What I Will Not See Tomorrow (34)

I have a theory that it takes me only three days to get used to a new place and forget that I have ever lived somewhere else. At first, my sense of time changes because my routine changes and the different time zone makes me disoriented from a lack of sleep. Then the way I move my body changes because objects are not in their usual places. I forget the taste of the food that I used to eat, what was important about the work I used to do, what I thought about, what used to make me angry or disappointed or sad. The sensation of newness becomes even more intense if the people who live in the new place speak a language other than English, as the lens through which I perceive reality changes with the new language.

I don’t know when I came up with this theory. I only know that I’ve been feeling this way since I first left my childhood home and moved to the city. Maybe because of the way I grew up, I have this fluid sense of belonging to a place. Put me in a tent next to a mountain stream, and three days later I will forget that I have ever lived in a house near the ocean and slept in a bed. Science might be able to explain this. The new visuals, smells, flavors and sounds carve new, semi-permanent neural pathways in my brain and they make me forget my previous life. I become a different person. Even my personality changes a bit. I am friendlier and more alert to my surroundings. I even eat less than I am used to. 

Maybe that’s why when I wake up in Portugal on the fourth day, I feel as if I have always lived here. I know where I am (more or less), and I know what to expect. Not the small details but rather the broad strokes of what my day is going to look like: walking the streets, looking at stuff, and eating. I still have to learn how to get around without checking Google maps or asking for directions, find out where to buy the things I need, or how much things cost, but the general feeling is that Portugal is no longer a stranger. 

I assume this is why, when I hear a knock on the door and Rita’s voice informs me that they are heading out to breakfast at the little café across the street, I reply that I am going to pass.

“We can wait for you,” she says as she opens the door.

“I don’t feel like getting up yet,” I say. 

I feel brave for saying no to something completely uncontroversial. We all know that as a tourist I’m supposed to devour every experience that presents itself to me, yet I dare to skip it. Even though I would love to have a cup of galão, now that I know how to order it, and maybe a pastry on the side, as long as it is not made of mostly egg yolks and sugar. That little café across the street got my attention the moment we arrived, but I can’t see how I am going to enjoy sitting there with Anna and Rita, who pretend that everything is great even though both are coping with a different drama that’s driving them to despair. Not Vera, though. She doesn’t let bad stuff affect her. She’s seen it all and survived the worst. 

“Okay,” Rita says cheerfully. “Just be ready when we come back.”

I wait for the sound of footsteps to fade before I venture into cyberspace to find out what there is to see in Porto. For curiosity’s sake only, not that I plan to suggest anything to the troupe. I am not interested in getting in trouble or instigating a debate about our next move. I just want to learn what this town is known for. 

I type “Things to see in Porto” and a list of websites pops up. Some websites suggest 10 things I must see, some 15, some 25. Some use stock photos, some feel like advertisements for tourists. I start with the shorter lists and move to the longer ones. Most lists provide the usual suggestions of sightseeing here and there, and visiting churches with magnificent artwork, but two places catch my eye. The first one is titled the Most Beautiful Bookstore in the World and the second is the Most Beautiful MacDonald’s in the world. 

I can’t help but let cynicism creep in. Why does a city with a long history and unique architecture—both of which are completely unknown to me since I arrived after dark and read nothing prior to my arrival—need to seduce tourists to visit these two places? In America, tourist traps usually claim to be the tallest, the biggest, the longest, the first, the only place of its kind, and so forth, which are measurable and can or cannot be contested. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and consequently subjective. So why make this claim?  

I think the answer is clear, but I still want to raise the question. So here are the answers I find, apart from the photos that attempt to lure me in.

Livraria Lello, the bookstore, occupies a neo-Gothic building (I need to google neo-Gothic) and features a stained-glass skylight, magnificent wood carvings, a breathtaking spiral wooden staircase, and bookshelves stretching from floor to ceiling behind rails and ladders and busts of famous authors. In addition, the store owns Portugal’s first cash register, which was brought here from Ohio, as well as some rare books on display. However, these attractions are not the main reason that tourists flock to the bookstore by the thousands. And I mean thousands every single day, because more than a million people visited this place last year and brought in over 8 million dollars in revenues for the store, partly because they had to pay a 5-euro entrance fee (after waiting in line for who knows how long) and partly because they bought books there. I assume not in Portuguese.

The real reason people flock to this most beautiful bookstore in the world, which I do believe is beautiful after seeing the pictures, but whether it is the most beautiful in the world I cannot vouch, is because the author of Harry Potter used to buy books there when she lived in Porto. According to popular lore, she was inspired by the bookstore’s beauty. Apparently, people who have read her books and seen the movies noticed that the architecture of Livraria Lello resembles the looks of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the Flourish and Blotts bookshop, where some characters purchased their books on magic. These people, though, do not include me, obviously, because I have not watched the movies or read the books. 

Sadly, my ignorance has no bounds when it comes to Harry Potter. As far as my memory goes, I believe that I tried to read the first book when it made its first splash, but the author’s fat shaming of the kid who tormented Harry pissed me off and made me put the book down and never come back to it. That was long before fat shaming became unacceptable, which makes me feel like a trail blazer now. But really, at the time I felt that making that nasty boy fat on top of all his other evil traits was unnecessary and I refused to take part in it.

So, do I want to go to Livraria Lello today? Not sure. However, I am sure that Harry Potter or J. K. Rowling mean little to Vera and standing in line is not something that Rita will do if she can avoid it. We have so few hours of daylight that standing in line to see the insides of a pretty bookstore might feel like a waste of time. Or not. I don’t know. Plus, I don’t know if the Israeli tour guide that Rita follows mentions this place on his blog, so I should take a “wait and see” approach and go with the flow.

The second most beautiful thing to see in Porto is the McDonald’s Imperial—not a church, not a bridge, not a tower, but a fast-food joint. Now, I don’t want to be self-righteous or preachy, but I have never been a fan of McDonald’s. Not in America, not in Israel, and probably not in Portugal either. I still don’t know what to order when I happen to find myself in a McDonald’s despite decades of living in the United States. I was once told that to prove my Americanness, I would have to go into a McDonald’s and order without reading the menu. It happened because I took more than a minute to decide what to order. I am probably one of the only people on this planet who has to read the menu that hangs above the counter before ordering. And then orders the wrong thing.

Anyway, the reason this fast-food establishment, which I am reluctant to call a restaurant, is considered the most beautiful in the world is because of its art deco architecture, the crystal chandeliers, and the stained-glass windows that were installed there long before the building became part of the global franchise. I guess tourists are expected to come for the sights and stay for the “food,” if you can call the concoctions that they sell there “food.” Interestingly, according to one American blogger I found, the food is not something to write home about, despite being modified to suit Portuguese tastes. He did mention that they sell the famous pastel de nata there, but I don’t need to go to a McDonald’s to eat one of those.

So, I have a feeling we will not visit this place either. Unless we pass by it when Vera feels it is time to stop for lunch and the line looks reasonably short. Otherwise, we will probably skip this experience as well. Just like all the other landmarks we missed on the way here. Not that I have any problem with that.

First World Problems (33)

“You awake?” Rita asks poking her head through the door. 

I put down the iPad and invite her in. I have no choice in the matter. 

She joins me on the bed. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing interesting.” 

I am not going to say anything about the surfers who rode the highest waves of the year today, while she was buying cork shoes on the other side of the mountain. She will probably say she read about it on the blog of the Israeli tour guide she uses to plan our trip and make me feel even stupider. Or she might shrug it off and say, who cares? 

“What’s going on?” I ask. I can see that she wants to talk.

“Fred is driving me crazy.”

Tell me something I don't know.

That’s one of Rita’s favorite topics of conversation. Complaining about Fred’s laziness, his personal hygiene habits, his addiction to Fox News. I am inevitably going to get sucked into the familiar territory of endless resentment. Unless she needs to bad-mouth her ex-husband and his new wife who is always dressed to perfection and is highly educated, which drives Rita mad with envy. Though she wouldn’t admit it, because her life is much better than the life of the new wife. I am not sure why, even though Rita explained that to me once or twice. Or more.

“What happened?” I resign myself.

 

“He’s going to quit his job.”

Fred has been talking about quitting his job for several months. He hates his boss, his boss does not respect him, he does almost nothing all day. People ignore him in the office. He’s sick of driving all the way to wherever his office is located. Yes, he’s making good money, but he can do better staying home and playing the stock market. 

“That’s old news,” I say after considering several other responses.

“Yeah, but now he’s really going to do it and I can’t have him sitting at home all day and bothering me.”

“He’ll get tired of being stuck at home after a while and look for another job,” I try to encourage her.

Well, that’s the price you pay for attaching yourself to him, I think to myself. He’s part of the deal. You can’t expect him to give you everything you want and stay out of your way. We all pay a price for the choices we make. And you’ve been doing a pretty good job with it until now. Compared to my other women friends who attached themselves to men with piles of disposable cash you’re the one who has lasted the longest.

“I told him he should get a job as a stockbroker but he’s a coward, he won’t do it. He’s all talk and no action,” she whines.

“You can always go out and do something if he gets on your nerves,” I suggest, not for the first time.

“But then he wants to go with me everywhere I go,” she fumes. “And all he wants to do is sit in a bar and talk politics with people he doesn’t know. Like anyone cares. It’s so boring. He thinks he is going to join me when I guide tours. I can’t let him do that.”

