Tickets Please!

Buses. Taxis. Trains. Oh, the tedium! What with all my recent car trouble (I won't labour the point any further...) I've been using an awful lot of public transport to get myself about places. And it's getting somewhat tiresome.

The first thing you have to contend with if you want to use public transport to get anywhere is buying a ticket. And you'd think that after living here for a year that I wouldn't have any problems doing exactly that, but you'd be wrong. A year ago, when I first arrived, I would use the buses quite frequently to get to the shops, or to the beach, and so forth. And I'd step on and ask for a ticket. Two Euros and fifteen Cents each they'd cost. Blimey! Even with one free toddler it was an expensive business getting the family around. Then someone told me not to bother and to use taxis instead, which cost around a fiver to get to the supermarket or beach. But with a family of five many taxi drivers wouldn't allow us to travel; some would, with my littlest one on my knee, but most would not. And then I discovered "Pre-Comprado" or "Pre-Buy" bus tickets which came in two, four and eight journey varieties. The eight trip ones came in at around a Euro per journey and so I thought that my prayers had been answered. Free travelling toddlers considered, this meant I could get my entire family to the beach for the extraordinarily low price of four Euros. And that was it. My journey along the road of cheap public transport had reached it's destination. Well, it had for buses at least. Trains were another matter. Again, a year ago I bought some train tickets to allow my family and I to travel along the Cascais branch line that runs from Lisboa, along the coast to Cascais, and I thought that I had it sussed. The tickets came in the form of a re-usable green card with a microchip inside that I could recharge with tickets at any number of payment machines in the stations. Except they didn't seem to work on the Lisboa Metro system, which I'd read on travel websites that they should. After queueing up at a ticket booth to talk to an actual person, it came to light that I'd charged our tickets up in the wrong way. Instead of charging them with distinct tickets, I should have charged them up with "Zapping", that is, just a monetary value which would decrease by the correct amount every time I scanned it through the machine to use the train or Metro. Fantastic!

All was well with the ticket situation until last week, when the bus company decided to kill off the "Pre-Comprado" tickets and instead replaced them with rechargeable "Zapping" cards identical to the ones that you can use on the trains. Except they aren't the ones you can use on the trains. They look the same and they work in exactly the same manner. Except that now I need to keep two of them in my wallet; one for the trains and one for the buses. The train one I can recharge at a machine in the train station and the bus one I can recharge at the kiosk in the bus station. Easy as pie. Or so it seems right now. I can't wait until next week when everybody's bus ticket needs recharging and suddenly the queues at the kiosks grow to 20 or 30 people long with everyone desperate to recharge their ticket before the once-hourly bus leaves in 30 seconds time. It will be ridiculously farcical I'm sure. Perhaps that won't happen. Perhaps everyone will be organised enough to leave plenty of time to get their bus ticket charged, but I very much doubt it.

Of course, once you have your ticket, and have successfully validated it in whatever the appropriate machine is for your journey, you can get on, find a seat and settle down to enjoy your journey, yes? No. Not enjoy. Endure. The main reason that the vast majority of people travelling around from place A to place B do their travelling in their shiny magic wheeled boxes called Cars is because they don't want to have to share their journey with anyone else, isn't it? For me personally I can live with the crying children. I can live with having to stand because there are no seats left. What is difficult is the paradigm of having to travel in a carriage with many other people who are all absolutely intent of pretending that they are the only person travelling. It's a kind of strange version of Lift Embarrassment. You know, that awkward silence that happens when you get in a lift and everyone is staring at the blank silver metal walls desperately trying to avoid making any kind of eye contact with anybody else. This strange effect of quietly sharing transport under the pretense that you are alone is compounded when one or more travellers decide to break the silence and suddenly talk, either into their mobile phone or to the person next to them, and almost inevitably, in a loud enough voice for the entire carriage to overhear the conversation. And even though I can't understand most of what is being said, since it is usually being said in Portuguese, I somehow still feel embarrassed to be listening in.

However, like I said, I can deal with all that; the awkward silences; the crying children; the surprise changes to the ticketing systems. None of that is a real problem. The main disappointing aspect of public transport is of course the inescapable fact that, inevitably, if you want to get from A to B, that you have to wait for the bus or train to arrive before you can start your journey. For me to get to work I have to ride a bus for eight minutes (according to the timetable) and then a train for nine minutes (again, according to the timetable) followed by a short walk up the tree lined driveway, and yet because of all the waiting involved, the entire journey can take me fifty minutes. The journey home is even worse, since there is only one bus per hour and if the train timetable doesn't sync up with the bus one it can take up to an hour and fifteen minutes to get home. And that really grinds, doesn't it?

Perhaps I'm being somewhat unfair? Public transport isn't all bad. (Should there be a "that" before the word "bad" in the previous sentence? I'm not sure.) It's cheap and environmentally friendly. It's reliable. Well, mostly. And this morning it was even kind of relaxing. Yes, that is what I said. Relaxing. I was on the train and it was quite busy. I had to stand up, near the door. I looked down the carriage at all the people sitting and looking out of the train windows at the houses going by and the occasional glimpse of the sea in between the apartment blocks. A significant number of people were flicking through the morning paper or quietly chewing their way through a nice thick book. The gentle murmur of the few talkers almost completely drowned out by the hypnotic clickety clack of the rails. And I thought to myself that this journey has to be better than sitting in a car in some traffic jam somewhere, doesn't it? Nobody was getting stressed about whether or not they were going to be there on time. No one was gesticulating wildly about the incompetence of the other road users. At that very moment in time (and for a whole nine minutes!) it all seemed very calm and pleasant.

