Waves

When I ask people around here what their favorite thing about the town is the answer is usually “The Waves”. Watching the ocean trying to steal back the land here is more than a pastime. Older men sit on the seawall benches deliberating the world and their place in it. I see them every morning. They look out to the ocean and carry on conversations that I will never understand. The Nazare way of speaking Portuguese is so fast that I fear I will never understand it.

When I asked Beto (one of the guys who works at the Centro-cultural) what his favorite thing about Nazare was he immediately said the waves. At first I thought he said wives and that he was a little dirty and a little intriguing. But, looking at him I knew he meant waves.

Are you a surfer? I asked.

Yes. He replied smiling.

That made more sense. Although, I kinda liked my first understanding better.

Carlos talked about how amazing the waves were when they came all the way up to the seawall. I heard him talk about them, but I didn’t really believe him. Only now can I understand that I doubted him.

Kootenay and I went for a walk on the seawall at midnight. The waves were enormous and they crawled toward the town. They had to be six meters high. Wow, I thought, this is what Carlos was talking about, then, K and turned around and headed back home.

When I first arrived in Nazare the waves kept me up at night. My family and I travelled through Thailand the winter that the big tsunami hit. We were just getting on the plane as the first bits of information were making their way to the news. When we landed in Hong Kong for a stopover, we were held up while they made sure that our destination, Bangkok, was not going to be affected by any aftershocks. Then, we made our way to Thailand and headed up north. We were quite sheltered by our non-existent Thai from the news. It was only when we headed back down south to Koh Samui that the extent of the devastation become apparent. On our return to the south we landed in the Bangkok airport. The average institutional airport that we left had been turned into what looked like a war zone command center. The institutional beige walls were now covered with missing posters and as you left your flight, embassies lined the hallways asking people to register with them so they could better estimate the missing. We were not directly affected by the wave but I was concerned about the morality of trying to enjoy a vacation in a country so wracked by tragedy.

The Thai people begged us to stay. Good for you. Good for Thailand. These words were used over and over by people talking to us. So we stayed. Loved the country, the people and the food, and returned home with a conflicted feeling about our time away.

Until I arrived in Nazare, I did not realize how deeply the trip had affected me.
My first two weeks here I spent listening to the waves at night with an anxiety that took me days to understand. After a week or so I started to love the sound of the waves at night. They lulled me to sleep.

And so I tucked into bed with the sound of the waves in the background thinking that I understood what Carlos had been talking about. That night walking Kootenay the waves seemed huge.

That all changed in the morning. K and I got up to do our morning walk. As we headed to the beach I noticed that there seemed to be more people than normal on the streets, and fewer cars than I was used to. By the time we were down the hill I could see that the night had changed the sea front of the town. There was sand and water covering the first two blocks. And the reason there were so few cars was that the street was covered with sand and receding water. Storefront windows had been broken and water flowed in and out at will.

And I, with my newfound comfort in the sound of waves had slept through it all.

Alentejo Blue Baby

I am back from Alentejo. It was great. After reading guidebooks and Monica Ali’s book Alentejo Blue I was prepared to find a depressed area filled with old people that was as flat as the prairies and as dry as Nevada. But instead I found myself riding a horse along a reservoir created by the Alqueva Dam. It was beautiful. There was olive, orange, lemon and cork trees. And the Gaudiana River, which feeds a patchwork of small local farms, excited Kootenay. I had to keep her on a leash or I would have had one very wet dog. I don’t think Vitor would have wanted her dripping all over his nice leather seats.

When Sofi and Vitor offered me the chance to tag along with them to see the area I took them up on it. We piled the three of us, and two dogs into Vitor’s car and headed out. I was prepared for a road trip Canadian style. You get up in the morning and drive all day, with hours of driving separating cities. Here is it a little different. We left Nazare at about 11 and promptly stopped for some breakfast. Then we drove to Evora. This took maybe two and a half hours.