I know she can’t. Fred is too big to travel with her in the small RV he bought for her a couple of years ago after she decided that she needed one for reasons that still elude me. The two times she used that miserable RV to go to Palm Springs or Lake Tahoe, Fred drove his own car and stayed at a hotel while she spent the night in the campground mingling with strangers. I’ve heard about it. And letting him travel with a bunch of Israelis who don’t speak much English to Yosemite would surely be a stretch even for her. I mean, how is she going to explain his presence to them? 

“It’s going to be fine, don’t worry,” I try to cheer her up even though I don’t believe my own words. What else can I say? I’ve had this conversation with her many times during our walks. As the ad hoc encourager-in-chief I can practically recite my responses in my sleep. She’s just letting off steam and I am the most available sounding board. She knows that she can’t complain about the situation to her mother. Her parents are more than happy that she is someone else’s responsibility. Especially her father, per her own testimony. He was so happy when she finally got married that even the fact that her ex-husband was younger than her and a devout Muslim from a hostile Arab nation did not put a dent in his support for that doomed union.

“He said he was not going back to work after he returns from Israel,” she says, exasperated.

“He already told his boss?” I just want to make sure that this is the last time we talk about this topic.

“He told him he was going away for two weeks and then he is going to quit.”

Her story sounds plausible. Before we left for Portugal, she said that Fred was coming to Israel for Thanksgiving to spend a couple of weeks with her. He decided to do it after he found a hotel in Jerusalem that caters to Americans and offers a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. 

“He invited my parents to the dinner. But my mother, you know, is not too excited to go all the way to Jerusalem to eat turkey. She doesn’t eat that stuff.”

That does not surprise me at all. From what I’ve seen so far, I can tell that it would be hard to impress Vera with over-the-top gluttony. She’s a down-to-earth kind of woman. She will find a way to belittle the extravagant dinner, I have no doubt. Maybe not to Fred’s face, though.

“I told him my parents would not drive to Jerusalem just for dinner, so he booked a room for them at the hotel,” she says as she rises from the bed.

I don’t want to read into why she is telling me all this, even though a little voice inside me insists that she is bragging about Fred’s ability to spend money on life’s extracurricular activities. I let it go. Then I say, “I’m sure you’ll have fun.” 

On this note, she gives me a crooked smile and leaves my room.

What Happened in Nazaré? (32)

According to Maria, there is a parking lot behind us up the street where we can leave the car for the next couple of days without paying a parking fee. She is going to wait for us by the gate and introduce us to the guard, so he doesn’t charge us on our way out. Rita gets into the car and drives to the parking lot as if she was born on this street. I don’t even get nervous when she makes a U-turn without bothering to find out if it’s legal or not. I have complete trust in her ever since she told me about driving through Tijuana with a malfunctioning GPS and cheating death more times than she cared to count. She stops in front of the barrier where Maria is waiting for us. An elderly man sits inside a small booth, smoking a cigarette and watching something on a small television set. When he sees our sporty looking Toyota approach, he raises the barrier arm to let us through. He steps out of the booth to greet us and offers to show us our parking spot. He probably does this with all the guests who come to this little parking lot, but it still makes me feel special. We are not just annoying tourists who drive fancy cars and behave as if we own the world. We are real people for him and are treated as such. At least in my imagination.

Maria shows us our parking spot, and after reminding us where to leave the apartment key and what time to check out of the parking lot, she bids us goodbye. She still has lots to do before the day is over and it’s getting late. No time to converse in Brazilian Portuguese about her life in Portugal or where to find normal food made from something other than egg yolks and sugar. 

Rita is surprisingly low key. Her loud chatter and over-the-top friendliness have disappeared and a persona I rarely see emerges from under the tight leggings, oversized top, and jewelry mélange. She doesn’t have to tell me that she’s exhausted. The way she picks up the bags left in the trunk tells me that she needs to hit the sack soon. She can be like a kid, going from a hundred to zero in a space of a few minutes. I’ve seen that happen when she used to come over to my apartment in Monterey between Uber trips and stretch out on the couch. One minute she would be giggling in front of her phone, scrolling down the nonsense she likes to watch on Facebook, and the next she’d be snoring. 

“Do you think your mom would want to check out this coffee shop tonight?” I ask Rita on the way back to the apartment. I am sure Anna will skip a dinner outing for budgetary reasons, but with Vera you never know. She loves to explore stuff and she might shame us into going out because “It’s not every day that we are in Portugal.”

“We can go there for breakfast tomorrow,” Rita says as she drags herself up the stairs. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Good. We can relax and recharge, and tomorrow we, or more accurately Rita, will decide how to proceed. I still don’t know when Anna is planning to depart, but I assume it will be either tomorrow or the day after. In the meantime, I will do what I can to keep the peace and not trigger her with my perceived insensitive approach to humanity and Planet Earth.

When we enter, we find Vera sitting at the dining table with the eternal cup of instant coffee in front of her, leafing through a tourist brochure. Anna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she went downstairs to commune with her muse and wrap the seashells she collected on the beach in Nazaré with colored strings or whatever. Rita shoves the plastic bags she brought from the car into the fridge without bothering to remove anything from them. I offer to make tea. She doesn’t want any. She plops on the couch, kicks off her boots, turns on the TV, and looks for something to watch. If I know her as well as I think I do, she will be fast asleep in a few minutes. She has the attention span of a squirrel and any video longer than 75 seconds does not really interest her. Unless it is an incredibly silly Israeli comedy show, which I am sure they don’t air in Portugal. Since there are no men or children among us, I also know that no one will compete for the remote or demand to watch anything other than what she chooses to put her to sleep. 

I retire to my Ikea furnished and decorated bedroom. Now it’s my turn to take off my boots and stretch on the perfectly made bed with its multi-colored pillows and matching comforter. I have my iPad charging on the nightstand and I intend to use it to learn about the places we visited and maybe even read about what’s going on in the real world since I left it to explore Portugal. 

I Google “Nazaré Portugal Surfing” mainly because I remember the conversation that we had earlier in the car about the Brazilian surfer who almost died there today. A year-old article from the New York Times pops up. It’s entitled, “This Town Once Feared the 10-Story Waves. Then the Extreme Surfers Showed Up.” I settle in for the read and discover that Nazaré is the Mecca of big-wave surfers. No wonder the huge waves I saw breaking so close to shore during my beach walk made such am impression on me. 

Apparently, Nazaré used to be a picturesque seaside town inhabited by fishermen and their families. In 2010, an American surfing champion named Garrett McNamara decided to come and check out the waves, following a personal invitation from a local sports teacher who understood that the mean waves could attract foreigners—and business—to the area. McNamara spent a winter there studying the waves and the deep canyon that causes these enormous waves to break so close to shore. In 2011 he surfed a 78-foot wave, becoming a world record holder and putting Nazaré on the map. The local sports teacher, Casimiro, proved to be quite a visionary, because in 2018, more than 220,000 people came to Nazaré to see extreme surfers ride the tall waves. Sadly, or not, I cannot claim that I came to Nazaré to watch the surfers.

For someone who has seen surfers ride huge waves in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, I feel a bit stupid discovering that Nazaré is one of the world’s most famous surfing hubs after visiting there and not before. It’s like going to Jerusalem and seeing an impressive ancient wall inside the Old City and not knowing that it’s the most sacred site for the Jewish people. To add insult to injury, because I didn’t realize it was such an important surfing spot, I didn’t think about going to watch the surfers from the fortress overlooking the giant waves. I walked on the beach looking at that fortress in the distance, admiring the waves, completely oblivious to the incredible drama that was unfolding on the other side of the mountain at the Praia do Norte (North Beach).

And to top it off, according to another report, today was a very special day in Nazaré, not only because one of Brazil’s most famous surfers nearly drowned there from a wipeout, but because it was one of the best days the big-wave surfers have seen in several years. I open YouTube to see if there are surfing videos from Nazaré when a knock on the door interrupts my search. 

Settling in Porto (31)

It is already dark when we get into town. The GPS does its miracle and leads Rita to the Airbnb address on a wide avenue across from a promising neighborhood café that’s still open. A long triangular traffic island divides the avenue into two parts; buses and small European cars rush up and down with not a crosswalk in sight to slow them down. At the bottom of the triangle, there is a fire station with a fire truck parked out front. Hopefully, Porto’s firefighters are not going to be too busy tonight, running their sirens at odd hours and galloping up the hill to deal with this or that emergency.

Rita parks in front of a three-floor apartment building that reminds me of a San Francisco Victorian even though it probably represents Portuguese architecture. One cute balcony hangs on each side of the second floor, more for decoration than for use by the apartment’s dwellers. I have little time to admire the beautiful façade though, because as soon as we get out of the car and hit the sidewalk, the Airbnb host spots us.

The woman is friendly, talkative, and dressed in casual business attire that gives her the aura of a real estate agent. Also, her accent and demeanor tell me that she is Brazilian. Maybe I will be able to talk to her in Portuguese, but not just yet. It is Rita’s turn to do the talking, to introduce us and let the woman lead us into the building. 

We collect our bags and follow her up the stairs. Unlike the fancy staircase of the indistinct house Rita found in the surfer town of Peniche, this staircase does not give clues about the apartment. It’s as nice as any staircase in a well-kept apartment building. The Brazilian woman, whose name we find out is Maria, rummages through a heavy keychain for the apartment key. She manages other rentals in town, she explains. 

