After watching rain scenically drizzle the granite slab sidewalks, cobbled streets and bedraggled Oportians and tourists in front of our window at breakfast, we slip/slide our way to the city’s now defunct stock exchange, hoping for an English-language tour in the near future.

Luckily, we get a tour we are told will begin in 20 minutes, and are instructed to wait “around over there” with a trio from Germany and a few others. The English-speaking guide will call us. We wait. Tour groups waft by us and enter. A very large Gate 1 tour group led by a woman speaking English and waving a Gate 1 flag brushes through the waiting area with her flock of 35-40. We wait some more until a guard finally tells us to go inside and wait some more. We go and wait some more.

Finally, a lovely woman assembles us and a group of others and says, “Welcome to the Spanish tour.” Our small English group politely protests in a variety of ways until the Spanish guide goes back out to the ticket booth, confers with the powers, and returns to tell us, you got it, the Gate 1 guide was the English guide and there must have been a misunderstanding. The next English tour will be in another 30 minutes if we could wait “just there.”

The tour is worth the wait: Opulent rooms in this building whose foundations were laid in 1834 when Oporto was a shipping power globally. Gifts given to the directors and their city abound, including entire rooms whose materials were donated by middle eastern nations and oriental despots. One gift: a bottle of 1834 port to commemorate the cornerstone. It is the oldest bottle of port in the world, we are told.

As we walk through the rooms, we can see rain coursing down the central glass skylight and wonder how much longer it will continue, how much to prolong our indoor sojourn. Sooooo, we decide to check out the small gift shop at the end of the tour and Cynthia makes a find: a round stainless steel circle with an articulated “tail” that wraps inside it. Unfurled, the tail swivels to hang down as a small hook for a purse or small backpack while the steel circle sits firmly on the table, kept firmly in its place by the counterbalanced weight of the hanging part. She gets a couple but, unfortunately, we can’t dawdle more and, with Rick Steves map and directions, force ourselves outside and into the northwestern portions of the city under a steady drizzle.

We’re near city hall, somewhat lost on a narrow unnamed side street when the smiley guy from yesterday’s train who is walking with a friend opens his arms wide, beams at us, and gives us a big thumbs up. With this encouragement we decide to give the outdoors about 30 seconds more before calling it a day because the weather is just miserable and the main park in front of city hall is totally under construction so the sights are often inside graffiti-covered walls and fences.

You’d think after being married to her for 40-plus years that David would know Cynthia has a sweet tooth, but she surprises him by taking us to a Rick Steves-recommended Confiteria at the edge of a little park so she can fuel up for the walk home, which we decide to forego because, by the time Cynthia has seen, analyzed, and talked with the sales women about every offering’s ingredients and baking process, the rain now has decided to hold off.

We walk around and end up in the cathedral and Bishop’s house, which are pretty sumptuous but not quite at stock exchange levels. “Render unto Caesar …” and all that but, still, the Oporto bishops lived well.

We divide and conquer the rest of the afternoon: David climbing up and over Eiffel’s bridge, almost blown off by 30-knot winds, to the port-house side of the Douro (the side named Novo Villa de Gaia) where an exuberant bride whose dress is almost stripped from her by the wind is having the time of her life doing an outdoor wedding photo op. Cynthia, cases some stores in the streets near our hotel while David returns to the hotel restaurant, gets his first true Negroni of the whole trip to date, and we meet in our room to get gussied up for our “big night” at Taylor Fladgate’s restaurant across the river.

Our uber driver is chatty and … mmmm … political?, philosophical?, slightly preachy? Whatever. Cynthia engages, time passes; we have to go all around Robin Hood’s barn to get to the restaurant because the main bridge doesn’t permit regular cars (nor Ubers) until after eight PM. But we get there and squander some extortionate=usage-fee-ATM-purchased Euros on a port spree in the tasting room for Himself’s upcoming birthday. David loves it when Cynthia splurges, an occurrence as startling as Hyakutake’s 70,000-year orbit.

We get the best table in the restaurant, right in the corner, right in front of the windows looking over the bridge and Oporto and realize that that huge white structure that looms over most of the city near the bridge, like the cathedral on Toledo’s central hill, is the bishop’s house. Our sommelier gives us nice advice on the pairings throughout the meal and, while Cynthia’s not stunned by her food, David is totally gruntled by his maigret of duck.

The uber back is quick — it’s after eight PM — and the driver says, waving her hand in front of her mouth, “No English, No French.” Quiet we be, Yoda thinks to himself.

And again, we fall asleeeeeeeeeep, praying for a warm sunny day.