A Visit Starts

I have been loafing around lately. Sorry to all my dedicated readers. But the tale I am about to tell you will give you some idea what I have been up to and why a bit of down time was needed.

Diane (a friend for many years) and Roberto (her devoted manservant) came to visit. They were only here for three weeks, but they packed in the sightseeing. While they were here we went to Porto, Coimbra, Tavira, Obidos, and various other towns that placed themselves between our daily destinations and us.

Di and Ro saw even more of Portugal. They added Evora and few small towns in the Algarve to their schedule. And this was all done before we hit Spain.

In Spain we managed to see Ronda, Gaucin, Sevilla, Malaga, and Jerez. The Spanish weather was challenging. While we were visiting Ronda, the wind blew so hard the rain accompanying it seemed to be coming at you horizontally. The umbrella merchants were pleased because that day umbrellas lasted between five and ten minutes. Then the wind would turn them inside out. There were a lot of garbage tins filled with discarded umbrellas around town.

But, back to Portugal... Di and Ro turned up a few days early and few dollars short. Kootenay and I were doing one of our many nightly walks on the beach, when a head popped out of a car and called her. I turned and there they were, arriving early, and me with a dirty bathroom. Damn. Their first few days on vacation had been challenging. First their luggage was lost, and in the course of getting it back they learned that in Spain not only is the customer not always right, but also the customer can actually be an inconvenience. I shudder at what UBC’s “secret shoppers” would say about interactions with Spanish customer service workers. But,they got their bags back eventually, and headed to Lisboa. They hadn't reserved a place to stay so they came straight to Nazare to regroup. Unfortunately I didn’t realize they were doing this or I would have given them my Portuguese highway tip. Always Always Always get a ticket at the toll center when you enter a highway. Or, you will end up donating to the “Portuguese Road Improvement Fund”. So after lost luggage, toll fines, and some generally crappy weather they unpacked in Nazare and we headed out to have dinner and celebrate Roberto’s birthday.

One of my earliest memories of hanging out with Diane, outside of the UBC Bookstore where we worked, was of going to a Crowded House concert. On Roberto’s birthday we headed down to NBar where Carlos kept our glasses sociably full and there was a band. Almost twenty years after we met Diane and I sat and enjoyed a drink listening to Crowded House songs. These ones were sung with a bit of a Portuguese accent, but that only made the experience better.

And this was just our first day together. Wait until i tell you about trying to follow them through Seville's rush hour traffic in a rented Fiat.

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.

Obrigadinia!

I had visitors this week. Three friends from Robson came to town and they dragged with them a friend of theirs from Lisbon. Hopefully he will be a new friend for me as well, when he gets over how disgracefully drunk I got in his presence. These girls are quite a combo. Keenan has a way of making a paper bag fun. Elsa has a grace about her that I quite envy. Laura is starting on her first solo travel experience and I hope it is as fun as she is. Jayme is a friend of Keenan’s and I am really glad to have met him. The four of them shook me out of my routine. We travelled to Fatima, Alcobaca, and Batalha. While we were spared the burden of a vision of Mary, we did see some great sites. There was a true devotee in Fatima who crawled on her knees to the shrine for worship. If only my beliefs were as devote and clear.

We then hit up a local bar and managed to embody the best and worst images of travelling girls. I need to apologize to MVS for the drunk dialing we did. I know how little he cares of it, but we did it anyway. We missed our other Robson folks and wanted to say hi. Elsa managed to captivate a lovely Portuguese flyboy named Carlos and later two cute Italians. Although I understand now that all the email address have gone missing. I guess fate will be in control of the future. Keenan managed to captivate the rest of bar. The owner even started buying us a few free rounds. This was the beginning of my downfall I think. And Laura did not smoke while she was there. I crushed a little on our bar manager Carlos. Who is a lovely guy and I am sure he and his girlfriend will be very happy together. Oh well. Hopefully he will turn into another English speaking friend for me. We helped him close down the bar and then everyone headed back to my place. Why I don’t know. After we got there I remembered that we had drank all the alcohol there before we left. But, that is probably a good thing. I don’t know that I would have had the sense to stop if there had been more. As it was, I spent the next day almost entirely on the sofa. I only got up to walk the dog, shower, drink some water and take Tylenol.

In Portugal waiters will often bring things to your table that you have not ordered. If you eat them you pay for them. This custom drives me a little nuts, because it is not always universally applied. The first night the gang arrived we headed out to dinner. The waiter brought us buns, olives, and cheese before we had even ordered. Luckily they are all so yummy that if you know you are paying for them, you are happy to see them. When poor Carlos (bar manager) brought us a bowl of faba beans to snack on that night we immediately asked… how much. The concern about charges makes it difficult to be gracious. They were free, not particularly tasty, and we ate bowl after bowl.

So, thanks to Keenan, Elsa, Laura, Jayme, and Carlos for such an enjoyable few days.

Now back to work. A novel won’t write itself.

Post Feminist World?

I miss my MVS, and Matt, and George… They could always be counted on to challenge me and help me hone my opinions. Matt, MVS and I worked together and spent many slow afternoons debating the state of the world. Seems crazy to miss those days when I am sitting with my dog in the sun’s warmth on a beach in a foreign country, but I do. There is no one here with enough English skills to talk to about my most recent rant.

I watched Blood Diamond and thought it was a good film. Then, because I hear so little English, and because it was a DVD and had a directors commentary on it, I watched the show again. The director impressed me at first. He talked about how filming and being in Africa deeply affected him, the crew and the stars.

Then as he was describing a scene that introduced the love interest for the main character he talked about her being a reporter in a post feminist world. He talked about female war reporters who dressed in dresses despite their surroundings and who had relationships with “inappropriate” men and used these as examples of this post feminist world. He seemed to find it odd that despite the circumstances the reporter didn’t want to lose her femininity. It was as if in his mind one must chose between feminism and femininity.

That is when I started to look at the movie a bit differently. At first it was just a buddy movie that turned conventions a little. I was happy that a movie would try to challenge the narrow view of life that Hollywood often brings us.

One point in this movie even moved outside the regular Hollywood path. The female character stepped outside the role of victim and managed to thwart a militia attack. But even this moment was cheapened when a soldier was required to say a line about her reminding him of his wife. In the director’s commentary you find out that she was originally supposed to cling to Leo the antihero, but came up with this idea instead.

The other thing that amazed me about this movie was the implied guilt meted out for women who have, or want a diamond ring. Again the lone female character is forced to defend all women while separating herself from them by declaring that “Not all women want a diamond ring” and “women wouldn’t want a diamond if the new it cost someone their arm”. It turns out that when men treat each other inhumanely, enslave each other to amass vast wealth, and rape and plunder nations it is because of outside pressures….

Okay, it was not that simple an analogy, but it feels that way today.

Where are you guys when I need to talk to you????