The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 49-50: Out Of The Frying Pan...

 

“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.

 

The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 47-48: Madman Across The Water

 

The fifteenth of August is a holiday in many European countries. It is, in my experience, the day of the year with the least productivity of any; at least in those countries where it is a day off. Why do I say that? Why not Christmas Day or New Year’s Day? Quite simply because on those days, everyone is preparing food, welcoming guests, putting on a show, and so on. But 15 August is right in the middle of everyone’s summer holidays. The only people working are those in uniform and catering staff. Everyone else is flaked out somewhere cowering from the scalding summer heat.

When I lived in Belgium, 15 August was a day for opening a bottle of something and lounging in the garden, a park, or on a terrace somewhere. In Germany, nothing and nobody moved; the silence was insistent and almost aggressive to the point that neighbours would call the police if you so much as put your knife on the plate too loudly after dinner. In France, in some areas it is a similar story: people go to extraordinary lengths to enforce their day off, simply out of principle.

So it came as no surprise that in Portugal, it’s pretty much the same. Add into that equation a near 40-degree heat, and you have the number one day of doing nothing at all. When I roamed the towns and villages of Luxembourg, I remember many of the parks and river banks being beset by Portuguese people grilling stuff on a Sunday. At the first sign of good weather, the lakeside in Echternach used to be heaving with Lusophone grillers and their enormous entourages, pouring their bodies out of Peugeot 305s, sometimes six of them, and all their food, and the charcoal, and the wood, and sometimes even the grill too.

I had booked for us to eat at a restaurant in the centre of Setúbal, so that I too could take a day off from cooking. And for a while, the children enjoyed sitting having a pre-meal drink. They stayed seated through the entirety of their dinner, which was quite astonishing. But things started to deteriorate thereafter, especially when Bonny Bee had to rush back to the apartment to finish off a translation. It started when one of them remembered that the interactive fountain was just a few steps away.

It didn’t take long for them to get totally saturated in the water jets, but I decided to just let them go through the process of understanding how the principle of cause and effect works. It’s still too early for them to fully grasp such complicated life lessons, such as what happens if you go to bed too late and get up too early in the morning, or if you steal a sibling’s ice cream. Clue: they both involve landing in a horizontal position, one more abruptly than the other.

For that reason, when one came over lamenting about the situation, I just said “yeah, that’s what happens if you play in moving water!” The reply is always denial or a demand for immediate remedial action. “Well sorry sweet cheeks, but we didn’t take three spare sets of clothes out with us in case you decided to go for a shower in the town square!” And besides, being that hot (it was about 37 degrees), their clothes were going to dry out in no time. I usually hang them up the following morning, and less than an hour later they’re ready to wear again.

Concerning the 15 August setup here in Setúbal, it was incredibly easy to find a parking spot in an area that is usually overwhelmed. Someone I spoke to the other day said it was becoming a real problem, as many drivers were just slotting their cars in everywhere as the parking fines weren’t that much more than the tickets from the distributors. The way I look at it is Setúbal has an incredibly unwieldy building layout. There were obviously no town planners around when the first buildings went up – that’s fine, because it makes the city what it is, but nobody has thought about making a rational plan since the beginning of the era of cars.

So what is here now is a mess. To get from our place to the centre, which is an 800-metre walk, I need to take a three-kilometre detour that involves me driving away from the centre for a good kilometre, then I don’t know how it works, but I have to take a flyover which sets me down on the opposite side of the city. In order to get to a decent parking area, I take another two right-turns (there are no left turns involved in the entirety of the trip), and park in a road that faces our apartment and would take only ten minutes to walk.

(DISCLAIMER: Before you all criticise me for driving such a short distance, I would walk it on my own, but the children would never make it there and back in the heat, especially as there are some slopes involved!)

The kids’ clothes dried more quickly than they would have done in a drier, and we went back to the car to pick their mother up. I had seen on a few trips a lovely little place where a river meets the sea about 10 minutes out of town. Some picnic infrastructure had been set up, and there seemed to be a beach at the bottom. I took a detour to fill up with petrol, and followed a narrow road through trees down to the sea. When I describe it as a road through trees, I really mean it – there were sections where the trees were in the middle of the road and you had to drive around them.

Then I understood why the centre was empty: we joined the main road out of town along the coast, which is usually wide enough to accommodate cars, trucks and buses in two directions. There were cars aligning both sides of the road as far as the eye could see, and even small cars were slowing down to make sure they could squeeze their way through. I mean, it wasn’t exactly the Kumbh Mela, but the number of people under the trees lining the banks of the river all the way to the beach was pretty staggering.