She points to one door and explains that it leads to another apartment and that we should not try to unlock it because someone lives there. Then she opens the door to “our” apartment. I don’t need to see all of it to know that Rita scored a nice place this time. It doesn’t have the musty smell of a century-old building or the convoluted floor plan and mismatched furniture we saw in the other places we’ve stayed in so far. The enormous living room features a high ceiling, wooden floors, large windows, a full-size couch, a glass coffee table, and a large flat-screen TV. The kitchen is even better. It’s large and fully equipped with the quintessential IKEA silverware, white ceramic plates and cups, and a nice collection of pots and pans. There is a coffee machine on the wide granite counter and next to it, sugar, teabags, and salt and pepper shakers. We comment on how clean the apartment is and Maria says that she just cleaned it and that she cleans all the apartments she manages.

“I love this job,” she laughs when I ask her if she’s tired. “I meet people from all over the world and the work is never boring.”

Now I wonder if Brazilians typically do the menial jobs in Portugal. Or maybe cleaning houses and managing short-term rentals for owners of amazingly large and well-furnished apartments is considered a good job? I can’t tell. Maybe it’s better than working at a coffee shop or a bookstore. I mean, the flat TV screen they have here is huge and that must mean something.

A nearly empty bottle of port and four wine glasses stand on a tray in the middle of a formal dining table that can sit six people. There are a few documents on the table, which Maria asks us to fill out and sign. While we pay her and provide all the necessary information, Maria pours a little port into each glass. It seems like a nice gesture, I think to myself, and then I realize that there is exactly enough port in the bottle for four glasses, not a drop more. I let my observation float away. The thought is what counts, I tell myself, not the amount of port in my glass. If I want more port, I can buy a bottle. Porto is the home of port, after all. It will not be hard to find a place that sells port, I am sure.

The bedrooms, we find out, are downstairs. The lower level gives me the impression that this house is probably a restored mansion that was divided into rooms that can be rented to families or small groups. There are three bedrooms on this level. The bedroom at the farthest end of the hallway includes a small nook, big enough for a single bed and nothing else. Rita and Vera decide to take that bedroom combination for obvious reasons. The bedroom’s windows are at street level and blocked with iron bars. Through the windows I can see the sidewalk and the bottom of several parked cars. I wonder if in the old days this part of the house was the section where the help used to reside. Under the kitchen and out of sight.

We proceed to look at the next bedroom. Anna parks her backpack on the floor by a double bed because she can probably feel that I am not about to volunteer to spend the night near Vera’s bedroom. Thankfully she is more agreeable than I will ever be. A clearly renovated bathroom with a smart sink and toilet separates this bedroom from Rita’s. The many white towels hanging on racks by the shower stall indicate that the property owners are either more generous than their Lisbon counterparts or more prepared for the task of hosting well-paying tourists with high expectations.   

I score the best bedroom without one pang of guilt. It is located on the other side of the stairs, away from the other bedrooms and any unusual noise that might erupt during the night from the farthest one. I didn’t claim this fabulous room or declare that I wanted it during the walk through. It happened because I kept my mouth shut and let the other women choose their rooms first. And so, I get a nice big room, my own private bathroom, a queen size bed with a nightstand on each side, and a glass door that leads to a small, fenced garden. I can’t sit there now because it is dark outside, and the garden furniture looks wet. But it is nice to know that in the morning, if the weather permits, I might be able to sit outside. Maybe I’ll have my morning tea there before we start exploring the city. Or maybe I’ll just stay here, read about Portugal, take it easy, and absorb the city vibes without doing anything touristy.

I couldn’t be happier. I am going to have a few hours of peace and privacy during the next two nights. A room all to myself and away from everything and everyone. But not just yet. I still have to go upstairs and accompany Rita and Maria to the car. Maria is going to show Rita where to park, and I don’t want Rita to go by herself, wherever it might be, even though I know she can take care of herself. This woman has gotten out of sticky situations many times before and I am not the one to save her. More likely, she would have to save me. But still, I feel that I should go with her at least to help her carry the few bags that are left in the car.

Port, Porto, Portugal (30)

Germany gave us Bach, Beethoven, and Hitler; Portugal gave us port, ginja, and the Inquisition. 

I like port and ginja because they are sweet and go great with dark chocolate. But I have a problem with the Inquisition, even though the suffering it inflicted upon my people was on a much smaller scale than the Shoah, probably because there were fewer Jews in Europe five hundred years ago than in 1939.

It’s not like the Inquisition has been on my mind since I arrived in Portugal. On the contrary. I wanted to get a feel for the country and see if I could communicate in continental Portuguese in case I decide to retire here, not dwell on the past. But the tuk-tuk guy in Lisbon brought up the topic, and since then I’ve been thinking about Portugal’s historical sins even though I never intended to do it.

To be fair, most of the credit should be given to the ruthless Spanish Inquisition and King Ferdinand, who forced the Jewish population to convert to Roman Catholicism or get the hell out of Spain. In March of 1492, the famous year that Columbus “discovered” America, Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree with the blessing of Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, and gave his loyal Jewish subjects four months to pack up their stuff and leave. Thousands left for North Africa and areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire, where they were allowed to resettle. Many converted and stayed in Spain or escaped to Portugal; some continued to practice their religion in secret. 

Portugal was more like the evil sister of Spain. She learned from the Spanish experience and perhaps tried to improve on it. The goal of the Portuguese Inquisition, which was established in 1536, was to prosecute and eliminate New Christians who were suspected of secretly practicing the old faith. The courts conducted show trials of the Crypto-Jews—as they are called to this day—in Lisbon and Porto, and other places less famous, all the way to the colonies in India and Brazil. The blood-cleansing laws that made possible the immiseration of the New Christians and their descendants were in effect until 1770, and the Inquisition remained in place until 1821, when it was finally abolished.

The funny thing is that to this day the name Torquemada sends chills down my spine. Maybe I have seen too many movies, I don’t know. I also cannot say that my childhood teachers tried to protect me from the gory details of his actions. He was actually part of the curriculum. I can still remember the drawings of Jews secretly lighting candles on Shabbat or being tortured, hanged, and burned at the stake. As a result, even today, when I see the number 1492, I don’t think about the discovery of a new continent by European sailors, but about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It’s what it means to be Jewish. Even a non-practicing one like me.

I am not holding a grudge, though. Bad things have happened to Jews throughout the centuries in many places, not only on the Iberian Peninsula, and the calamity that was inflicted on the Jews of Portugal has already run out the statute of limitation, anyway. I’m over it. Besides, the Portuguese government is trying to make amends by offering descendants of the expelled Jews Portuguese citizenship, which includes an EU passport. It’s pretty great for Jews with a Portuguese last name. But I can’t completely ignore history when it is shoved in my face in broad daylight. So, I’ll send it to the back of my mind, and leave it there for the time being. In the meantime, I am going to see what Porto has in store for me. 

I know nothing about Porto, apart from the assumption that port wine is named after this city or that it comes from this city. I became aware of this piece of trivia under somewhat unexpected circumstances.  

It was during a seminal wine tasting that took place at a large convention hotel in San Francisco more than twenty-five years ago. My participation in that event was not due to my interest in wine or my good connections. I was part of the floor crew whose job was to clear the wine glasses from the tables and replace the spit buckets. It was one of the most disgusting jobs I have done in my pre-full-time job days; but it did have a few perks, including free food and meeting a variety of San Francisco artist types and hard-working immigrants from non-European countries.  

I have to confess that in spite of the fact that I have worked in the hospitality business for many years and learned to perform the entire ritual of pouring wine into a glass as if it were liquid diamonds ($395K per gram) and not just fermented grape juice, I did not become a wine connoisseur. I knew how to open a corked bottle without putting it between my knees, I knew into which glass to pour the wine, and I knew to wait for the guest to ceremoniously taste and approve before I filled the glass almost halfway. But I couldn’t care less if the bottle cost three hundred dollars or $2.99 at Trader Joe’s. 

I just never cared about this stuff. 

Until I found out that the port served at that wine tasting had been shipped to San Francisco from Portugal after sitting there in oak barrels for 150 years. My imagination ran wild when I heard that dozens of bottles of port dating back almost to the days of the Inquisition were piled up in the back aisle, where we were taking short breaks between emptying spittoons the shape and size of KFC buckets and collecting used wine glasses from long tables. I just had to try to get a taste, not because I was a lover of port, but because it felt cool to be able to say to myself, “I just had a glass of a hundred- and fifty-year-old port,” to justify the shitty job I was stuck in.

I decided to take my chances with the clean looking white guy in khakis and a blue shirt who was standing by the boxes in which the bottles were waiting to be opened and taken to the guests.

“Hey, are you in charge of these boxes?” I asked him.

I wasn’t sure how he would react. Based on my outfit of black slacks, white shirt, black jacket adorned with gold buttons, and stupid bowtie and name tag, he could have thought that I was just another lowlife trying to get a free drink from him. But he was nice. Maybe a little bored, too. 

“Yes, I am,” he responded, and gave me the name of the distributor he was working for. Not that it mattered because I knew nothing about wine distributors.

“Someone said that these bottles are over a hundred years old,” I said. “Is that true?”

“Yup. That’s right,” he said in a friendly tone, not at all what I expected.

“Can I have a taste?” 

The man looked at me as if I had asked a legitimate question. “Are you allowed to drink during work?”

