Tuesday night, midnight:
I am sitting out on our long terrace, overlooking the plaza.
A jazz fusion band is playing at the bar across and over, “Easy Like Sunday Morning.”
Great song.
Technically, however, it is now "Easy Like Wednesday Morning."
We just got back from dinner at the little local cafe, where we had a litre of red house wine and grilled white fish.
It was so good.
I had an espresso on the way back, and now I am drinking mint tea as Gail settles in to sleep. The terrace door is open, so she is listening in bed, while watching the BBC.
I know when I turn in I’ll have to turn off the TV.
This whole scene o the plaza might go till 1:00 or 2:00 or later… you either have to get used to the buzz or close up all the windows and doors if you want to sleep.
We prefer the buzz. It is very comforting in a way.
I am wearing my fleece out here. It is surprisingly cool in the evenings, especially compared to the balmy summer nights at home.
I am wondering how I will get my feet back into shoes after fifty days barefoot and in sandals.
How will I wear long pants to work after an entire summer in shorts?
And what about the afternoon siesta wine and tapas breaks in the heat of the afternoon?
Sigh*
Today we did chores in the morning.
We picked up our bus tickets to Porto, for Thursday morning.
We dropped a load of laundry off across town. We pick it up tomorrow. €12 and no worries.
On our way through town we stopped in at the market center, like a big farmers’ market indoors, under a huge roof, like a train station. They had fruits, vegetables, cheese and sausage, sardines drying on the wire racks the old way, and trays of cockles, barnacles, clams, and snails.
Percebes.
That is what they call barnacles here. They are a specialty of the region, so I had some at siesta break.
They are surprisingly good. You kind of snap off the “stem” from the “head” and eat the inside. They are a little chewy, like a clam, but they taste of salt air, the ocean and sunshine.
When you eat a barnacle, you are eating the ocean essence.
I think they would taste great in Trinidad, or perhaps up on the Oregon coast.
But they are best here, with a cold beer.
We ordered a litre of wine, and took half of it home in an empty water bottle to have tonight. I just finished the last glass of it a little it ago. I ate percebes and grilled shrimps; Gail had a white cod salad.
We took the ascensor to the top of the town, called Sítio, up on the cliffs. We could have walked, but for a euro, why not take the easy way? The view from the top is spectacular, and the overhanging cliffs are jaw dropping. And a little scary. You just hope that today is not the day that they will break off.
The biggest balcony that hangs over is called the Belvedere.
There is a monument to Vasco de Gama, the explorer, up on top.
The church and a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary recall the story of the guy riding full speed, chasing a deer. He chased the deer right up to the cliff, where it plunged to its death, but the Virgin Mary suddenly and miraculusly appeared to the horseman and kept him from going over the cliff as well.
Now all sorts of shrines are dedicated to this event.
The lesson here: God and the Virgin Mary hate animals.
Think about it logically. Why are the people always being saved, but the animals are not?
Seriously.
It sucks to be an animal in god’s kingdom.
And we are the ones doing all the destruction… yet somehow god only saves us.
Huh.
Poor deer.
We walked past a vendor’s stand, and Gail spied a sugar-coated fig and suddenly had to have one. Not a hundred grams, not five, just one. SO she went up and offered the lady €0,30 for one, but the lady just shrugged and gave it to her for free.
Nice.
These are the differences with Morocco:
1. No flies around the food.
2. If someone in Morocco gave you a fig, ten people involved in the process would want their tip.
We spent a couple hours of the afternoon on the beach, then went to the room and sat on the patio resting and reading.
The sunset was beautiful behind the cliffs, we enjoyed a late dinner and then listened to the jazz band from our patio until we fell asleep (sometime past 1:00 as I am still writing this and it is now 1:05).
It has been a great day.
I am up early again, out about 6AM drinking coffee, watching the drunks from last night stumble and yell their way home.
It is a ratio of about 25 guys to one girl, and those few women are being pursued, like dogs chasing a rabbit.
I can see where this would be the downside of living in one of these nice, European towns: summers filled with drunken tourists.
We were talking about just this very thing this afternoon while eating. What would it REALLY be like to live here? For instance, I love the very silent, still nights at home, when you only hear the occasional coyote howl or owl hoot, and once in a while a car might go by. On the other hand, part of what I like so much about Europe is the comforting buzz from the cafés going late at night; the clink of the dishes and coffee cups, the quiet but constant buzz of conversations till 2:00, the church bells ringing.
But, and this is true mostly in these beach resorts, not so much in the cities and little country villages, there is a time around two or three in the morning when the peaceful buzz turns into the drunken shouting and yelling and crashing.
