Porto, seen mostly through wet glass
Two months of coliving in Porto, six weeks of rain, and a lesson in what happens when every apartment has its own kitchen.
Late November 2022
Booked two months. Rained for six weeks. Still liked it. Clearly something is wrong with me.
I spent October and November 2022 in Porto. Roughly six of those eight weeks were continuous, aggressive rainfall. Not the polite Lisbon kind. The kind that makes you doubt your clothes will ever be fully dry again.
The first few sunny days, I explored a lot. And the city is brilliant: smaller and quieter than Lisbon, a beautiful old town, a proper river front. The tourists cluster in about four predictable spots. Avoid those and you’re mostly among locals, which suits me fine.
I stayed at an Outsite coliving in a quiet residential area. A dozen small apartments, a coworking area, a big outdoor space that would have been perfect if the outdoors hadn’t declared war on us.
Spoiler: the self-contained apartments were the problem. Coliving lives off the “co” part — a shared kitchen where you bump into people, exchange three sentences about the weather and accidentally become friends. Here everyone had their own kitchen. So once the rain settled in, we all retreated like hermit crabs. It felt a bit like lockdown. You knew you had neighbours. You occasionally saw one sprint to the bins.
The kind of social experiment where everyone independently arrives at the same conclusion: maybe tomorrow.