And the noise. There were families with men arguing over banal topics like VAR in the pre-season friendlies, there were children chasing each other in and out of all the groups, women raucously laughing at one or other incident, and old geezers turning huge lumps of meat over on the grills. It seemed that it was always the elders who were in charge of the grilling. I don’t know if this was a sincere veneration or an excuse by younger family members not to stand next to a blazing inferno in a near 40-degree heat.

This was just like the banks of the lake at Echternach, then multiplied by a factor of seven, but the stereotypes were true: it was a national hobby and definitely one that would be a ritual on the least productive day of the year. We passed about twenty different groups all hanging around their grill patch making the most boisterous amount of noise. There were numerous Bluetooth speakers blasting out different levels of painful sounds, competing for supremacy over the others in the immediate surroundings.

There were crates of Sagres and Bock beer bottles and cans everywhere. One person was grilling a huge fish, another had about 12 picanha steaks, and a third was roasting a huge lump of sirloin, and one had three spatchcock chickens on the spit. There were bowls of potato salad and green salad, tomatoes, crisps, peanuts in their shells, olives, fried peppers in a lake of olive oil, and I maybe saw some aubergines with cured ham too.

Passing this sea of people, all doing nothing in particular, we arrived at a cooler, windier area with no tree cover. People were sitting in the shadow of the man-made rock bank and venturing out to dip their feet in the water every now and again. An old man had rather unthinkingly decided to put two fishing rods right in the middle of the already short beach, splitting the swimmers in half.

When I arrived, Livia and Dainoris had already entered the water and Dainoris had tied his surfboard to Livia’s floating ring. The floor of the bay was silt and stone, making it really difficult to get anywhere, so I chose to go in wearing my rubber slippers I had ordered from German Amazon. It’s pointless getting my shoes in Spain as my size (48) is just not catered for. Buying shoes for me is a soul-destroying exercise: most people go in the shop, peruse the hundreds of sorts of shoes they can potentially buy, from stilettos to brogues, house slippers to wellington boots, whereas I go in and just ask “what’s the largest size shoe you have?” Most say 45 or 46, which is the answer I am expecting people to say. When they say 48, it’s usually one or two pairs of clunky black lace-up shoes.

But there are the odd times when a shop actually caters to people who have my size, and then they have a loyal customer in me. Back in Germany, I used to go shoe hunting in Trier, because there were so many shoe shops. Only one, Kempe, had sizes beyond 46, up to 52. I bought nearly every shoe in there until we left last August. Clothes sizes are also rather impertinently measured: what is an XXL shirt in an Italian or Swedish chain store is an XL in a German one. And some shops have huge fat-shaming signs up saying “XXXL SECTION” or some such disrespectful statement of intent.

In the ladies’ XXXL SECTION are typically low-cut dresses with various colours that make the wearer resemble a parrot that’s been hit by a lift. The men’s section is awful – drab plain blue, grey or white shirts and conservative trousers with a special long belt section handily placed right next to them. Sometimes the shop will go the extra mile and provide checked shirts or even striped ones, but that’s it. And when I glance at the SLIM FIT SECTION or the CLASSICS, there are so many variations to choose from, that for the larger man, I can only show my indignant feelings to the poor worker fronting the store, which is pointless.

The main problem with this beach was that the wind was blowing directly from the land, and each time Livia and Dainoris lifted up their feet, they drifted further out into the main waters. I had to keep chasing them to make sure they returned closer to shore. Then when Dainoris got fed up, I had to contend with Livia and her total lack of understanding of consequences. So it completely exasperated me when she kept letting go of the inflatable ring and I had to go retrieving it several times. Needless to say, this was not a successful beach trip, and I persuaded everyone that it was time to go home.

On Friday 16 August, the temperature in this area was due to hit 40 degrees, a temperature so frightening to many people who see it as the point where human life and that of the surrounding nature cannot thrive any more. We stayed in practically all day and only well after 5pm did Livia, Dainoris and I venture out to one of the city parks. It contained a large lake and some low-maintenance bushes, with a playground at one end and a café at the other. We had a drink, because even as the sun was setting it was baking hot, then they ran off to play.

A young local lad befriended Dainoris and they along with Livia began throwing Livia’s furry bird in the air, trying to get it in the thing I call the Flying Underpants – that blue thing on a pole.