We walked all the way down the beach to the harbor, looking at the few remaining fishing boats left on the sand for tourists like us. In the old days they had no harbor, so just like we saw in Salema, they used a tractor to pull the boats out and push them in each day. Before that they used oxen. But Nazaré grew up and became a resort area with an actual harbor, and no one wants to lie on oxen poop in the sand, (it ruins the tan I hear) so now the boats stay in the harbor, the oxen are out to pasture, and people like me take photos of the same four, brightly painted boats so we can say, “I was here.”
Near the end of the beach they have these racks of fish. There are wooden frames, like thick, big picture frames, with wire netting stretched on them. Women sit with buckets of sardines and some other fish and octopi, but mostly sardines, and they quickly gut and split the sardines and set them on the racks to dry in the sun. The racks are under netting so the millions of seagulls circling above don’t get any ideas. As you can imagine, it stinks here. This is not a popular area of the beach for people to tan. But now I can say, “I was here."
We walked to the laundry, and when we walked in the door the laundry lady, who met us exactly once when we dropped our clothes off, took one look at me, turned and grabbed the right bag and handed them to me. I was astounded that she remembered us. I didn’t even have to use the “fetch my clothes” ticket. Then, walking home, the waiter from the dinner place we ate at last night, he saw us on the street and ran over to say hi.
Funny how quick you become known in some places.
We went early to the beach hoping to beat the crowds (we didn’t) and to miss the afternoon wind (we did, but got the morning wind instead). I had sand in my teeth when we left today. But it was relaxing and the roar of the waves was tremendous.
This is our last “hang out at the beach day” of our trip.
In thinking back at all the beaches we have been to this trip, Asilah, Mirleft and Sidi Ifni in Morocco, Tarifa, Nerja and San Jose in Spain, Salema, Lagos and Nazaré here in Portugal we both agree Salema was our favorite.
We ate lunch after beach time, back at our little hangout at the top of the boardwalk.
I had another helping of barnacles with “green” wine, which is young, bubbly dry white wine. It turned out to be the perfect combination.
Then I tried the cockles. I was unsure of what cockles even were, maybe swirly shell things? Turns out that all those small, well formed, colorful ridged clam shells you find at the beach are not clam shells. They are cockles. So think of miniature clams and you have it. An order was €5 and ended up being a huge bowl; they were great,with a good broth.
I had to have just one last order of their shrimp as well. After this I was pretty full, and not thinking about dinner at all.
Gail, meanwhile, had tuna salad.
What did we do this afternoon for four hours? It is hard to describe.
Everything.
And nothing.
If I die tomorrow, I hope the last view I have fixed in my brain is that from today. Or from one of the other European places we have been like this.
We sat in a café and ate slow, drank and watched.
We watched the beach, the multi colored flutter of the tents, the rainbow assortment of the umbrellas.
We watched the waves crash in, building to a roar.
We watched the girls in their shorts and heels strolling by, or their littlest of bikinis, checking each other out as they passed.
We saw the old ladies in thier wraps of petticoats, turning them into old, sun baked lumps of women, and tried hard to think of them as the long legged girls at one time.
We watched the shadows move and shift, the fishing boats return and slide, one at a time into the harbour.
There is a big event this Saturday: a bullfight here. There is this van, just parked by the beach, with loudspeakers on it, blaring out bullfight music and making this announcement over and over. There are posters up all over town, and it looks so flashy. Too bed we will be gone.
But wait! One poster has a little line on it: The bull will not be killed.
Huh?
What’s the point then?
That’s like a Wold Cup Soccer final and by the way, no score will be kept.
If I was going to a bullfight, I want to see a fight, and blood, and honestly I don’t care whose blood.
Here’s a tidbit for you: Nazaré is named for Nazareth.
That’s the only part I know.
We returned to room for some reading and writing, and Gail kept trying to figure out that nursery rhyme that has “silver bells and cockle shells… da duh da duh da duh.”
So I just googled it.
Mary Mary, Quite Contrary, how does your garden grow?
Turns out, by the way, that like so many of the other nursery rhymes, this one is not nice, and talks about torture under Queen “Bloody" Mary.
We decided to enjoy our patios and just stay in tonight, so we went out and got a Mr. Pizza, take out. We grabbed a bottle of wine and a bottle of gas water at the market, and hustled up to the room, where we sat in the dark and watched the plaza below. It is cold enough for a fleece at night here, though I am still wearing shorts and am barefoot.
In the dark, the lighthouse blinks, marking time.
The moon is coming on toward full, maybe another five days.
We will be in Lisbon by then, getting ready to head home.
The end of our trip is crashing in on us like the waves.