Are you ready for a photo-bomb? Most of this blog post doesn’t have photos to go with it, so I’m going to include a bunch of cool pics.
We’ve made friends here over the years. Rita and Leo over in Portimão are both sweethearts. We took an Uber over there last week to get our hugs. Rita doesn’t work at the beach-bar we know her from… she got a job working for an insurance company, so we ubered there first. Her and her fiancé want to buy a home, so she also works at a restaurant at night. That’s 14-hour workdays/6 days a week. She was telling us that her fiancé fell down a flight of stairs when the Iberian black-out occurred. He ended up being off work for a month.
That got me talking to another acquaintance, Sarah. She runs a café on the beach. She said Armação de Pêra was one of the last to get their electricity back on with the black-out. The people were chanting in the streets, “Wi-Fi! Wi-Fi!” Can you imagine? It was pitch-black until around eleven at night, which is a big deal here. People usually wander the promenade past midnight.
Sarah says the Portuguese government has come to realize that they shouldn’t be dependent on Spain for their electricity. They have the facilities to produce their own, but Spain’s is cheaper. This is interesting to me. Portugal is capable of being self-sufficient in many ways. I wonder what they’ll do?
The other night we were heading to a restaurant and were distracted by the setting up of a giant-screen TV at Pedro’s beach bar. We decided to stop for a drink and see what would happen. We ended up staying there until after they closed watching the Spain/Portugal soccer game. It was a great game. Pedro’s staff came out at 9:00 to tell us they were closing and to fill last-call beers. The giant-screen TVs were left on and the packed patio sat in the dark until the end. We decided to head home when it went into overtime and found we could watch the finish of the game along the way. When the game was finally over, and Portugal won, the streets went wild. People were dancing together with children on their shoulders, car horns were beeping (which is a big deal because honking your horn is not culturally acceptable— it’s reserved for emergencies), and the promenade was full.
There’re some cultural customs (along with not honking your horn when you’re impatient) here that come as a surprise to us spoiled Americans. We have the saying, “You break it, you bought it,” but that’s rarely true in The States anymore. If you knock over your drink, they often replace it for free. Not here. A lady the other day knocked over her fresh martini. Fortunately she was wearing a black dress. The server immediately wiped everything down and gave her a paper towel for her legs… but he didn’t replace the martini. Joe was carrying a carton of eggs and it tipped open at the register. An egg fell out. The cashier rang up the eggs with no offer to replace the lost egg. When the seagull stole a piece of Joe’s chicken off his plate, they laughed along with us, but no new piece of chicken appeared.
They have various ways to deal with the seagull population, but my favorite is fishing line strung across areas like patios. It’s especially effective for protecting air-conditioning units. I’ve never seen that trick. We saw a seagull flapping around like it was under attack from an invisible foe, then we realized it had flown into the lines. It flew away unscathed.
When you stay someplace for a while, you slowly begin to feel like a resident. For example, I’ve had my doorbell rung several times to find a sweaty teen asking if I would throw their soccer ball back over the wall. The other day an older man rang the bell. It was a complete failure. Neither one of us could understand the other. I still don’t know what he wanted.
The same people with the same dogs walk the same routes. There’s one very noble looking large dog who ignores all the other dogs yapping. An extremely furry dog walks alone from the upper neighborhood to the beach every day. He walks slowly and methodically along the promenade and then goes home. I’ve never seen his owner. My favorite is the dog with the water bottle in his mouth. His owners have him on a leash and they walk a fair distance on the promenade, but this dog always has the water bottle in his mouth. One dog has a filthy little stuffed animal it carries everywhere. A lot of dogs walk along the low wall that hems in the promenade.
We even saw a cat on a leash on the beach. A different cat sits on a bench and waits for the tourists to pet it. It’s very successful.
An unusual thing in my experience has been the number of Muslims who hang out at the beach. There is a fairly large Muslim population here and because of the amount of clothing they have to wear, I assume they get pretty hot. At night the playground across from us is packed with women wearing at least a hijab, if not the cloak too and occasionally the face scarf. The only times I’ve seen these women out during the day is at the beach. They wear leggings with a long sleeve tunic shirt with an attached Hijab, and they go right into the water to play and swim. I seriously didn’t know this was even a thing!
Joe got a haircut at his favorite barber. They have a chessboard out front for people to play while they wait, or a pool-table inside. We sat at the chessboard and Joe tried, yet again, to teach me how to play. I thought I was saved by the Barber calling Joe in, but no. Another man who was waiting sat down and offered to play me while he waited. I explained that I had absolutely no idea how to play, but he wasn’t daunted. He made several moves as he explained why he did it. He eventually admitted he was the two-year national champion chess-player of the Netherlands. What? That’s not fair!
Well, time has passed. We left Armação de Pêra and took an express bus up to Lisbon. We’re staying at our friend’s again, but we didn’t see much of them over the weekend. It was Gay-Pride weekend and they stayed out partying until 7:30 in the morning… we were up sipping coffee before they came home. Then they went out to watch the parade in the city-center. We made a point of going the opposite direction to the Vasco da Gama Mall by the Oriente bus depot. It’s a super clean and calm area and we love it.
Sunday, we ventured downtown along the pretty main street that’s lined with trees and Sunday’s street-market. We limped home on tired feet in time to watch Sherlock Holmes with the boys. Monday was a lot of this and that… shopping, doing laundry, etc. All the stuff one does when you’ve been traveling for two months. That night a friend of theirs, whom we’ve met before, came over for dinner. I made a salad and cooked up some cheesy burgers, the requisite egg on top, and fried potatoes. Helio brought a fancy bottle of wine.
At the end of the evening, at the ungodly hour of midnight, Helio made the offer to take us to Sintra the next day. We eagerly agreed. Sintra is one of those few places we haven’t been because it’s too awkward to go to actually see the Pena Castle. You go part way on metro, then take a really crowded train, and then walk half an hour straight up hill—or pay a tuk-tuk to give you a ride. Helio drove us there and we could see the castle in the distance. We walked all over the tiny village and stopped at a pastry shop, Casa Piriquita, owned by the same family since 1862.
Then Helio drove us over to the most western point of continental Europe, Cabo da Roca. It was beautiful. It was nice to get that checked off of our bucket list. Then he drove us the back way to Cascais and dropped us off. What a beautiful part of the country. We climbed on the train and struggled to stay awake.
Now we’re all packed up and ready to catch a flight home tomorrow morning. The boys are making us dinner tonight. Hopefully we’ll get to bed before midnight.
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