So much of my Portuguese language speaking skill disappeared that people kept talking to me in English in Lisbon. Some people were happy that I was trying. They encouraged me to speak after I alerted them to the fact that “O meu português não é perfeito, mas compreendo mais do que posso falar.”
No beard and too many years older, my hair is still there but it is now “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and yet there were people who addressed me in Portuguese, and even some tourists who asked me for directions to a praça that, fortunately, I knew how to get to. I felt proudly useful sometimes.
As I was on my way back to the apartment one afternoon, walking past the Jardim do Príncipe Real, a woman dressed well for the cooler weather stopped to ask me, in Portuguese, if I could enlighten her about the parking sign that was there on the street. Her husband and two kids were with her. I replied that it could be restricted, though it was a Sunday. She spoke to her husband in English and then English to me when she clicked that I wasn’t a native speaker.
My positive contribution was explaining to her how ePark works with the Emel App for paying for parking on the streets of Lisbon. She told her husband to download it, thanked me for the info and more or less sent this old man on his way.
Once you get the hang of it, using the app is really easy. Luckily, we parked the car in a lot near the Tejo about a kilometer further in the direction of Cascais from Cais do Sodré and left it in the same place for the whole two weeks. Parking cost €3 for the whole day, from 09:00 to 19:00, nights and weekends and holidays are free. The trick was that every evening at 19:00 or within 10 minutes thereafter, you need to get on the app, find the place where your car is parked and then click on the ALL DAY, to pay for the next day and guarantee you are covered.
This entails of course having credit enough to cover the daily cost of €3. I loaded the app with €20 a couple of times and, eventually, I should get a bank transfer of whatever credit remained after our stay. The application process for the return of the money was a bit complicated, but it should work. I haven’t checked yet to see if money has been deposited.
Not shy me, I met a few very interesting people while sitting having coffee or in the tram. I already mentioned the English lady I bonded with over Henry Fielding. I thought about her when I traipsed around the English Cemetery. I never did make it to the Cemitério dos Prazeres, where all sorts of important other people are enjoying their final R&R. I can’t remember being there in the 80s, but maybe I was, having drifted around the city quite a lot in those days.
I caught a cold in the humid and cold apartment after Christmas and suffered a bit, but then at the Taverna belonging to the Casa do Alentejo in the Baixa, I discovered the cure:
Let me translate that for you: Garlic bread soup. A typical soup made with bread, garlic, coriander, olive oil, and poached egg. With emphasis on the garlic, garlic, garlic. One day I ate two bowls of the soup. The next day and the day after that, I went back for lunch and had the soup again. My cold could not resist the onslaught of garlic and coriander. The poached egg restored my energy.
On another day, before I went to meet Peter for lunch at the Taverna, I had done some shopping for the folks at home, you know, a bottle of this, some cans of that.
The bottle is of a tasty aperitif and digestive liquor known as Ginja.
There is a tiny hole-in-wall place called Ginja sem Rival
not very far from Casa do Alentejo where a drink before lunch or dinner is available, as well as a drink after lunch or dinner. It’s not schnapps, only 23.5%, but made of cherries that give it a fantastically sweet, not sugary sweet, cherry sweet, taste. The Portuguese man who serves the drink directly from a bottle, always includes two cherries from the bottle in your shot glass.
Of course I also bought cans of sardines for the various family members who like to eat fish. You can get canned sardines anywhere in the world nowadays, but there’s something about a can from Portugal which makes the sardines special—and it’s not just the language on the outside of the little can.
But I was going to tell you about the Pastelaria I went to after my shopping.
It was a warm and sunny day. I entered the Pastelaria, chose a fresh nata, ordered a Galão—which consists of one part espresso and two to three parts hot milk and is served in a tall glass—paid, got a tray to carry my spoils on, went outside and sat at a little green metal-topped table next to a middle-aged lady sitting at a little green metal-topped table. We smiled at each other and I sat down, lost in my own thoughts and observed the surroundings.
The sun was shining on my face. The nata was excellent. The Galão was satisfying. A steady stream of people went by for me to watch and study, summing up personalities and life stories in mere seconds. The cafe tables enable one to look out over one of the main roads of the city, a split road which, on the right hand side of the split leads up to the Marques de Pombal statue which stands atop a huge pillar in the center of a massive roundabout. The left hand side of the road leads down to the city center.
The husband of the lady at the next table came out of the Pastelaria with a tray overloaded with coffee and cake and sat down on the chair next to mine and we nodded to each other courteously. I went back to observing people. Then I heard them speak British English to each other. It was impossible not to eavesdrop, so when he mentioned that they had to take the metro to go somewhere, I couldn’t resist. I excused myself, said I had heard them talking about the metro and asked them if they knew that the metro had been built by the British.
They didn’t know. I explained that because it was built by the British, the metro ran on the left, contrary to the street traffic which was based on driving on the right. They found that fascinating. Then, because I’m one of those people that can find bits of trivial knowledge to drop on British strangers, I told them that above the statue of the Marques de Pombal (the man who supervised the rebuilding of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755), there was Edward VII park, a tribute to the British king who visited Portugal in 1903 to strengthen relations between the two countries and reaffirm the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance.