Evora is a beautiful old town with an ancient core that is a UNESCO heritage site. It also houses a very modern university. We strolled through the center of the city had lunch and took in the Diana Temple, which is really the Roman Temple of Evora. Then we were off to our hotel.

The cork trees we passed along the way are really cool. Their bark is harvested about every ten years. The tree is stripped of its bark leaving it with a rusty red trunk. Eventually the bark grows back leaving it ready to be stripped once again. The yummy black pig hangs out underneath and eats the acorns that fall from the tree. So the tree is responsible for the cork in the wine and the yummy dinner that I had with it. You gotta love a tree that committed to my happiness.

We stayed at Horta Da Moura. It is an old family farm that has been transformed into a hotel as part of a rural tourism program in Portugal. On our first night we went into Monsaraz for dinner. The hotel recommended we try O Alcaide. Great suggestion. That is where I first tasted black pork. The pig is black not the meat. Yummy. And the potatoes that we were served were fantastic. They were cut like potato chips and then fried and salted. With a little local red wine to wash it down with I was a happy girl.

The next day we went back to the town for lunch and tried another restaurant. Vitor ordered the meal of the day that day. He had Alentejo pork. It is small cubes of pork served with clams or mussels and a wine and paprika sauce. This time we tired a local wine that was produced for the restaurant. The Portuguese know how to flavour pork and how to make wine. The total bill for two jugs of wine, three lunches, fresh cheese, olives, and bread came to about thirty euros, pretty damn reasonable to me.

Monsaraz is a tiny town/castle that sits on top of a hill keeping on eye on Spain. It is a pre-historic town that has had many occupiers. Right now there are about 60 residents and the day we were there; twice that many tourists. Cobblestone streets, white washed houses with the Alentejo blue trim, and bull fighting rings were the amongst the sites.

Somehow we also managed to find ourselves heading to Spain looking for cheese to go with the local wine we had picked up. Unfortunately for Spain everything was closed. So we took a quick look at another castle and headed back to Portugal. We stopped just across the border and found a local cheese maker and some crackers and made it back to Horta da Moura in time for dinner.

Quite a weekend eh… and I am haven’t even told you about the lunch on the way home (great in case you were wondering) and the fantastic view from the windmill that I now want to buy and live in.

Check out Vitor's website to see the pictures.

Hot Water Anyone?

From 36 hours to 3.6 minutes.
The hot water tank and stove are run on butane gas. You have to get the tank from a shop down the street. Drag it home. Hook it up. And then light the pilot light for the hot water tank. The stove you light each time you use an element.
A cousin of my friend Isabel showed my how to do this when I first arrived in Nazare. It took me three months to burn through that first tank. In February I had to do the first switch. Unhooking the tank was really easy. Hooking it back up proved to be more problematic. Although I thought I was paying attention to the steps when I first saw them when I tried to repeat them I could not get the gas to flow. I could not figure out how to get the hose attachment secured to the tank. I kept trying over and over again, but I was doing the same steps. So I kept getting the same result. No flame.
After a few hours of this I thought I would get my dictionary out and ask my neighbour for help. My neighbour is a tough old lady. I can hear her yelling at her kids, grandkids, neighbourhood dogs, and neighbours through the walls. She runs a tight ship. I figured she would be able to help me out. I went and knocked on her door with my little Portuguese phrase book. She couldn’t understand a thing that I was saying. She just kept smiling and nodding. I motioned for her to come with me. Then showed her the tank and the hose. AH…. She says. Then she shook her head. No No she says and taps her chest. My Yuri. Then she smiled and walked away. She wasn’t going to be any help.
I decided to leave it unhooked. I figured if I went for a walk, and got a pizza I could look at it with fresh eyes. It took until the next morning for me to realize what I had been doing wrong. All I had to do was turn the lever on the hose the other direction. Thirty-six hours to realize this. I relit the pilot light on the hot water tank and took a shower to celebrate. I had started to smell worse than Kootenay.
Last week I ran out of gas again. This time I managed to unhook the empty tank, hook up the new full one, and relight the hot water heater in under 4 minutes. This old dog learned a new trick

Friends!!

