“Fuengirola monkfish, Pont d’Avignon Lech
Wałęsa Mount Fuji?” asked the guy outside
the door of the apartment block. I suddenly realised what was going on – he was
speaking Portuguese to me. It was Saturday 17 August, our penultimate full day
here, and I was in a thick cloud of sleeplessness. I was on my way to pick up
the clothes from the laundry and he caught me by surprise. It was good, because
it produced that click you need to get going. Anyway, he wanted to know where a
particular church was, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea.
Arriving at the laundry, the woman was all
alone. She greeted me with a smile, raising her hands in the air. She had done
all the laundry to perfection, down to folding it symmetrically and placing it
all in a bag, about a third of the size of the pile I brought in a few days
earlier. She had given me a massive discount, and after the deposit I gave her,
I owed her 15 euro, but seeing this, I gave her twenty and refused the change.
We swapped pleasantries in as much as my staggeringly inadequate Portuguese would
allow, bought some food, and went back to the apartment to cook some lunch.
In the supermarket, I realised one of the
things that I will remember most from my trip through Portugal: the national
hobby of Taking Their Sweet Time. All I wanted were four small picanha steaks.
The ticket from the dispenser said I was about fifth, so I did a bit of
localised shopping while the numbers went down. After selecting 12 bread rolls
and a bottle of wine, I went to check. No progress. So I went a bit further to
the pasta aisle and the fridges for milk and yoghurt. Came back, I was one
nearer. I did the entirety of my shopping, visiting every part of the store,
and I still had to wait several minutes.
The one right before me, I am not
exaggerating here, bought enough meat to keep a pride of lions contented for a
few days. By now, a fairly large crowd had built up around the meat counter.
When my number finally did come up, and I pointed to the picanhas, he asked
“anything else?” I said no, that’s it. He looked at me sheepishly and I could
see in that very brief exchange of glances, that he was slightly ashamed that
his department was woefully understaffed. This left it painfully exposed to the
risk of veteran grillers showing up during rush-hour on a Saturday to spend ten
to fifteen minutes purchasing a month’s worth of protein for their litter of
carnivorous relatives while everyone else hovered around.
When I finally got to the checkout, the
next stage of Taking Their Sweet Time appeared. There were two checkouts open
and a third was closed while a client made a query on the price of a bag of
cherries. This then sucked in virtually all the other checkout staff members,
all standing around giving their opinions on the matter. Seeing the queues
getting longer and hearing very few beeps any more, I took matters into my own
hands by carting my fairly large wheelie basket to the self-checkout in order to
get out of there as quickly as possible.
But I had forgotten to buy some water. I
attracted the attention of the woman in charge of the self-checkout, who was
busy Taking Her Sweet Time talking to a client, to ask her to keep an eye on my
bags while I ran back inside. She looked at me as if I had just belched and
dropped my trousers at her mother’s funeral. How dare I disturb her cosy chat
with the random customer?! I was actually unsure whether she even knew what I
had asked her.
Anyway… you may have gathered by now that
I’m letting off a bit of steam. After the shameless robbery in broad daylight,
being harassed by a madman for my mobile phone, and the feeling of being ripped
off for the standard of accommodation, as I write these lines, I am close to
the edge and can’t wait to scuttle off back to Spain.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t despise this
country, not at all. I will give it another try, but it hasn’t exactly been the
most successful phase of our road trip. To start with, we hardly managed to
fulfil any of the plans we had; this was partly due to Bonny Bee’s workload and
for the rest because we just don’t feel like it. The temperature has been in
the mid- to high-thirties, which hasn’t helped. I mean, we are less than an
hour from Lisbon, yet we never managed to go there. Nor to Sintra, Cascais,
Estoril, or any of the places I had marked off. I think we will return out of
season, possibly in May or October one year.
We had decided to spend the Saturday before we left at the Fonte da Telha beach and its lovely bar, as we had such a good time a few days earlier. But we should remember: you can go back to a certain place, but you can never go back to a certain time. And this was proven true this time. We went to the bar first for a drink, which took a jolly long time to arrive. I’m not sure this was Taking Their Sweet Time though, more likely a staffing issue, so I didn’t make a scene.