Heading home, exhausted but fulfilled, the two of them joined Milda for some food and they went to bed fairly easily. I decided to go out for an exploratory late-night trip. The air was still fairly warm so I headed to a promenade and artificial beach on the edge of the city. The tide was coming in, but I managed to walk a few hundred metres up the beach before the water got too high.

In the distance, I heard what sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. As I climbed up from the beach to the promenade, my bag caught on a branch and some loose coins fell out. By now, the crazed gibbering of the madman was getting closer, and my physical formation prevents me from reaching the floor with any ease. This Brazilian guy saw the panic in my eyes and the pain in my thighs, and bent down to pick up the coins with me. I was extremely grateful because the nutcase had made it to within throwing distance of us. I put the money in my wallet and back in my bag.

Just then, he decided to start chasing us pointing at my smartphone, saying “Hey! Hey! That’s my phone!” This was despite having a phone of his own in his left hand. We walked faster, and found relative safety in a group of locals heading back to their cars. After a while, we reached the car park, the guy was clearly on some kind of substance, and I was standing at my car. The Brazilian guy was clearly shaken, so I told him to get in my car, but the cuckoo bloke grabbed the door, preventing him from closing it and driving off.

He threatened to call the police to get “his” phone back, the phone with three years’ worth of photos on it from my recent life – how did that get there so quickly…? And all the cookies, and all the saved locations on Google Maps, and all my contacts… The kook was clearly, to use a local London term, three stops from Dagenham (= Barking). One of those who we walked with stood in front of the car to prevent the guy from photographing my number plate, but he already had it.

So I was stuck in my car with a stranger from Brazil. I asked him where he lived, he said Palmela, which was a town about 15 minutes’ drive away, so I took him home. It was another one of those incidents that seems to have occurred far too often here in Setúbal.

We have the weekend, and then we can escape to Seville, the inferno of Spain.

The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 45-46: Banishing The Demons

 

After Monday’s nastiness, dragging yourself up from such a rare and abrupt occurrence can be hard. You play the scene over and over in your head, analysing what you should have done better, sometimes veering to the far-fetched – how you could have run after the guy or pinned him to the ground in a lightning manoeuvre that would even have the SAS getting out one of their standard contracts.

But of course, life goes on. On Tuesday 13 August, we took it easy – just going to the centre for cakes and a drink. I walked past the scene of the crime and I sat with Bonny Bee in the square nearby while the children played in the interactive fountains listening to a guitarist playing some popular songs. Returning to where you had an extreme experience as early as possible is often good for the psyche: it helps in the process of returning to normal.

On Wednesday 14 August, after having cooked a meal of rice with secreto ibérico and vegetables, I took a look at Gonçalo’s suggestions and decided to take everyone to the beach at Fonte do Telho. The beach guards at Meco the other day said it was a good place to take Dainoris with his surfboard, as the waves crashed further in the sea and they did a lot of rolling before they hit the beach, meaning he would have quite a ride.

Firstly, though, we stopped at a café on the main avenue out of town for a cake and coffee. A stressful affair, tension was predominant, the children sensed there was bad air and seemed somewhat aloof. Probably a wise attitude to adopt, as both Bonny Bee and I were fed up with something or other, that we couldn’t put our fingers on.

I was about to change our course and head towards one of the beaches nearer by, but Bonny Bee thought the children needed to sleep. They had got up at seven-thirty in the morning after a very short night’s sleep. Milda was already asking to be carried, even though we needed to walk less than 100 metres from the car to the café and back.

The beach was a good 45 minutes away, and it was already gone 4, so by the time we arrived, it would really be prime beach time. One thing that astounded me was the number of French cars on the road, and all of them going obnoxiously faster than anything else, even the local dudes in their BMWs and Audis with their baseball caps on back-to-front.

Reaching the beach was an education: passing a huge number of umbrella pines, then down an incline that would not be suitable for parking, we arrived amongst a throng of people and cars. It will never cease to amaze me how it’s possible to go to the end of the land through swathes of empty countryside and find so much commotion, a tumult of the least expected kind. On one of the main streets parallel to the beach there was a car park and a clearing to the beach directly opposite.

Arriving at the beach, I could see the point the rescuers were making: the waves were indeed quite large but they crashed further out to sea. We dumped our stuff on the soft, powdery sand and got changed. The waves were really playful – they kept coming in at quite a rapid frequency, but the real breakers were further out. The undercurrents were extreme though, so swimming was going to be a problem.