“Of course not, but this is a special occasion.”

He smiled. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.” He was a lot friendlier than I thought.

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell the manager that I wanted to find out what the stuff I’m serving tastes like.” 

I didn’t think he’d believe me, but truth be told, many times we did get to eat filet mignon and salmon combination plates as well as Alaskan king crab legs and scallops sautéed in butter and garlic at the end of the dinner service. It was more because of optics than the management’s magnanimity. There was just a ton of food left over after large functions that we would have to dump in the garbage had we not been welcomed to it. 

My courage paid off handsomely. The guy let me taste the oldest port he had in his inventory and then offered me a taste from the newer wines, one only a hundred years old and another from fifty years ago. He even offered a taste to some of my colleagues, who at first thought that I was crazy for asking him for a taste and then quickly shed their apprehensions when they saw the outcome of my direct approach. They didn’t see that he was as low on the totem pole as we were, and that he was more than happy to engage with us instead of standing there, alone, like a stick in the mud guarding boxes of wine for a boss who didn’t know he existed.

I have to say that drinking old port was not a life-altering event. I didn’t see fireworks or feel any different afterward. I remember it was sweet, that’s all. It’s hard to remember taste if you do it only once. Even when you know it’s something you will never taste again.  

The memory of drinking port stayed with me, but I never imagined that I would actually see Porto in person. Until now. Not that I can see much because the sun has already set, and all that I can see from the back seat of the car are the blinking lights of the city as we get closer and closer to it.

Soft Eggs (29)

While I am sure many nice things can be said about Aveiro, Venice it is not. I say that with some authority because I visited Venice ten years ago and Aveiro cannot rival the magic of Venice. I can’t even repeat the cliche that Aveiro is the poor man’s Venice, because Venice is on a completely different scale than Aveiro. The beauty of Venice punches you in the gut while Aveiro politely requests your attention. So why even make such a claim? It only makes Aveiro look bad. 

True, Aveiro has a canal in the middle of a wide avenue and fabulously painted wooden boats floating on the water. However, these boats look like bloated gondolas, and there are no gondoliers pushing them along the canals with long sticks or oars or whatever they are called, because the Portuguese boats are propelled by engines. And no one on them is singing love songs in Italian, or in Portuguese for that matter.

Maybe because it’s late in the day or because we are visiting Aveiro in the middle of the week during the off season, the few boats in sight are moored to the bank of the canal with not one tourist aboard. The touristy tchotchke stores are also empty. Even a gallery with an amazing display of original art made by local artists is deserted. I take a couple of pictures of the scenery to remind myself of this place. The streets in the tourist area are paved with black and white stones like those in Lisbon, and the few Art Nouveau buildings feature charming balconies and some of their façades are covered with the famous azuleijos. In short, this part of town deserves a stopover if you have time to kill between Lisbon and Porto or if you want to taste the traditional egg yolk sweets called ovos moles (soft eggs), which originated in Aveiro, according to a sleek brochure I picked up on the way from the parking garage to the canal. 

  

“Anyone want to go on a boat ride?” Rita asks no one in particular after taking the obligatory selfie with the boats in the background. By now I have learned that the boats are called moliceiros, which is the name of the seaweed that the local fishermen harvested in the past for use as fertilizer in the surrounding fields. 

I wait for Anna to shoot down Rita’s idea. A sign by the boats reads that a ride costs 10 euros and no one is around to promise that it would be worth it. Plus, I don’t think anything spectacular can be seen from the boats that we can’t see from here. The canal stretches out to sea somewhere in the horizon, and the outer parts of town, which I saw on the way in, are too industrial to merit even a cheaper boat ride. 

“Nah, I prefer to walk,” Vera decides without bothering to consult us.

Luckily the boats are not as attractive to Rita as Lisbon’s noisy tuk-tuks, and we are spared an embarrassing debate similar to the one we witnessed in the capital. I guess Rita was just checking the mood of the group after the anticlimactic ending of the visit to Nazaré. Maybe she guessed that I wouldn’t climb into one of these boats even if she offered to pay my share. As for Anna, I can almost hear her sighing in relief.

I am still baffled by Anna’s presence on this trip and her friendship with Rita. They say opposites attract, but Anna is beyond the opposite of Rita. Her energy feels like heavy shackles, and I wonder what Rita, with her insatiable appetite for life, food, and mishaps, gets out of carrying that extra weight around her neck. These two women hardly talk to each other. Even Anna’s decision to leave us earlier than planned did not generate a conversation. 

“OK then, I’m going to get something to drink,” Rita announces cheerfully. She shuffles her boot-clad feet toward a small venue that functions as a café and gift store that specializes in sweets and ocean-themed knickknacks. The sound of the boots on the pavement makes me think that her feet could benefit from the cork shoes she bought in Nazaré, even though I still doubt that she will ever use them. 

“I’m going to walk around,” Anna mumbles, partly to herself partly to the back of Rita’s head. 

“Enjoy your walk, we’ll be here,” Rita retorts, sending out subtle passive-aggressive vibes even though she is probably not aware of it because she has the self-awareness of a fruit fly, not that I have any disrespect to fruit flies.

“You sure you don’t want to have coffee with us?” Vera calls after Anna.

“Mom, she’s a grown up, let her do what she wants,” Rita berates Vera.

“OK, OK,” Vera says, raising one arm in defeat. I guess she wants to show sympathy to the injured social justice warrior who needs to avoid our company now. “Are you going to have coffee with us?” she asks me by way of invitation.

“Sure, I’ll buy yours too. I still owe you,” I say. That tram ticket she bought me in Lisbon is still gnawing at me and I’m worried about the repercussions of owing money to Rita even by proxy. After she put some of the group activities on her (Fred’s) credit card, she started showing concern about money I owe her. As if I am going to disappear without paying my debt. 

“No need. Consider it a gift,” Vera says, patting me on the arm.

Inside the café, Rita orders two galãos and several ovos moles. As expected, she makes a big deal about being able to order the correct coffee in Portuguese. Without waiting for the woman behind the counter to finish preparing the coffee, she takes the ovos moles to the table where Vera is already sitting.

“You should have told Anna to come with us,” Vera says.

“Mom, let her be, she wants to be alone,” Rita says, somewhat annoyed. She takes a little bite from one of the seashell-shaped ovos moles. Her eyes light up and she nods with approval. She pushes the plate toward her mother. “Try it, it’s good.”

The coffee arrives at our table. Vera tastes one of the ovos moles. “It’s good but I don’t need the extra sugar.”

“Come on, you only live once,” Rita reasserts her life motto and reaches for another seashell. 

While they debate the merit of these cholesterol-laden sweets, my mind goes back to Anna, the woman who wants to be alone, behaving as if my exchange with the waiter has traumatized her. Give me a freaking brake. She has a problem with how I treat waiters. Me, the veteran waitress. I worked for so long in food service that even years later I still suffered from what we, veteran food servers call “waiters’ nightmares.” In one of my more memorable dreams, a customer orders a vanilla milkshake, and instead of asking the bartender to prepare me one, I go to the kitchen, put mashed potatoes in the blender, and serve the concoction in a tall glass. With a straw. In the dream I know I am doing something wrong, but the only way I can make the nightmare stop is by waking up. 

These days, when I enter a restaurant, I automatically check the wait staff to see how they are being treated and how hard they work for their tips. Especially the older women who I can tell have been waiting tables for decades. I’m the last person who would want to annoy a waiter. I know how difficult and unforgiving this job can be. But Anna, she prefers seeing me as an evil customer, which I’ve never been and don’t plan on starting to be now. Even though that waiter in Nazaré was a piece of work.

I know I can’t say anything to Rita about Anna’s tantrum. Rita has little patience for other people’s troubles. She blows them off as soon as they open their mouths. Life is short, enjoy the moment, who cares what other people feel, love yourself, bend the rules if they don’t work for you, and on and on. Plus, she is too focused on her own troubles. And there are enough of them behind her cheerful disposition to fill up an hour-long hike, three times a week. 

“We should save one for Anna,” Vera’s voice breaks through my ruminations.

Rita scoops up one of the seashells and wraps it in a napkin. Then she pushes the plate toward me. “Want the last one?”

I shake my head. “No, thanks. I don’t want to clog my arteries just yet.” 

What is it with Portuguese egg-yolk sweets? What do they do with all the leftover egg whites? Not meringue cookies, I am sure. The pamphlets say that the nuns used the egg whites to starch their linen or habits, but how many nuns wear habits today?

Rita shrugs and pops the last seashell into her mouth. “You know, my mother doesn’t take any medication,” she says with her mouth partly full. “Not for high cholesterol, blood pressure, high blood sugar, nothing. Fred takes more medications than she does.”

Vera pats Rita on the arm. I don’t know if she’s doing it to tell Rita to shut up or to agree with her.

“You’re brave,” I compliment Vera. I’m a walking hypochondriac, not that I use medications or get sick often. I’m just scared of what’s in store for me. The future is approaching quickly with all its menacing diseases, incapacitations, and falls.

“She doesn’t want to be dependent on doctors and drugs, so she lives a healthy lifestyle. If she eats too much sugar one day, she will not touch it for a few days afterward,” Rita further explains, as if her mother is not sitting right next to her. 

“Are we ready to go back to the car or do you want to keep walking around?” Vera asks Rita. She’s obviously not interested at being the center of attention. She acted the same way when Rita was laughing at her night terrors. Ignoring the bait and steering the conversation away from herself.