I enquired about their sunbeds under the
wooden parasols out front, and we were granted number 125. But once we got
there, it was occupied, so we took 113. It was clear now that staffing was the
culprit here, so I stayed polite when I went to tell the girl in charge that we
had taken another number. Although she virtually admitted that nobody was
paying attention to the numbers that the beachgoers took… we could have
occupied an entire row and nobody would have been any the wiser.
I went for a swim, Dainoris went with his
surfboard. He didn’t last too long before he decided to pack it in and go to
play in one of the many pools formed by the low tide. Milda had joined him, but
when I came back from my swim, she was no longer there. She was also nowhere to
be found – neither at the sunbed with her mother and Livia, nor at the littoral
where she sometimes goes for a paddle. She hadn’t wanted to go anywhere, so we
hadn’t put on her water wings. Scanning the beach was made doubly difficult by
the reflection of the setting sun, and I started to panic somewhat. The beach
is kilometres long and at the time was crammed full of people.
I rallied Bonny Bee, and we split up to look for her. Using the psychology of a child, which involved trying to remember what I did when I got lost (several times) on beaches, I thought she would carry on drifting down the beach hoping to stumble upon someone who would care enough to bring her to a person in uniform. And after walking about a hundred metres further, I spotted a little blonde girl in a watermelon-coloured bathing suit high up on the banks of the beach, drifting in and out of the crowds carrying a spade and a plastic shape.
I darted forward, upsetting a game of
paddle, stomping on an abandoned sandcastle, and sploshing my way through
several shallow pools, always keeping an eye on my target, like my training had
told me. As I got nearer, I realised it was her, which was still unsure from
the distance, and I reached her just as she had decided to sink to the sand and
give up. I had been extremely lucky to have spotted her before she did, because
she disappeared behind a lot of indifferent sunbathers, and it may have taken a
lot longer to locate her.
When she saw me, the relief on her face was writ large. With us both in a heightened emotional state, I gave her a big hug and took her hand. She wanted her mummy, so I walked with her back to the sunbed. I told her how to locate us – just look for the bar, we’re right in front! She laughed in realisation of how easy it could have been, but from that point on, she had no intention of going anywhere.
So we played a bit longer on the sand, making then destroying some sandcastles, before we decamped to the bar for some food while we watched the sun setting. There were some glorious cloud formations as the sun hit the horizon, and as the moor reached the middle of the sky, I felt the urge to run back into the water, but I didn’t. I should have, but I’ll wait until we’re back in the Mediterranean before I plant myself in the salty water once again. We headed back to sleep and experience our final full day in Portugal.
On Sunday 18 August, we spent the hotter hours in the apartment, packing clothes and clearing up. I like to have this type of thing done early so I can relax without having it on my mind for the rest of the day. I cooked some chicken breasts in garlic and herbs with roasted baby red potatoes. It was the first meal I can remember where nothing was left over at the end.
Afterwards, we went to the city for dessert before we walked to the park for drinks while the kids went to the playground. They also enjoyed dipping their toys in the pond, losing a stegosaurus in the process. Home, food, bed, and we leave the country in the morning.
People will ask how our time in Portugal
was. I will reply: apart from the robbery and the near-attack from the madman,
one other thing happened that sealed the deal… we received an anonymous letter
from someone in the building who didn’t want us here. It was scrawled in
Spanish and more or less says “BEWARE OF WHAT YOU DO – IF YOU DON’T WANT IT FOR
YOURSELF THEN OTHERS NEITHER”, which was I think either a dig at the fact the
kids could be noisy during the day, even though this is the land of self-unaware
people, or because we were tourists in a building full of permanent residents
and they didn’t like it. Also, the day after, our water supply was turned down
to the lowest level so we couldn’t wash properly or do the washing up.
So all-in-all, I would say we will return
to Portugal one day, but not to Setúbal, that’s
for sure.
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