Dainoris took his surfboard. After two failed attempts, the waves on this beach provided the winning formula to carry him to the beach. He had a great time riding on to the sand, but he and his sisters have an innate sense of risk, so he knew when to stop. Milda isn’t really a fan of the sea – she doesn’t like getting wet above her belly button, so Dainoris brought his surfboard back up and went to play with her.

Meanwhile, Livia had found an extremely energetic and slightly nutty girl of her age to hang around with. Due to the nature of the waves, they both kept drifting further along the beach, which meant that I needed to stay with her all the time, lest we completely lose sight of her. That’s one of the reasons I kind of favour smaller beaches, but hey, this was still quite fun. I decided to take some pictures of the scene, but Dainoris had other ideas… he kept filling up his bucket with water and chasing me around. It was at this point we understood that the nasty business had been purged and we had got our mojo back.

We stayed quite long – much longer than we usually do – and being on the west coast of Europe, we were now able to watch the sun setting. The cloudless skies overhead provided us with a gloriously unblemished backdrop to witness both the sun and the moon crossing above us. Just a few metres away was a beachside bar and restaurant made totally out of wood. The consensus was that we had worked up an appetite with all that beach activity.

The bar itself is a very special place indeed, and the builders had obviously taken the position of the sun into account when they built the place, because the steps down to the beach align perfectly with the summer sunset, and the side terrace catches the sun during the day but casts some decent shadows in the evening.

The menu was fine: the usual combination of deep fried yellow stuff, grilled fish and meat, pasta, rice, salads, desserts and fruit juices. The kids wanted a fruit juice to start with, and after the guy serving described their in-house juice, we all wanted one, and it was phenomenal. I can’t remember ever in my life having a fruit juice that actually had a creamy texture to it.

We ordered some sweet potato fries, ordinary potato ones too, some alheira balls with onion chutney. Alheira in its usual habitat is a particular type of sausage, but the restaurant’s take on it turned it into something resembling a falafel. It had the taste and texture of one too. Originally derived from “alho”, meaning garlic, which used to be a central ingredient, they were created by Sephardic Jews trying to avoid being denounced during the harsh days of the Inquisition. They thought that hanging sausages, which were traditionally made from pork, from their smokehouses, would save them from being betrayed. Other people were unaware they had made the sausages with other meats, the garlic probably disguising their flavour.

Another sausage I have really come to appreciate here in Portugal is the farinheira, a flour-based affair with a tangy and powdery quality. They have a much more subtle taste than chouriços (chorizos), which are often too salty to eat more than a couple.

We sat there contented with the fare in front of us, and decided to take a dessert. The sun was fast disappearing beyond the horizon, providing a spectacular backdrop to our meal. After two coffees while the kids played on the sunbeds in front of the place, we made our way to the car and drove home.

The unpleasant events of Monday were now a distant memory; the demons had been banished. And now we enter the last quarter of our Road Trip.

The Great Iberian Road Trip, Day 44: The Day The Enthusiasm Died

 

On Monday 12 August, I underwent a whole new experience: I was robbed in broad daylight at an ATM in the old town centre of Setúbal. It all happened so fast, I almost let my brain trick me into denying it. Luckily the people who saw it insisted on taking it to the next level.

In the morning, I went to the supermarket to buy food. Bonny Bee was working hard today, so I needed to do the heavy lifting with the children. After dinner, we were going to go into town for a cake or ice cream and then have another attempt at Dainoris’s surfboard in slightly calmer waters.

After a meal of pasta with meatballs in a cheesy cream sauce, I took Livia and Dainoris out for the afternoon. Milda stayed at home because she dithered and procrastinated, expecting us to wait for her while she fiddled with something on the floor. She was still without shoes.

I parked the car on 5 October Avenue in the north of the centre and we took a walk around looking for the place we had gone to last time, but my Google Maps timeline had decided to completely disappear. I like to keep a record of places visited and now it was telling me it had all been wiped while Google updates on a global basis “to provide you with the best client care”. Yeah, right…

So I got a bit frustrated and after turning around several times on the same streets, with two moaning kids in tow, I landed on a café with ice creams with juice for them and cakes with coffee for me. I took out my card to pay and the jolly proprietor apologised saying he didn’t have a card reader but there was an ATM about 40 metres down the street.

The kids were happily chomping on their ice creams so I quickly went to the cash machine. When I put my card inside, it asked the usual questions – PIN and how much cash. I asked for 70, because if you ask for 50, often one note will come out, and many shops like these don’t have the change for that. The card was released first and then the teller machine counted out a 20 and a 50 for me.