Since the signing of the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, the Kingdom of Portugal and the Kingdom of England, and later the modern Portuguese Republic and United Kingdom, have never waged war against each other, nor have they participated in wars on opposite sides as independent states. Friends indeed.
The English couple and I engaged in small talk over why we were in Lisbon. I mentioned my month On The Road and they said they had fled to have some time for themselves after a loud and chaotic Christmas with too much family. So they were doing 4 days Lisbon and 4 days Porto. Porto is a marvelous place and of course all the Port wine producers are there at the edge of the river. I warned them not to walk too close to the river after their 3rd round of tasting.
The most interesting person I met on the road was on the road back. Anna. In Troyes. The way we met might make some friends of Rock music smile.
In Troyes (pronounced “trois”, like the number 3 in French), Peter and I decided to go to a rather large restaurant which is also a brewery. After I looked around a bit in the world of bits and bytes I discovered that it is a chain that has many locations throughout France. 3 Brasseurs. I had eaten there in May of what is now the previous year when I visited the city by myself. It’s OK. The plates are abundantly filled and all is cooked to a high enough standard. It’s not luxury food, but it is satisfying. Check out the menu in the link.
Anyway, Peter and I didn’t realize that Friday night dinner at the restaurant required a reservation. We were not let into the spacious inner sanctum of the restaurant and had to sit in a nook to the right of the entrance (if you are entering the place). Peter had his back to the door, which was constantly being opened and closed by people coming in for dinner and others going outside for a smoke. It was uncomfortable for him because the cold air kept hitting him in the back.
What was really surprising for us was the loud rock music that was coming out of the speakers near the high ceiling to the left of us. Some of it was strong guitar heavy modern indie music. We wondered that a restaurant like this would play that kind of music—we had absolutely nothing against it! It grooved along and was rocking!
Then, wonder of wonders, music from our era started to come through, most notably, a long chain of Rolling Stones songs: Sympathy for the Devil, Satisfaction, Angie, Paint It Black, Connection, and then, totally unexpectedly, She’s a Rainbow from Their Satanic Majesties Request. Wow!
There was lots more of that type of music and Peter and I were grooving to the sound, nodding heads on the beats like old rockers do. I was laughing at our head-bobbing and then I looked to my left and there was the woman sitting next to me doing the head bob as well. I couldn’t resist: “Yeah! Rock & Roll!” She looked at me and smiled and gave me a thumbs up: “Rock & Roll!”
Conversation began.
“Yes,” she said, “I sing in a rock band!” I said: “Peter was a singer in a rock band.” That was it. The flood gates broke open. She had recently returned to France with her boyfriend after 16 years teaching in Madagascar. Her boyfriend was also a teacher. Peter was a teacher too. And I taught English to people. But what bonded us was rock music.
In my youth, I had lived in Tananarive, Madagascar for 6 months—a stop between postings in Los Angeles and Nairobi during my mother’s Foreign Service career for the Italian government. It’s where I first met someone who could actually play electric guitar. He played like Hank Marvin of The Shadows. It awoke something in me that has never gone back to sleep.
Anna and I are now connected by WhatsApp. I saw the videos from her band’s performances. She’s good and she really rocks! Tunes from her vids: Smells Like Teen Spirit, I Feel Good, I Want to Break Free, Killing In the Name from Rage Against the Machine, Toto, Hold The Line… I sent her a link to one of my more melodic blues tunes: It’s Time 4 Love 2 Win. She liked it. I hope to hear them perform it one day.
The next day we made it to Germany, through fog, some snow flurries and roads salted to prevent them from icing up. Treviri, Trier, Trèves, is a town founded by the Romans. The Romans laid the foundation stone for the Porta Nigra in AD 170 and now the ‘Black Gate’ is the best preserved Roman city gate north of the Alps—the number one attraction when it comes to Roman structures in modern-day Germany.
More importantly, Karl Marx was born in Trier.
On our last morning in Trier, at breakfast in the hotel, we met a guy with lots of silver rings in his ears and a large silver ring through his nose. He had spent a couple of days at the Grind Here Festival, where Grindcore, Thrash-Metal and Hardcore/Punk bands were on stage. I asked him if he played in a band. He doesn’t, but he plays banjo and likes country music.
Politics wedges itself back into my life
On the evening of the 11th, before dinner at a crappy supposed-to-be-Italian restaurant, there was a demonstration on the main pedestrian street near the hotel. Turns out the flag that people were waving was the Lion and Sun flag, the first official flag of Iran, from 1907. Obviously the demo was a reaction to what is currently going on in Iran. BTW, there was also an Israeli flag being flown in the demo. I leaned out my window and filmed the protesters as they went by.
Today, in the news, I found out more about Iran and the protests and the American reaction. Irony is completely lost on the MAGAistas: “[The Orange Monster] said it ‘looks like’ Iran may have crossed the administration’s red line of killing protesters… ” two days after ICE murdered a woman protester in Minnesota.
…dein Wort in Gottes Ohr.
Well, I’m home again and being bombarded with political shit, just like before.
It was nice to be away from all the rotten news for a month.
