’t as devious as I’ve made out; maybe he was just confused and one thing led to another and before he could stop himself… The cause of his downfall might have been situational!