At the very moment it emerged from the machine, a hand abruptly reached out and tried to grab the notes. The first attempt didn’t succeed, but the second one did. And then he ran away down one of the many alleyways in the centre of this city. It all happened in slow-motion. You hear this a lot from people who have been robbed, but now I know it’s actually true – I can replay the thing over and over again, and the scenario really does develop that way. Before you can even think, it’s all over with.

The woman from the accessories shop opposite the ATM came running out in indignant disgust, as did two women with a pram who were waiting just at the entrance to the shop next door. Two builders gave me advice never to stand too far from the ATM, and don’t let the money linger in the slot. The woman from the accessories shop told me to call the police, but in my state of denial, I said it wasn’t worth it and I had to go back to my kids. She said it was, in fact she insisted, so she called the police herself.

By this time, the café owner had come down the street and also told me it was best to call the police, and I followed him back to the table where my cake and coffee were waiting.

To their credit, the police showed up more or less just as I had finished my coffee. They were two really friendly and patient officers. One was near retirement and the other was in his prime, and they asked me for a description of the guy. The ladies around me concurred with the account. The police knew exactly who it was – obviously a known offender. Before they had finished asking me the arbitrary questions, they had picked him up and were taking him to the station.

The younger one asked me if I would accept to come and identify him, meaning we would have to take a ride in the police car. Then the radio came through asking how my Portuguese was. I said it was pretty sketchy but I can handle myself in such a situation. But their superior officer insisted that I needed a friend or contact there to interpret for me. In the eyes of the law, everything had to be as clear-cut as possible. If I knew someone here in Setúbal he would appear in court in the morning. If not, it would take a while longer. As I didn’t, it was decided that it was best to just let justice take its course.

I lost 70 euro, but I also lost any remaining warmth I had for Portugal. Now, I am just counting the days until we head back to Spain. After that incident, I drove us all to a small stony beach just along the coast where they played for a while before we went back to the apartment for food. They took a long time to settle, but fortunately they had had no idea what had happened to me.

No real sense of normality returned to me that day, and as I write these lines it’s the day after. I’m still feeling quite low, but I have to occupy the children.

 

 

The Great Iberian Road Trip, Day 43: Where Did All The Cars Come From?

 

Portuguese is for me a language I can understand but I’ve never learned it. In terms of closeness to Spanish, it’s like Luxembourgish and German or Slovak and Ukrainian. It’s mutually intelligible to some extent with a number of notable exceptions, and yet it’s definitely another language. But it is also a language I will never learn, and there’s a reason why: it sounds so familiar but not in the way you think. It comes across like a whole swathe of other languages I speak, all jumbled up. Each time I hear Portuguese, for example in advertisements from the supermarket speaker, I think, “why on earth are they talking about skin products in a Slavic dialect?” Then reality hits and I realise it’s about kitchenware in Portuguese.

To me, the adverts sound like this: “Gołąbki feta carambolage waneschglift scooby doo mulţumesc pinball? Now Nižný vollkasko pain au chocolat! Wie sieht Esch-Sur-Alzette procureur fandango Edinburgh… Kantonesisch!” And then some jingle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to insult the language or the people who speak it, but in all the languages I have learned or tried to learn over the years, some defeat me for one reason or another. Usually incompatibility with my own ridiculous preconceptions of it.

A good example is Danish. I tried, boy did I try… but apart from the bonkers phonetics and the insane numerical system, I couldn’t get my head around it being far too recognisable without actually looking anything like English or German. However, what threw me the most was the word order, which is more or less like English without the silly exceptions for questions and negatives. I expected Danish to put its verb at the end, like German or Dutch. Nope. Didn’t get it. And now I’m sensing the same vibe with Portuguese, although for different reasons.

So navigating the supermarket, shops and cafés has been a little torturous for me. I hate going to a country and showing my incompetence in their language – this only happened twice in my life before. In Denmark, obviously, and Hungary. Hungarian is a step too far for me, really. Although when I hear an attractive person speaking it, I turn into a warm pool of watery mush very quickly. Early on in this trip, I learned that Basque is also an incredibly beautiful language. So much so, I am actually thinking of learning it.

Anyway, on Sunday 11 August, I woke up feeling awful. I couldn’t move and just wanted to crawl back into bed again. The kids also noticed this and kept hugging and stroking me – it was really very sweet of them. By about midday, I felt adequately mobile to go to the kitchen and make lunch – creamy chicken rice. I was incredibly surprised when Livia said she would eat some with us. Whisper it quietly, but I think she might be passing out of her fussy eater stage.