“Let’s go find Anna,” Rita says, rising from her chair and pushing it aside. She reads her mother’s clues quite well, sometimes.

We spot Anna inside a music store that houses a large collection of fado CDs and posters of famous musicians. Colorful T-shirts with prints of contemporary paintings and landscapes that hang on the walls make the ambience feel less touristy. I expect Rita to tell Anna that we are leaving town as soon as she sees her, but Rita loves shopping and we find ourselves roaming around the store until Rita decides that she has seen enough.

It is time to head to Porto. 

The Scoobys of Our World (28)

I don’t know if it’s all in my head, but the silence in the car is a bit heavy. It’s not the silence that stems from having nothing to say, but the kind that grinds on you because you know that people are thinking about things that they prefer to keep under a lid in order to maintain the peace (except for Rita, who lacks the disposition to be silent about anything). We are driving out of town toward another city on the coast, somewhere between Nazaré and Porto. I have no idea what to expect from that city, but that’s fine. I am used to this now. Being shuttled from one place to another and stopping to appreciate the ambience and landscape, and occasionally watch Rita buy stuff. 

I don’t take responsibility for the silence. I was not the one who blew up. I don’t have much steam to blow at the moment anyway. I made a decision to tag along and I am not going back on it. I have to enjoy this trial-by-fire vacation as it is. Observe human nature, practice my Portuguese, and avoid mental health damage. As a bonus, I might learn a thing or two about Portugal.

Considering the fact that my job description includes researching and writing the history, geography, politics, economy, and culture of a variety of countries, it is hard to explain why Portugal remains such an unknown to me. I can talk about the economy of Turkmenistan and its vast natural gas reserves or Niger’s diplomatic relations with its neighboring countries, for example, or the turbulent history of Serbia and why it hasn’t joined NATO or the EU, but ask me anything about Portugal and I go blank. Even though by now I’ve learned that pastel de nata is the pride of the country and noisy tuk-tuks roam the streets of Lisbon, anything beyond that would require serious digging, which I haven’t done for a variety of reasons. Maybe tonight I will venture onto YouTube and explore this country a bit. Provided there will be Wi-Fi at the place Rita booked for us in Porto.

“Simone is driving me crazy with her texts,” Rita’s voice breaks the long silence. “She doesn’t stop,” she complains, unconvincingly. Rita loves occupying people’s brain space, and when they forget to call or text her, she makes sure to remind them of her existence with friendly WhatsApp calls and messages. I know from experience. 

Simone, the Brazilian hairdresser who wants Rita to visit her in Brazil, is following the news in Portugal and reporting back to Rita. We learn from Simone’s message that the waves off the coast of Nazaré were unusually big today and that a famous Brazilian surfer nearly died by a big wave earlier. It looks like I was not imagining when I thought that the waves in Nazaré were bigger than anything I’d seen before. Only I haven’t seen any surfers. 

Rita’s phone beeps another message, causing her to let out little-girl giggles as if she is sharing an amazingly funny secret with herself. I have observed her doing this when she watches silly videos on Facebook, but now she is driving, so it must be related to the messages from Simone or her need to break the long silence emanating from Anna.

“What’s so funny?” Vera asks in that annoyed tone she uses when Rita’s quirky behavior gets on her nerves. She definitely does not think it’s funny that a surfer was nearly killed off the coast.

“His name is Scooby,” Rita giggles. Her silliness does not help warm the atmosphere, but it does engage her mother. 

“Why is that funny?” Vera demands again.

“Scooby,” Rita giggles. “You don’t remember Scooby?”

 

It is time to intervene before Vera loses her patience. “Scooby was Rita’s stupid dog who always ran away and got her in trouble with the neighbors,” I say, leaning forward so Vera can hear me.

“He was not stupid,” Rita giggles, unoffended, looking at the rear mirror. “He just had issues.”

Of course, he had issues. All dogs have issues, especially rescue dogs. I can’t remember where she got him, but she told me that he was miserable and covered in parasites when she adopted him. But regardless of his traumatic yet unknown past, he was a cheerful creature who maintained an incredibly gregarious approach to life, including lots of enthusiastic barking, jumping over fences, and chasing squirrels.

“Yes, yes, yes, now I remember,” Vera says. “He was a big dog, not the chihuahua.”

“He was big, with messy white hair, or gray, depending on how clean he was,” I add to the conversation. I don’t want to sound too critical though. Rita loved him, as much as she loved all her other pets, which included a variety of feral cats, caged birds, chickens, and even a white rat at one point.

Rita giggles again. Her pets give her enormous pleasure. Especially when they are naughty.

“He destroyed half of your house,” Vera exaggerates, disapprovingly, which makes Rita giggle even more.

“My dog ruined my best pair of boots,” Anna finally joins the conversation, signaling that soon things might go back to normal and that her silence from now on will be the result of her usual concern for the daughter she left behind rather than my inexcusable behavior at the restaurant. 

I bet Rita is taking credit for this encouraging development. As she told me a lifetime ago, people on her trips get along, they have a fabulous time, and everything’s great. She is the ultimate tour guide who knows how to make people enjoy each other’s company. And Anna goes with the flow after all.

“I can’t count how many shoes my dogs ate,” Rita laughs. 

“Becky chewed up dad’s favorite slippers the moment you brought her home,” Vera says dryly. She is not one to betray negative emotions when it comes to life’s ordinary mishaps. 

Vera’s reaction is anticipated. Rita bought Becky, a little fluffy purebred, for her mom during her previous trip to Israel and Vera fell in love with it. Now Vera has someone to walk with when her husband is slouched in front of the TV, indulging in one of his foul moods, according to a report I received from Rita during one of our walks. But it doesn’t solve my problem.

The conversation puts me on alert. I don’t have a dog and I don’t plan to have one, so I can’t share any cute anecdote about my dog’s bad behavior. I am friendly with dogs who belong to other people, even when they sniff me on nature trails, but that might not be enough to make Anna think that I am not the worst person on the planet. I will have to think of something else to bring her back to my side. 

“He needed new slippers so good for him that she chewed them up,” Rita laughs. Then she looks up at the rearview mirror and asks Anna if her daughter has bought food for the dog.

“She said that she did, but I am not sure I believe her,” Anna says.

“What are you going to do about it?” Rita challenges her again, like she did the first time when the topic of the uncooperative daughter came up.

“I might have to return home earlier than I thought,” Anna says.

Surprise, surprise. Maybe the blow up at the restaurant had nothing to do with me after all. I might have just given her a good excuse to explode. 

Rita doesn’t miss a beat. “We can check the bus schedule when we get to Porto,” she suggests. I have to confess that at these moments I absolutely admire Rita. Nothing fazes her. She is the ultimate tour guide. She knows what to do. She doesn’t question Anna’s decision. She accepts reality as it is.

Although this turn of events feels unexpected, I am not surprised. Since I first met Anna, I haven’t been able to understand why she dragged herself here with no money to spend, leaving her dysfunctional daughter alone in Spain without a support network. Furthermore, the woman looks uncomfortable in her own skin and is definitely not too keen on being a part of our motley crew. Maybe Rita didn’t explain to her what she was getting herself into, just like she didn’t explain to me. I’ll never know.  

“When are we getting to Porto?” Vera jumps in, probably to divert the conversation to a more agreeable topic. She definitely doesn’t want to talk about Anna’s problems at home and beyond. She is very sensitive in this way.

“It depends on how much time we spend in Aveiro,” Rita responds.

“Aveiro? What’s there?” Vera asks again.

“It’s the Venice of Portugal,” she explains.

“That sounds good,” Vera declares and on this cheerful note, life goes back to almost normal.

What Happens When You Don't Know (27)

Rita digs her fork into the pink flesh of the fish and takes a tiny bite. I am surprised to see her usual loud appreciation for food changes into this timid ladylike demeanor, something I have never observed before. It feels as if I am watching her eat for the first time. I wonder if living with Fred, who suffers from obsessive overeating, has anything to do with it. Or has she always been like this and I just never noticed because I was so absorbed in my own little world? 

“Is it good?” Vera asks Rita in a voice that signals disdain rather than curiosity. It’s easy to see that she is not enjoying her green soup.

“Hmmm,” Rita nods and takes another tiny bite of the salmon. 

In spite of the noisy ambience, I can hear her eating. This is also completely new to me. I’ve never noticed that she makes noises when she eats. It’s not a crunching sound, like when someone chews on an apple or a carrot, but a wet sound, as if she is sucking fruit juice from a plastic bottle or gnawing on something soft that does not require using teeth. Perhaps I can hear these noises because she eats with her mouth slightly open. How did I miss this? How did I not see this before? How am I going to ignore it? Or pretend I don’t hear it?

The waiter arrives with my order. The salad contains chopped lettuce and a few slices of cucumber, an unripe tomato, and an oversized carrot. Nothing too fancy or exotic. The shape of the plate is unusual, but everything on it is mediocre, including the oil and vinegar on the side. I eat the salad anyway because vegetables are good for me and I haven’t had a salad since I arrived in Portugal. The French fries are heavenly, but there are too many of them in the bowl. I decide to share them with the other women, even though, usually, I am quite possessive of my fries. Also, Vera and Anna have already finished their soups and are just sitting there waiting for Rita and me to finish eating. I don’t know if they ordered anything else and I need to see them eating with us. I feel awkward enough that Rita ordered a full meal while these two barely ate anything. 

