I heard that Elizabeth finally posted our vacation pictures on Instagram, so it’s safe for me to share that she, Remy, and I traveled to Paris and Porto for ~10 days in July. I worked the week in Paris from my employer’s office there, while Elizabeth and Remy adjusted to the time zone change and bought exotic mustards. Our real holiday, to celebrate and mourn the end of Elizabeth’s maternity leave, was our time in Porto. We spent two days in the old town of Porto, in an Airbnb studio apartment that was probably hundreds of years old with incredible stone work. We then spent two days at a beautiful vineyard hotel an hour north of the city, which would make for a great destination wedding location. The hotel was affordable for all of the luxury. The downside was the single restaurant didn’t open for dinner until 7:30pm, which is after Remy’s bedtime. Bedtimes were especially stressful given the overlap of the dreaded “four month sleep regression” and a quarter-day time zone change. So, that meant that Elizabeth and I each took a turn rolling a cart with our dinner from the restaurant back to our room. The hotel isn’t used to parents with infants, but the compromise worked out in our favor. Instead of sitting in the restaurant, we got to eat dinner under a veranda outside our room overlooking the vines.
The most memorable part of our entire trip was a three-hour food tour in Porto. We met our tour guide at a metro stop in one of the main squares of Porto and then waited for the other tourists to join us. Elizabeth and I took turns “wearing” Remy in a carrier on our chests, and that gave our guide and fellow tourists something to ask us about. Our tour guide was not Portuguese, she was Italian, but she was obviously passionate about travel. When our first compatriot arrived, a woman who I’ll call Sonja, there was a quick connection between her and the tour guide. Both were single women who made it clear that independent solo travel was something that they prioritized. Sonja was from Norway and was not impressed at all by the fact that my favorite band is the Norwegian bossa nova duo Kings of Convenience.
The four of us, plus Remy, spent a few minutes covering the usual “where have you and haven’t you traveled” conversation that would have felt right at home at any gathering of MBAs. Elizabeth also asked what the craziest tour experience our tour guide had ever had, which was disappointingly just a woman leaving a tour after being shown a photo of another tourist eating some kind of animal head. All this conversation passed while we were waiting for the final tourist to join, who did eventually find us. Charles was both late and a man, both of which seemed to start him off on the wrong foot with our tour guide and Sonja.
Charles is English and he tried his darndest to show us the dry, slightly slapstick sense of humor we would associate with English. He was also remarkably tan and with perfectly white flashing veneers, a role model for my future middle-aged-self.
With the group assembled, we went off towards the first stop. When we arrived at a bifana (a kind of peri peri pork sandwich) stop, Charles lamented that he had actually just been there for breakfast. Inside, we sat in the sweltering heat to have our sandwiches and first round of drinks. While Elizabeth took Remy away for moment, I asked Charles if he had had the same meal this morning, when he revealed that he was just joking about being there earlier. The joke had gotten past me, and everyone else on the tour. He sat spread-legged at the table and said that if anyone else joined their table, they were welcome “right here” as he slapped the top of his thigh. The tour guide heard this and painfully let it go, while Sonja had been out of earshot.
When Sonja did sit down, she happened to brush Charles’ leg with her hand. This set off a series of jokes and comments from Charles around Sonja’s inappropriate conduct and that he would need to keep his distance from her during the rest of the tour.
We continued on to more stops, with Charles asking Elizabeth if she was Japanese and with both Elizabeth and I trying to figure out more about him. He was apparently a divorced former real estate mogul who spent his time between a small town north of London (where it’s apparently more affordable to live, which didn’t align with his money-is-not-an-issue persona) and Dubai. I pushed for more info and he claimed to not need to work any more, which is why details were sparse.
At each stop, Charles continued to note that he had just been there yesterday for dinner or for a snack midday. Because Elizabeth had missed the comment, I was apparently the only one who knew he was joking. He finally revealed that he had been kidding the entire time, but unfortunately the tour guide was not relieved or amused.
A fair amount of our conversation was not that remarkable and I enjoyed a number of Charles’ jokes. At one point, he tried to take a selfie of our group which prompted Sonja to run away. She did not want to be in a photo that he posted. Elizabeth and I thought Sonja’s response was a little extreme, but the moment passed without much drama. We luckily had a lot of alcohol to help prime the conversations, four (or maybe more) glasses of wine, an 8oz beer that the Europeans seem to prefer over the American institution that is a 12oz beverage, and one shot of liquor from an edible chocolate shot glass.