I have been getting tips from a very special friend of mine, Gonçalo, who has microscopic knowledge of this area and to prove it, I’ve been sending him a random photo each day of a place we have been to – only once did he need a second guess, all the other times he has been spot-on. And he advised us to head to the beaches of the western part of our promontory. The ones near Setúbal are pretty overcrowded and it’s difficult to park.

We headed out west in the car for a dessert and then beach; my choice was the resort of Sesimbra. The approach to the town was extraordinary, similar to the French Riviera or the Amalfi Coast. But as soon as we entered the place, it was a parking hellscape. I thought I had seen everything in Setúbal with the pile-up of vehicles, but here, it was another level. There were cars parked in the middle of tiny squares with just enough room to pass, there were cars that had reversed on to people’s front gardens, there were cars wedged between rubbish containers, left precariously on empty building sites, even abandoned in the road with the hazard lights on.

I drove around looking for a parking spot, nothing. Then I saw a sign pointing to a 500-space parking garage. I thought, there must be a space in here. I drove in on the lowest deck opposite the beach, up and up a spiral column until I hit a parking zone. The kids thought the dizzy circles were hilarious. One floor was reserved for a hotel, and going up, all the barriers were down – I presumed later I had to get a ticket from the entrance to each deck, but I didn’t realise this until we reached the top and the parking garage vomited us out onto another car-plagued side street. We all laughed so soundly that even a 500-car parking megalith had spat us out.

I drove up the hill away from the beach area and came across a secluded street with cars lined up in a row backing on to a fallow field. And I also noticed another car coming down the hill. I put two and two together and suspected there was a free space just up there. I was right, and there was no ticket machine. Fabulous. Now we needed to try to get everyone down to the town without an argument or a complaint. Never going to happen.

In the end, we got there, and I have to say the town was quite a pleasant place. Dainoris was doing his usual “I’m hungry!” routine, but I wasn’t going to go in the first café I saw just to appease the little monster. I kept walking until I came across the right place. The groans got louder the more places I walked past. Then we found a restaurant overlooking the sea where they were finishing the lunch service, so they wouldn’t mind just serving desserts and drinks. If there’s one thing Portuguese can do incredibly well it’s pâtisserie. Livia had a chocolate mousse so thick and unctuous that it could have been used to repair glass. Bonny Bee and Dainoris had a strawberry cheesecake, and Milda had something similar. I went off-piste and had an orange and cinnamon flan.

We kept checking the sun because it was really bright and hot, especially in mid-late afternoon. They kept badgering us to go to the beach, and I kept telling them it was too hot. This was doubly justified when I peered over the edge to look at the beach – I couldn’t see the sand, just a teeming number of parasols, sunbeds and towels as far as the eye could see. There was no way I was going to go down there. Gonçalo had told me about the fabled beaches out west, and upon consultation with Bonny Bee, who wisely suggested that by the time we got there it would be cooler, I had to sell this idea to the kids.

The protests were almost on the level of French faux-outrage over another government decision to save the economy, but I bargained with them – if we went back to the car, we would go to the beach shop and get some stuff. Suddenly they went from the infantile equivalent of pitchfork-wielding, tyre-burning, ministry-occupying protesters, to effusively loyal political party members whooping for their leader at a pre-election rally. Dainoris got his first surf board. Livia got some sand utensils and a bucket, and Milda got an inflatable ring in the shape of an unrecognisable animal.

For speed, I decided to drop everyone in a square and dart up the hill to get the car. Smart move…? Well it would have been were it not for the labyrinthine street layout. I found myself going around and around the tortuous pattern of thoroughfares trying to land on the one where I dropped everyone. Eventually, I managed, and in a powerful act of integration into Portuguese culture, parked in the middle of the road. They all hopped in and off we went.

It was a good half hour’s drive, but the scenery was lovely, even if the roads had seen better days. Arriving at the wide-open expanse of the Praia do Meco at about half past five in the evening, I took the car down some very remote roads. Yet when we got there, the place was utterly packed as if Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones had teamed up with Liverpool FC and Benfica for a free football match accompanied by live music on the beach. The car parking facilities were crazy – they went on and on for rows upon rows. In the end, as some people had started to pack up to leave, I drove to the parking area nearest the beach. We got a front-row space and piled out of there.