I push the fries to the middle of the table. “Have some fries. This is way too much for one person.” 

Luckily, they are not too proud to decline my offer. Even Rita, who is still working on her meal, joins in. Each woman in turn takes a few fries from the bowl and soon only a few unappetizing pieces are left at the bottom.

“We are still waiting for our boiled potatoes,” Anna says out of the blue while munching on a French fry.

“You should call the waiter and remind him,” I suggest.

“It’s OK. I don’t want it anymore,” Anna says, a bit impatient, as if I said something wrong.

“I also didn’t get my salad,” Rita adds.

“You should tell him,” I say.

Now, it’s Vera’s turn. “I’m already full.”

“Are you sure? I can tell him you’re still waiting for your boiled potatoes,” I insist this time. He’s probably giving us the treatment reserved for bad customers. We are four women sitting at the farthest table from the kitchen and he knows that the tip is going to be too small to make an effort. We didn’t even order drinks.

As if to undermine my assessment of the situation, the waiter returns to our table to ask if we want to order dessert.

If Rita orders dessert I’m going to walk out, I think to myself. I am not going to sit here and watch her stuffing her face with more food while Anna counts her euros. Luckily for all, Rita tells him that we want the bill. 

“Coffee?” he asks again.

Anna shakes her head without looking at me or the waiter. 

“You know, these two women never got their boiled potatoes,” I say to the waiter in Portuguese. 

“We don’t want it anymore,” Vera says in Hebrew, moving her hand in a motion that indicates ‘no.’ She puts her napkin on the table and shoves her plate to the middle of the table to further drive her point home.

The waiter points to the two small pieces of French fries that were left at the bottom of the bowl and says, “This was for all of you. You ordered potatoes.” 

“They ordered boiled potatoes,” I explain in Portuguese. “I ordered the French fries.”

The waiter shakes his head firmly and points to the bowl. “This was for all of you.” Then he puts the bill on the table, takes the empty plates and bowls, and leaves.

Even though I am floored by the waiter’s rudeness, I am so, so glad I offered some of the fries to Vera and Anna. I was right that the portion was too big for one person. And I am so, so glad I didn’t eat all these fries by myself. I wouldn’t be able to look these women in the face for the rest of the trip had I eaten them all by myself. I feel lucky beyond words. By the grace of the universe, I did something completely out of character and it saved me from embarrassment.

But not completely. Because when the waiter comes back to take our money, offered in a variety of coins and a paper bill, he tells me that the salad plate was also prepared for two people because Rita’s salmon came with a side of salad.

“I knew I was supposed to get a salad,” Rita says, making me squirm in my chair because I ate all the lettuce by myself without offering her any. Vera shrugs off the news and Anna’s face is buried in her backpack. 

This misunderstanding makes my inner waitress kick in. I need to understand if this mishap is the result of a cultural gap or the misbehavior of our obnoxious waiter. We have a few more days in Portugal and I’d better learn some Portuguese restaurant etiquette and what to expect when I order something. I decide to ask for clarification.

“You know,” I open in Portuguese, hoping to appease him. “I was a waitress many years in the United States. Over there, when people order food, every person gets a separate plate. So, are you telling me that here if two people order the same thing you bring it on the same plate?”

The waiter looks me with open hostility. He doesn’t answer. Maybe my Portuguese sucks and he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

“I would like to understand how you do things in Portugal. I’ve never seen this done before,” I try my best at showing him my stupidity to defuse his hostility. I am starting to think that maybe he hates Brazilians, because I certainly don’t sound Israeli or American. 

At this point Anna rises from her chair and grabs her backpack and jacket. “I really hate what you’re doing. I’m getting out of here,” she seethes through clenched teeth, in Hebrew. She turns her back to me and storms out of the restaurant, as far as storming out of a small and crowded dining hall allows. 

“I’m not arguing about money, I only want to understand how they do thing here,” I apologize, but she is already gone, slamming an invisible door in my face and making me feel like a cheap bully. I feel bad about not letting it go but I have to redeem myself after eating all these fries and Rita’s share of the salad. And I wasn’t even hungry.

“It’s OK,” Vera, the self-designated peacemaker, intervenes. “Let’s just get out of here.”

Anna’s sudden eruption appears so out of character and out of place that it leaves me deeply rattled. She certainly was not going with the flow, as Rita had promised weeks ago when she told me that she invited Anna to join us. I don’t know what Anna thought I was trying to do by seeking clarification from this cold-hearted waiter, but I know that my intentions were pure. I was only trying to repair what my academic side would call ‘an unfortunate language breakdown.’ When I was working on my master’s degree in foreign language teaching, I read several studies and even wrote some academic papers that could have helped explain this incident. But this restaurant is not academia, and trying to repair an authentic communicative breakdown by talking to a waiter is not the best remedy. Apparently. 

“Everything’s good, everything’s good,” Rita announces in Hebrew as she rises from her chair and pushes it away to squeeze herself and her big handbag out of a tight spot. It is something she usually says when things are awful. I’ve seen her doing it time and again, especially after long diatribes about Fred’s poor eating and hygiene habits or her ex-husband’s stinginess.

This time I don’t try to argue my point. I follow the two women out of the restaurant and decide that from now on, I will not join this group at any restaurant. I don’t want to risk putting myself in such an adverse situation again. Things are already becoming borderline unbearable.

You better Know How to Order Food or Else (26)

Unlike the deserted beach and boardwalk of Nazaré, the recommended restaurant is packed, as if all the tourists who happened to be in town decided this is the restaurant to be in today. Maybe the shoe store owners sent them here; maybe it’s the only restaurant that remains opened during the off season. Maybe it’s the restaurant that received the most stars on Trip Advisor. I can’t tell.

We have to squeeze ourselves by a row of tables to reach the only empty table standing at the very end of the long and narrow dining area. Apart from the four chairs that surround this lonely table, every seat in the house is taken by a person who looks distinctly foreign, just like me and my travel mates. The amount of food that I see on the plates leaves me somewhat worried about the expectations that the waiters might entertain regarding our eating capacity. Large plates of fish, shellfish and crab, with sides of antipasto or French fries, plates of green salad and bread, bottles of white wine and glasses filled to the brim cover each tabletop. In short, patrons are having huge meals at this restaurant. Nothing I was planning to be confronted with when I decided to take the risk and enter this place with the hope of ending my nerve-racking search for a bathroom. I also have a nagging feeling that the unsmiling waiter who leads us to the only unoccupied table is going to be unpleasantly surprised when he gets our orders and realizes that my troupe is not the type that splurges on wine and expensive seafood platters for lunch.    

The waiter puts four large menus on the table and pulls out the chair closest to him for Vera, I assume, since she is the eldest among us. Vera ignores his gesture and maneuvers her body between the table and the window into a chair at the corner, from where she can observe the entire restaurant. She is not one to sit with her back to the action. I noticed that she did the same at the fado bar. I think it’s an ingrained Israeli habit to choose a strategic spot from which she can see what’s going on at the restaurant in case a suspicious person walks in. You kind of want to be prepared to leave quickly before the suspect starts shooting or activates his suicide vest.

Rita pulls out a chair opposite her mother and sits near the wall with her back to the restaurant. Anna just stands there, waiting for the waiter to walk away so she can sit near Rita. I make no movement toward the chair next to Vera and ask him about the bathroom. He motions to follow him back to the entrance and there, he points to a narrow, spiral staircase, explaining that I will find the bathroom at the top of the stairs. 

Luckily, I am a small person. I don’t think anyone above six feet or over 300 pounds would fit in this staircase, or inside the bathroom. Because there is no window in this tiny nook, I have to feel my way in the dark to find the light switch. But I can’t complain. I get to use the bathroom for free, and there is soap and toilet paper under the sink. I am also glad to see that the flushing mechanism is not too complicated to operate. More than once I have found myself in a new country, trying to figure out how to flush a toilet. On a ferry in Denmark, I once stood inside a sparklingly clean toilet for several minutes, searching for the flushing handle or string or pedal until my eyes landed on a smartly designed button that was discretely embedded in the wall above the toilet bowl. There was no indication that pressing that button into the wall would activate a waterfall, but I bravely took the chance and pushed it. I still remember the relief I felt that I was able to figure it out on my own. I didn’t know what they do in Denmark to people who don’t flush the toilet before they get out of the bathroom and I didn’t intend to find out.

 

With a similar sense of relief and triumph I descend the treacherous staircase and cross the entire dining room to reach my table. For a moment, I feel exposed and judged by the affluent-looking diners. It might be paranoia or projection exacerbated by my childhood experience of walking into the kibbutz dining hall where everyone knew everyone and gossip was the main pastime. Or, it might be a common reaction some women have when they walk into a crowded room. I don’t know. Unfortunately, I can’t control it. I can only be conscious of my discomfort and not let it stop me.

When I join the women at the table, Vera tells me that they already ordered their food. I check the menu and decide to order a salad and a plate of French fries. I am not hungry enough to order one of those enormous seafood plates and I don’t want to be antisocial and not order anything. Plus, I am not open to spending 50 euros on fish and wine just because that’s what the other tourists are doing.