I have two friends…. Okay. So I have a few friends at home, but here I haven’t made real friends until now. Vitor works at the cultural center and is a great photographer. Sofi is his partner. Sofi and I don’t know each other very well, but she offered to teach me some Portuguese. Hopefully she will still hang out with me when she finds out how hopeless I am at languages.

They are coming over for dinner tonight. Last week they had me over and made a really yummy duck and rice casserole. We drank a few bottles of wine and had a lovely time.

How did she meet them, you may be asking yourself. Well. One night I was walking Kootenay and Vitor was walking Spock, who may be cuter than Kootenay. We stopped to chat and it turns out that we had run into each other at the Cultural Center. It took the dogs to get us to chat long enough to make friends.

So tonight I am going to try and make garlic ginger chicken with rice. Hopefully I can pull it off with my two elements and electric frying pan. I have few bottles of wine and some bread and cheese if the dinner doesn’t turn out.

Life

You are more emotional now that the Moon is in Aquarius, but you also may feel a bit isolated. You may think you need to show up and do your job, without making a big deal about your unfulfilled needs. You may not be able to solve your current problem on your own, so find an appropriate way to bring your questions out into the open.

This is what Rick Levine has to say about my little aquarian life. It is a bit creepy how much I identify with it right now.

This morning I sat on the beach with Kootenay and contemplated the big questions. You know… Who am I? Where am I going? Where is home? Where do I belong? What do I want my life to be?

When I started the day I had every intention of writing, but instead I watched the sea boil around Pedra do Guilhim. The photo doesn’t do justice to how big the outcropping is. It was amazing to see. Sitting there I realized that I seldom do something without thinking about what is next.

As Rick says that I may not be able to solve my current problems on my own, I am sending these thoughts out into the ether.

Carnaval or for you in Canada Carnival

Each month Nazare comes up with some reason to celebrate. The biggest celebration was during Carnaval. If you link to the description you will probably come away from reading it almost as confused as was experiencing it.

Apparently, if you want to build a float or be part of the parade you dream up your costume and then send your list of supplies to the local municipality. They have a warehouse space where you can work and store your creation and they will supply you with any materials that you need. There were floats on the back of flatbed trucks, cars with streamers, dogs in costumes, kids dressed as super heroes and bums, and wave after wave of women dressed in matching outfits each group dancing to its own song.

If you ask the people here what makes their Carnaval special they all answer the same thing. It is a local celebration… Not a copy of Brazil’s. Then they will shake their head and name a few Portuguese towns that are too “Brazil”. People who grew up here, people born elsewhere but whose parents were born here, and people who now live here all call themselves local. I don’t know enough Portuguese to understand the politics of these groups and know who truly is local, but during Carnaval they all claim local status.

The soundtrack to Carnaval is local. Even without an understanding of Portuguese you can make out the word Nazare in all the songs. By the end of the celebration I wanted to hunt down every copy of all the songs and erase them from the public domain. Now I kinda miss it.

People dress up and dance in the streets. There is a type of public joy you don’t see in Canada. You see people wearing elaborate costumes and right next to them people wearing long johns with a clown wig. And, each person is genuinely excited about the others costume. There is also a tremendous amount of drinking going on. And there is dance. Dance exists everywhere during this time. My favourite moments were when you would see grown men dancing with young girls. The costumed girls and their dad’s/uncle’s/family friend’s spontaneously dance in the streets.

At the start of carnival I woke up to the sound of drums. There appear to be large groups of drummers who parade down the main street drumming. They all wear uniforms and drum. To an outsider there seems to be very little organization behind who drums and marches and when. I am sure there are rules, but they elude me.

Here are the official Canaval photos. Take a look for yourself.