Reaching the beach, there were those wooden parasols with the sharp, straight branches lining the place, and I had to go to the bar to ask for one. Now… in Peñiscola, they cost 5 euro for the day. The guys under the one just next to us had arrived at about 1pm and had to pay 18 euro. I was scandalised on their behalf, but not surprised – this was a money-spinning operation. The parking facility was 1 euro a space, which was a relative bargain, but it wasn’t the beach proper, otherwise I would have set us up in one of those instead. The woman at the bar looked at me, asked her husband what he thought as it was coming up to six, and told me “pięknie izgubi folkloric bardzo ketamine fika benzine, calorie maréchal Volkswagen Kombi,” to which I replied “uma pessõa” and she asked for ten euro in English.

Getting there, we all changed out of our clothes and into our swimming gear. I helped blow up the inflatable genetic mutation and the kids’ water wings, then we headed down to the water. To say the waves were high and somewhat crashy would be like stating that Hurricane Katrina had caused a bit of a commotion. There was no way Dainoris was ever going to get his surf board into that water. But he really tried – again and again and again. For sheer persistence and determination, I was utterly impressed. Milda on the other hand arrived at the edge with her blow-up escaped laboratory experiment, took one look at it and headed back to her mother, who has remained stoically dry every time we have visited a beach. Livia just got in the water and had enormous fun.

After a while, realisation set in, and I went to speak to the rescue service, as they would have more idea of where I should take Dainoris to try his surfboard out. They said about 5 km up the coast was a beach called Fonte da Telha, where the sand was less steep and the waves calmer. We will try that another day for sure.

After another fun-packed afternoon, we headed back to the car with the accompaniment of lamentations and protestations from the rabble. My plan was to stop at some place for a last drink but they were really acting up so I drove straight home. Let’s see if we can find calmer waves…

The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 38-42: Going South

 

The week at Penacova was quite uneventful and made a change to the hectic activities of the previous month. The last couple of days we spent at the river beach, and visiting some historical windmills of the Quixotic kind. Penacova and the region is beautiful but there are a few things about this area that seemed a little odd.

Penacova doesn’t have a very large population – 15,000 people live there – but it is quite spread out, and there didn’t seem to be much of a centre. The main supermarket was up a hill out of town, a bank was located in an ordinary house with a gate and a small garden, the fire service was located in a side street at the top of the town, and there were other commercial establishments spread out everywhere. But no centre. We stumbled upon a great little café on the opposite side of the valley to us, at the very top. The view was tremendous, but there was nearly nobody in it. They even had a kids’ corner and the guy who ran it had some serious music equipment. If this were in any other place, it would have been crammed full of visitors. But this being Penacova, it had two local guys in there getting drunk and talking politics.

I asked our hostess why it seemed that every café we had passed was full of men of a certain age. There was this semi-toxic masculinity floating around bars and cafés in the town. She said it was just the way it was in rural Portugal, which I found to be quite sad really. Another thing I found a little strange was the lack of pavements. Everyone was walking along the side of the roads between the parked cars to get anywhere.

On Friday 9 August, we left Penacova for the relatively warmer city of Setúbal, about half an hour south of Lisbon. On the way, we decided to make a stop in Fatima, the home of That Other Miracle, and if there was time, go to Óbidos, a well-preserved medieval town half way. Passing Fatima, it became obvious that this wasn’t really going to be worthwhile. It seemed to be just a provincial town dining out on some obscure and eminently implausible happening many years ago.

So we headed to Óbidos, and it was not a mistake. Despite the massive car park next to a sixteenth-century aqueduct, and the streets full of tourists, it was a really lovely place to go for a walk and for some food. We encountered French, British, American, Scandinavian, Flemish, Dutch, Japanese, Danish, Brazilian, Italian, Chinese, Spanish and Indian people, so it had quite a reputation.

The children were getting a bit ratty from the constant meandering of the roads, so we started looking out for a place to eat. Dainoris was the worst – he can be really morose with his constant bleating, taking the joy out of the adventure, word by cheerless word. We looked at a few menus around the place and they all seemed appetising. One of the serving staff in a place we chose said “the waiting time for dishes is up to 45 minutes, so with your hungry children, better keep on looking!”

This was the kindest and best advice of the day.

Another hundred metres further on, we stumbled upon a splendid restaurant with a pretty reasonably priced menu, considering it was in a prime part of town. It took a while for anyone to come to our table though, as the guy running this place seemed to have all the time in the world to chat to everyone. But order we did, and the food came about half an hour later, so we didn’t really save much time, but at least we were outside on a terrace, and it all looked really good.