The waiter comes to get my order and drops off a bread basket and small plates with cheese, olives, and chilled butter. He barely looks at me when I give him my order. I can tell that he is not happy. I worked as a waitress long enough in popular restaurants in New York and San Francisco to know how waiters feel about customers who occupy a prime spot during the lunch rush and order an appetizer and a glass of water. But I am not going to be intimidated, even though I know what he thinks about people like me. I’ll give him a nice tip to compensate for the lousy sale.

As soon as the waiter leaves, Rita reaches for the cheese plate and delicately picks one cheese square with two fingers, leaving her pinky upright. She slowly moves her hand toward her face and puts the cheese square in her mouth. I almost fall out of my chair looking at her. I’ve never noticed her being so dainty with food.

“Do you know they charge us for these things?” I ask the group. I read somewhere that in Portugal they charge for starters and if diners don’t want to pay for them, they have to ask the waiter to take them back, which is unsanitary and awkward, but every culture has its little perks and idiosyncrasies, and I shouldn’t be judgmental. I believe that this unusual arrangement catches most tourists by surprise. I think most people assume these are freebies. In Israel, in some restaurants, waiters put a pile of warm pitas, pickles, olives, chunks of white onion, and hot peppers on the table as soon as you order your food, and they never charge you for them separately, so you don’t feel that you pay for them. But in Portugal it’s different.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rita says even though I am certain she doesn’t know that. She points to the breadbasket. “Want one?” she asks, picking a piece of bread and handing it to Vera.

“Not yet,” Vera demurs.

“Come on mom, try the cheese. It’s yummy,” Rita insists, picking another cheese square. She brings it slowly to her mouth and chews slowly, contemplating the flavor. “Ta’im,” she reports to us and reaches for a green olive with her heavily bejeweled fingers. 

Anna stirs out of her trance-like silence, takes an olive and pops it into her mouth. “I prefer black olives,” she says.

“Me too,” Rita says with her mouth full. “I used to make olives when I lived in…” she begins telling a story she told me during one of our walks about her life on a goat farm but is interrupted by the waiter. He places a small bowl of green soup in front of Vera and another in front of Anna. A large plate with a generous piece of grilled salmon, a boiled potato, and a pile of steamed vegetables is placed in front of Rita.

She did it again. She ordered the grilled salmon. Every time I go to a restaurant with Rita—and Freddy, I have to confess, because she has asked me a few times to join them for dinner to enliven the conversation and spare her from being alone with him—she orders the salmon. But this time the plate seems a bit out of place. A bit too big and full of food compared to the small bowls of soup in front of her mother and her financially strained friend. Maybe they ordered something else, although I doubt Anna, the vegetarian, can afford more than a side dish. Maybe Rita ordered something for them just like she kind of agreed to pay for the starters no one wants to eat. I have to wait and see. 

Beach Walk (25)

The drive to Nazaré is uneventful. By now, I am used to my spot in the back seat, staring outside the window and letting my thoughts drift to wherever they want to take me. Once in a while the silence is broken by a short exchange between Rita and her mother, mostly complaints that Rita makes about the annoying text messages that she’s getting from her Brazilian hairdresser. Why she is annoyed by the messages I am not completely sure, because she is creating the situation by frequently texting the woman about where we are in Portugal and in response the Brazilian asks her to go look for the cousin, who now I hear lives in a place called Tomar. 

Outside the window, Óbidos appears again. The walled medieval part of town is still shining on the hillside looking adorable and inviting, but it is quickly left behind. The highway on which our fabulous Toyota is traveling is almost empty, apart from the occasional truck or semi that passes us. It appears that most of the vehicles that share the highway with us are commercial, which means that, unlike the rest of the population, they can afford the toll fee. Apparently, in Portugal the highways are too expensive for the locals. For us, tourists of means (except for Anna), the toll fees are a temporary expense we barely notice. Rita, our learned guide, included the toll payments in the rental agreement so we don’t have to stop and pay them or even know of their existence. She explains that her (Fred’s) credit card is automatically charged every time we enter a toll road to save time and confusion. All I can think is that it is great someone thought of doing this and how lucky I am that Rita knows this stuff.

We descend into Nazaré from the highway. The city faces the blue ocean and looks nothing like the original Nazaré that I know, located inland, between the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee. Rita maneuvers the car down winding streets until we reach a wide boulevard that runs along a white sandy beach and is bordered by a paved boardwalk on one side and brightly colored three-floor apartment buildings on the other. The boardwalk, however, is empty of tourists. Maybe the morning rain sent them running for cover. Now the rain has stopped and Rita is ready for action. She parks the car by a line of parking meters and steps out before I manage to even undo my seatbelt. 

It is time to explore another place I’ve never heard of until a few hours ago.

As soon as I plant myself on the sidewalk, Rita spots a display of shoes made of cork outside a store that looks like the quintessential tourist trap and disappears inside. My heart skips a couple of beats and settles back in place. Shoes for Rita are the most potent opiate. They alleviate her existential angst in a way that people like me, who do not possess the addiction gene, cannot comprehend. Not that she is anything like the infamous shoe hoarder Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, who owned thousands of pairs. She just likes to buy stuff, and shoes happen to appeal to her as much as jewelry and Jacuzzis. 

Vera promptly follows Rita into the belly of the beast. I remain on the sidewalk, trying to decide what to do. I am certainly not following these two women into the abyss. I am done scouring these depressingly cheerful money pits for stuff I don’t need. Anna, who could not afford to buy anything even if she wanted to, stops at a neighboring store that sells beach towels and flags, looking like she might do some window shopping. Since no discussion about what we are going to do here has taken place, it occurs to me that a walk on the beach would be the most appropriate activity. Later on, I might embark on a search for a public bathroom to avoid unforeseen disasters. But for now, the beach is calling me.

Several wooden fishing boats are lined up on the sand by the boardwalk. It is not clear if they are actually used for fishing, since there are no fishing nets or fish for sale inside them or even a nearby ramp from which to enter the ocean. The boats, all of which are named Nazaré, are painted in bright colors and look like the perfect props in a staged display for gullible tourists. They seem somewhat out of place, but at the same time they belong on the beach. I take a picture of the boats and decide that later on I will look up this town on the internet.

There is no one around to ask about the boats. The beach is deserted and even the few structures that look like they might be dressing rooms for bathers or maybe lifeguard stations are chained and locked. Down by the water line, two men, one young, one much older, walk slowly with their hands clasped behind their backs, but they are all the human presence the town offers at the moment.

I step on the soft sand and walk toward the water line. About a mile up, the beach ends at the foot of a steep ridge that runs from east to west all the way to the ocean. Rows of red-roofed, whitewashed apartment buildings accentuate the skyline atop the ridge. I cannot see any roads or even trails connecting the bottom part of town with the buildings at the top of the ridge. The only thing that cuts through the green hillside is a concrete shaft that looks like a funicular rail. I assume a funicular carriage runs up and down this rail during the tourist season, but not on a cloudy November day when barely one tourist is in sight. 

The steep mountain ridge turns into a spectacular cliff that descends almost vertically into the ocean. A short distance from this sheer cliff, in the ocean, a giant shapeless rock rises from the bottom of the sea to meet the highest waves I have ever seen in my life. The waves crash onto the rock, and the white spray shoots up into the air so high that it takes my breath away. I have seen giant waves before, when I was sailing in the Aegean Sea near Crete during a winter storm, but they were nothing like the waves that bombard this rock. I didn’t even know that waves this size break so close to shore. I have heard about Hawaii and Australia, but nothing has prepared me for what I am witnessing now. Even the waves that break right in front of me, on this flat beach, are taller than I have ever seen at such close proximity. I am definitely not a stranger to the ocean, but this natural spectacle is something on a different scale.

It takes me a while before I remember that I need to check on my travel mates in case they are looking for me and want to go somewhere else. I start walking back toward where we last split up and, to my relief, I see that Anna also chose to spend her time on the beach. Maybe she coordinated her beach stroll with Rita after her window-shopping stint and went to collect seashells for her art projects. Since she does not seem in a hurry, I move to explore the streets that face the ocean. Maybe I can find a public bathroom hidden somewhere, although I am not incredibly optimistic considering my experience so far. 

The streets are deserted, as are the few open shops that I pass. Nothing inviting enough to enter and there are no little signs with sticks figures in a skirt or pants in sight. An empty parking lot behind the oceanfront buildings catches my eye. Maybe they have a public restroom at that small shack where drivers pay to park. In Monterey, which is such a touristy town, there are public bathrooms everywhere for the masses of tourists who invade the town in the summer months. Maybe this town too remembers its tourists and provides some amenities. Who knows? I might be surprised. But no, after a short hike up the hill, I find nothing. And there is no one in the little shack who can help me find anything. I decide to go back and look for my travel mates. Maybe they have found the coveted bathrooms.

I run into them before I reach the car. They are looking for a restaurant recommended to them by the salesperson at the shoe store, where Rita and Vera have spent the last hour or so. I realize that Rita did not waste her time there. She bought one pair of shoes and one pair of sandals and per her testimony they didn’t even cost that much. She couldn’t resist them because they were so unique. No one she knows owns cork shoes, and these shoes are so cleverly painted, on top of being made of such unusual material, that she just had to have them. She pulls the shoes out of the bag and shows them to me. 