All the while, Charles kept making jokes and you could tell that our tour guide and Sonja were not entirely comfortable with him, which when Elizabeth and I discussed after, we agreed was as much about their inability to understand his humor as it was about him recognizing that no one was getting his humor.
At our second-to-last stop, we were the only customers in a small restaurant. Elizabeth had to step away with Remy again for a moment, which prompted Charles to start discussing how important having kids was to him. He took off the facade for a moment and seemed earnest in saying how his two adult sons were his best friends, even though one of them is an idiot. There is an insider’s club to being a parent, where it is hard to appreciate the benefits of if you haven’t done it. Elizabeth returned with Remy and the conversation around having children being the most meaningful thing you do continued. However, Sonja took offense that Charles would say something like that, because the commitment is so much different as a man. He did a poor job defending himself, reiterating the joy that being a parent brings. After two or three repeated statements from Sonja that it’s easy for him to say that “as a man,” he reverted to jokes. He said that when his ex-wife (who he had coincidentally met on a food tour) had forced him into having kids, he claimed he made a deal with her that she would do all of the work and he would only get to do the fun parts. She would raise them and he would give them money. Obviously, this line of defense did even worse than his earnest repetition that having kids is fun.
At the last stop, I took my turn walking around a port wine shop trying to soothe a screaming baby, so I missed the last morsels of conversation between our new found friends. Because I was standing outside with Remy, I heard Charles suggest to Sonja that they get a meal together at some point over the next few days while they were both in Porto, which I personally saw as an attempt just for some human contact and not a predatory-date kind of move. Sonja less than skillfully evaded the offer.
All in all, Elizabeth and I had a wonderful food tour experience. We left feeling sorry for our tour guide and fellow tourists, for different reasons. On our departure, our tour guide told us that this was the new horror story tour if anyone asks the same question Elizabeth started the tour with. Their fierce independence seemed more about disliking traditional lifestyles as much as it was about liking a non-traditional on. I definitely don’t like things but I don’t want my dislikes to define me. This is obviously a limited perspective given that we met these ladies for only three hours. But, Sonja’s comments made Elizabeth and I sound guilty in subtle ways, me for not having to go through pregnancy and childbirth and Elizabeth for being weak-willed enough to do that “for a man.”
For Charles, we felt bad because he obviously seemed lonely. Our read was that he was harmless. You can’t excuse his lack of social awareness. If people are being made uncomfortable by the jokes you make, should be able to tell when to back off, but it also wasn’t fair to him that neither of the women got any of the jokes and seemed predisposed to not like him from the start. He definitely crossed a few lines but he was never outright disrespectful. Even I was uncomfortable, but more in a Always Sunny or Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way than any real stranger danger.
In Elizabeth’s and my reflection afterwards, I told her about my tangential theory that, in most locker-room-talk between two men, one of the men is slightly uncomfortable but tolerating the conversation to preserve social norms. I feel this way often. You try to be friendly to sales people you interact with frequently or with coworkers, and they say things that you wouldn’t say. I don’t endorse the statements and don’t like hearing them, but it’s not my time or place to correct some other man’s comments, especially when I don’t think they reflect the way they actually behave outside of this clumsy machismo guy talk. I think myself usually respectful, but I’m irreverent enough that there are probably more sensitive men than I, who find what I say offensive but don’t feel it’s their place to correct me. There is a spectrum between the Dalai Lama and Charles Bukowski in terms of reverence and respect, and men exist on that line and move along it during their lives. Our tourist friend Charles is just closer to Bukowski than I am.
Elizabeth’s and my perspective on our fellow tourists is biased because we’re people who became parents. We felt Charles’ side of the argument more strongly than this non-parent counterpart’s position during the friendly debate. But that’s partially because we’re now so certain that being a parent is a very special and important thing to do. You commit to that position forever.
But anyway, again I can’t recommend enough going on a three-hour food tour of Porto. There were natural wines and tinned fishes, and there was plenty of great conversation. I’ll repeat Charles’ same review that he shared with our tour guide: “It’s a bargain of a tour for €20.”1
It was a €70 euro tour.