We weren’t disappointed – my mixed grill was superb, with pieces of pork belly, beef steak cuts and crunchy vegetables. The children had a sausage medley, including one new to my repertoire: the farinheira, as the name suggests a floury affair, it was orange in hue and had the texture of mashed potato. It’s one I will keep my eye on. Bonny Bee had a splendid chicken steak in honey and mustard sauce, which I would have taken if we were to return.

The children hardly ate their sausages, preferring the blandness of their chips and a few bites of the rest. I wasn’t going to leave such an array of deliciousness there, so I did my best to eat it all. Two meat dishes. This was the most I had eaten in about two years and when I weighed myself later, I had put on quite a lot in one day.

After an equally splendid dessert and coffee, we headed off to the ramparts of Óbidos which surrounded the entire town and were totally walkable, although when we hit an area without safety barriers, we turned around and went back.

The journey to Setúbal was pleasant and hilly, then the colossal Vasco Da Gama Bridge across the River Tagus, as spectacular as its counterpart over the Great Belt in Denmark from Fyn island to Sjaelland, but about a tenth of the price to cross.

Arriving in Setúbal, having sent our hosts a message that we would be there at about 5 or quarter past, I parked in a scorchingly sunny location on a street that had seen better days. I walked around the building where the person letting us in was apparently going to wait. There was a woman standing there busy on her phone, with her daughter of about 12, but she didn’t acknowledge me and so I presumed she wasn’t the one who would be waiting for somebody who looked like a northern European carrying a mobile phone and a bag, and standing in the shade anticipating somebody to guide him to his apartment.

We ignored each other for a good couple of minutes more, until I decided she might be the one. I said her name (I forget what it was now), and she said yes. After I had rolled my eyes so far around my head that they had taken a look at my brain, she said to follow her. I asked her to wait a couple of minutes while I got the others, and we went upstairs. She was nice, but unlike all the other hosts on our journey so far, she didn’t really have the instinct for guest care. She showed us a few ins and outs in the apartment, and then she left.

So far, there are a few things I need to get off my shoulders, lest I write a scathing review: this place is listed as a loft, although it’s like calling our storage container a mobile home, or our compact Kia Niro a camper van. Anyway, it’s adequate for ten days, but if I had a choice, I would leave a few days earlier and spend the time in a few other places on our way to the next destination.

I went to the supermarket, which is in a side street just across the main road so that we had a few provisions, and after lunch on Saturday 10 August, we took a trip into the centre of town. Setúbal is a nice enough town – quiet, apparently, by Portuguese standards – although the first night was marred by a nearby student house where a party was going on. The place is jammed full of cars, parked in every single conceivable gap, but there were nearly no people around. The centre is completely pedestrianised, which accounts for the pile-up of vehicles and the empty streets: apparently everyone was at the beaches. To get there, you take the buses provided, because they’re all out west of town. I had heard it was easier than driving.

The kids had been hankering for dessert after I had cooked dinner. Portugal does one thing right, and that’s cakes. We sat at a café next to the town’s fountains and had something sweet before the kids asked to play boats with their rubber sandals in the fountain pools. The next thing we know, they’re all inside the waters splashing around like a bunch of chimpanzees in clothes. Mortification was the first feeling, followed by anger, then a slow acceptance that actually this was a logical step considering it was above 30.

When we managed to fish them out, their clothes were soaking all the way through. “I’m cold”, “I’m all wet!” came the cries. I wonder why… anyway, they needed some new clothes, so I wrung out their shirts and dresses, and we headed for the quiet labyrinthine streets of the centre where we found Bonny Bee a new dress and stumbled upon a lovely boutique full of children’s clothes. The sale was on, so we didn’t hold back.

We drove out of the town in the early evening to take a look at the scenery further west. And then it became clear why the non-pedestrian centre of Setúbal was plagued by cars: the winding roads leading to a number of bays, coves and beaches were littered with parked vehicles of all kinds. This stretch of road had 70kph speed limit in parts, but because of the precariously abandoned cars left on the side of the road, and the sheer number of people walking to them, we could barely reach 30kph.

A little further on was an abandoned fortress overlooking the river mouth. What a glorious sight – cargo ships, sand banks like atolls, tourist villages, bridges, beaches, forests, mountains, towns and much more as far as the eye could see. We had had our first little adventure in this area, and there were hopefully more to come.

However, on that Saturday evening, I started to feel unwell to the extent I couldn’t open my eyes and I had a nosebleed and headache. Time would tell if this was something nastier than just fatigue.

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