I want to feel happy for her, but I don’t have the right personality for it. All I can think is, Do you really need more shoes? You already have so many boots and flip-flops and tennis shoes and platform shoes and only the almighty knows what else, and most of them you don’t use. Because the footwear you like the most is this pair of beat-up, faded leather boots that cost you only 5 dollars after you successfully negotiated the price down from 10 dollars, per your own report during one of our hikes. Now, these boots are disintegrating in front of my eyes. I also know that the fate of these cork shoes is going to be identical to the fate of the fado CD you bought in Lisbon. As soon as they get home they are going to be abandoned and forgotten until you decide to clean your closet and put them for sale on your table at a street fair or festival for an exorbitant price. Other than that, they are doomed to oblivion.

“Let’s go put the shoes in the car first,” Rita says cheerfully, and the three of us obediently follow her. On the way to the car, I receive a full report about the prices and the conversation that preceded the final transaction. I also learn that the fabulous people at the shoe store suggested we go have lunch at a restaurant not too far from here. “They said it’s the best restaurant in town,” Rita promises.

I don’t really want to eat lunch at a touristy restaurant, but maybe there will be a restroom there for the patrons. So, I agree. I will brave the restaurant and be a good sport. Besides, it’s lunch time for Vera, and when Vera is ready for lunch, we all are.

Pastries (24)

On my way outside I decide to do some attitude adjustment. Although this trip is not exactly the kind of trip I would have planned, and my travel mates are not the kind of people I would have chosen to travel with (apart from Rita, who in a moment of weakness got me into it), it is no use feeling sorry for myself or making excuses to justify why I don’t have the courage to leave. I should be grateful that I can travel in comfort and learn something new every day without having to pay exorbitant fees or worry about getting lost due to GPS malfunctions. It’s the journey that counts, as they say. Portugal is a big unknown waiting to be discovered and who knows, maybe I will discover something new about myself, too, during this sorry misadventure.

Or maybe this journey will just reinforce what I already know about myself. For example, that sometimes I choose to keep my mouth shut even when I know that I should say something, because the pastries that Rita bought are still sitting in the middle of the table, calling for the café owner’s attention. Rita is chewing on one of the pastries while scrolling on her phone, giggling as always, her colorful leggings-clad legs resting on a chair she pulled from another table. Vera is staring at the ocean, absorbed in the view, I assume, and Anna is consorting with her muse, in front of some flowering bushes that grow among the rocks on the edge of the hill, taking close-up photos.

Rita raises her head from the phone as soon as she hears me approach the table and pushes the pastry box toward me. “Take one. It’s really good.”

“Maybe later,” I say.

“Come on, take one, they’re good, I bought too many,” Rita insists, as she always does.

“She said she didn’t want any,” Vera intervenes impatiently. I am not sure if she’s doing it on my behalf or because she’s annoyed by her daughter’s voice. Sometimes I can’t decipher the way Vera thinks. She becomes impatient at the most unexpected moments.

Rita shrugs without raising her eyes from the phone and takes another bite from her pastry. “Whatever.”   

I watch her for about a second chewing slowly, methodically, unperturbed by the people around her. She is so content in her little world, surrounded by food and silly videos her Israeli friends post on Facebook, I want to punch her if only to wake her up to reality. “You should put away the pastries,” I finally break my silence in spite of myself. “When the woman brings the coffee, she’s going to say something.” 

Rita does not react. Either she doesn’t understand why I say that or she is pretending that she doesn’t know the rules. At last, she looks up from her phone. “She’s not going to say anything.”

As soon as she says it, the woman comes out with four coffees with milk on a tray. She puts the glasses in a circle around the pastry box. 

“Can we have sugar?” Rita asks the woman. 

“You can’t bring food from outside,” the woman responds in perfect English as if she didn’t hear Rita’s question.

Rita looks at the woman, lifts both side of her mouth in a forced smile, closes the box and moves it from the table to the chair that her feet were resting on until that moment. She hates to play by the rules, but today she doesn’t want to make a scene, and I am grateful. I really don’t want to watch her argue with that nice Portuguese woman who taught me how to order coffee. 

“Thank you,” the woman says. 

As she turns away from us, Rita calls after her, “Sugar please?”

I want to strangle her for being such a bitch. I also want to say “I told you so,” but I know I don’t have to rub it in. Anna, who was not privy to the completely predictable scene, returns from her short expedition and joins us at the table.

“You ordered me coffee? Thank you,” she says to Rita.

Rita pulls the box from under the table. “Want a pastry?”

This woman is incorrigible. If I had known that she was going to cause trouble with that stupid box of pastries, I would have told her not to buy it, but telling Rita not to buy something usually gets the opposite result. She would just buy two of whatever it is, as those jacuzzis in her backyard attest.

“No thanks,” Anna says and takes a sip from the coffee. “It’s good,” she says.

Rita puts the box back on the chair. I reach for my coffee and take a sip. It tastes great and I owe it to this nice woman I did not protect from Rita’s antics. It only needs a little sugar, but that’s not a problem. I can drink coffee without sugar if I have to, but I don’t because the woman comes out with a few paper packets of sugar and puts them on the table. “Do you want to order something to eat?” She asks no one in particular.

“Thank you, we are fine,” Anna volunteers. Rita keeps her eyes on her phone. Vera says nothing. She does not speak to strangers as far as I’ve noticed, even though she speaks four languages. “Obrigada,” I contribute my small part, hoping to make our little group look less inconsiderate after the pastry box incident.

With the hot coffee warming my hands, I lean into my chair and watch the giant waves enter the bay below us. I don’t think I have ever sat so close to such large waves without getting wet or scared. I grew up swimming in the Mediterranean Sea and spent most of my life a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, where surfers ride the tallest waves, but these waves here are nothing like the waves I’ve seen in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. They don’t break near the café. They rush into the bay and break in front of a sandy beach bordered by grass-covered dunes and recently plowed fields. In the distance, I finally see the surfers. They cross the beach with their surfboards and enter the sea. A second later, they disappear behind the mountains of water rolling into the bay, and the beach is empty again. 

I wonder if I could live in a place like this, where they drink coffee in glasses and charge you to use the bathroom. This town, whose name I already forgot, is not as spectacular as Lisbon or as quaint as Óbidos, but the weather is nice and the people don’t look mean. Plus, it is not very big so it’s possible to walk everywhere, including to the beach, which from a distance looks clean and undisturbed. I cannot see trash floating in the water, either, which is promising. In some countries you cannot swim in the sea because there is so much crap floating around that it can make you sick. My daughter spent a summer semester in South Korea a few years ago, and told me she became fascinated with Korea’s ocean conservation program after swimming in the trash-filled waters off Jeju Island, not far from women in their seventies who were diving to harvest sea creatures for a living. In Israel, swarms of stinging jellies scare bathers off the beaches in hot summers, and in Monterey, once in a while, large blooms of toxic algae kill seabirds and intimidate the few human swimmers who brave the year-round frigid waters. I wonder what it would be like to swim here when the surf is not so high. But it’s too early to tell. I don’t know enough about this town or any other place in Portugal to be able to decide if I want to live here. I’m sure, though, that real estate prices here are much more affordable than in Lisbon, and I have yet to see a hill or a tourist.

“Are we ready to go?” Vera, the dedicated traveler, breaks the pleasant silence that allowed me to drift away for a few moments. “It’s starting to rain,” she clarifies as she rises from her chair.

She’s right. A few drops land on the table, signaling that soon we will need to look for shelter. I collect my pretty cork handbag and leave a few euros by my coffee glass as tip, hoping it would somehow improve the poor impression we undoubtedly made on the woman who served us. My long history as a waitress always comes to the fore when I witness bad behavior toward food servers or any person who belongs to the less fortunate proletariat. It’s part of who I am. It hasn’t made me a huge tipper, I confess, but it has made me a close observer of people, especially the self-entitled, obnoxious ones.

“Where are we going now?” Vera asks Rita on the way to the car.

“Nazaré,” she says.   

“How far is it?” Vera asks again. I wonder if she’s asking these questions to make conversation because when people talk it makes her feel that they are getting along fabulously, or if she’s really curious about the itinerary. Until now, she hasn’t given me the impression that she is super interested in where we are going.   

“About an hour,” Rita says, pressing on the remote key to unlock the car doors for us. Before I reach the car, Vera grabs the back door handle. 

“You sit in the front,” she says to me. All I can think is, I don’t think so. This is a test and I am not going to fail. The last thing I need is to give Rita fresh ammunition to argue later that I was inconsiderate to her mother and blah blah blah. Really. I am not that stupid. The moment she invited her mother to the trip, I accepted my fate that I was going to be relegated to the back seat for the entirety of this trip and nothing can convince me that letting a seventy-eight-year-old woman sit in the back would not come back to haunt me for the rest of my days. 

“It’s OK, Vera, I am fine in the back,” I lie to her.

“No, no, no, you sit in the front. I sat in the front all day yesterday. I’m fine sitting in the back seat,” she insists. 

I don’t know how to make this woman shut up and I don’t want to continue this embarrassing argument. “We’ll switch tomorrow,” I say, trying to kick the can down the road. 

“Anna, do you want to sit in the front?” She tries her luck again. What a relief. At least this exercise in generosity is not directed only at me. 

Anna shakes her head and mumbles something as she opens the back door and firmly situates herself inside the car. Through the window I can see her rummaging through her backpack for something. Maybe she is looking for a carrot or an apple.

“Mom, get in the car already, they don’t want to sit in the front, OK?” Rita loses her patience and interrupts this futile exchange.

Vera shrugs in protest and drops into the front seat. Before she slams the door shut, she turns to me and says, “I really don’t mind sitting in the back.”