So Public Transport isn't all that bad. But? Will I be happy when I have a car again and not have to worry about making certain to be standing in the bus shelter by twenty past seven every morning? Will I be happy when I can get home after a long day in fifteen minutes flat? You bet I will!

Summer Is Over. Or Is It?

By 'eck it rained on Saturday night. It absolutely blooming threw it down. I was staying up late, watching a certain Mr Schwarzenegger kill a particularly nasty alien Predator, when I nodded off on the sofa, like you do when you're watching a film that you've seen at least 4 or 5 times before. And then I woke up. At first I wasn't exactly sure what was happening, like you don't when you are woken up suddenly by a strange noise outside. The television was proudly displaying the words "Sem Sinal" in the middle of the screen, indicating that it was, as the message says, "Without Signal." This was the final clue that I needed to understand what was happening through my dozy haze. No signal on the telly. It must be raining. Anyone who lives here and has a massive dish on the roof for receiving foreign telly (or has been reading my blog from the start and paying attention) will tell you that you can't watch the satellite telly when it's raining.

It was a massive release. Quite literally in that the heavens had opened in a most dramatic way, but also in a more figurative fashion too. Having not had any rain since May, it was as if the very Earth itself was breathing a sigh of relief to feel the moisture in it's soil. As the torrent came down I stood with the patio doors open, looking on, watching the dry dust from between the cobbles being thrown up into the air a couple of inches due to the sheer force of the rain hitting the floor. I stood there for about five or maybe ten minutes, watching and listening to the rain. Standing there in awe, like a person who'd never seen rain before. And then, as if some great universal entity was intent on making sure that I knew exactly what rain was, the downpour got heavier. The droning pitch of white noise suddenly went up a semi-tone (or there abouts? I'm not pitch perfect!) as the rain continued with a renewed vigour. Smell was the next of my senses to become aware of the assault, as I realised that the air had that clarity and freshness to it that a heavy rainfall brings. I stood there for maybe a minute longer before thinking that it was time to hit the sack. The film was no longer an option and I'd already nodded off on the sofa anyway, so what else was I to do? However, the compulsion to watch the rain for a few minutes more from the higher vantage point of the upstairs window was strong, and so I stood for a while looking out over the village and across the valley, in sheer wonderment at the rain pouring down onto the houses and gardens, forming rivers in the roadside gutters, washing away the dry summer.

When I awoke on Sunday morning and looked out into our garden it was clear to see the aftermath of the torrent. Sodden piles of leaves had collected in the nooks and crannies and a few small muddy puddles remained. The air was refreshingly calm and cool. By mid morning the puddles were starting to dry out and throughout the day the air remained clear and the temperature remained lower than it previously had been.  In the middle of the afternoon another brief (and much less forceful) shower hit, as if to serve as a reminder to the downpour of the previous evening, but it was not to last.

At work yesterday the number one topic of conversation was the rain. And not one single solitary person had anything bad to say about it! Quite the contrary in fact. Many were raving about how fantastic Saturday night's storm had been and others were being a little more down-to-earth about things and merely stating how good it was for their gardens. For whatever reasons people were unanimously happy about the rain. This may seem a little strange to many, but when you have months without any rain at all, and then it absolutely hammers it down, it's a good thing.

This morning the weather was the same as it was yesterday. Cloudy and warm with a fresh wind, but no rain. Well maybe a few drops, but it didn't come to anything. Then, this evening, just as my wife and children were coming home from work and school, the heavens opened once again. It's not been quite as torrential as it was on Saturday night but it has lasted longer. Three hours on and it's still raining. I reckon it will stop soon.

So, is summer over? Technically, I suppose so, yes. Autumn is almost certainly here. But you have to remember that last October was really hot and sunny. And of course you have to also remember that Portuguese rain comes down all at once, not like that horrid English Drizzle. There's hope yet for more sunny days to come. Yes, many more sunny days.

Wine Making Time Again

Yesterday morning I was busying myself with being lazy when suddenly my wife called to me from the garden. She'd spotted in the street the man that cuts our hedges for us, Senhor P, who was apparently back from his month long Algarve holiday. Now our hedges grow pretty quickly and after a month of not being cut they are positively rampant. And so out I went, eager to grab him and ask him if he could give them a good trim sometime this week. With the obligatory Portuguese handshakes and courteous greetings out of the way I asked my question, he replied that he could, and I handed him the spare garden gate key. And then I noticed the buckets.

It was about this time last year when I first met Senhor P doing exactly what he was doing yesterday, which was fetching buckets of grapes from out of the back of his car and carrying them down the alleyway, past our front gate, and into his back yard. Thinking back a year, Senhor P must have thought I was a very strange man indeed, because with only a "Por favor!" (I really only knew my Portuguese P's and Q's back then) I'd simply grabbed a bucket in each hand and started helping to carry his grapes to his yard. And indeed I must have been a strange and very naive man back then because it was only when I first stepped into his yard that I realised what he had destined for his grapes. Of course, this year, as soon as I saw the buckets of grapes I knew what was going on and with a hearty, "Ah! Vinho!", and a quick mime of stamping on grapes, proceeded to continue my year old neighbourly tradition, reached down for a couple of buckets and walked off down the alley with them!

In his back yard he had the same equipment that he had last year, namely a large four foot tall, perhaps five foot diameter red bucket on top of which was a simple machine consisting of a hopper, some grinding gears and a turning handle. After the grapes had been weighed, on a handy set of bathroom scales, his son and I took turns in lifting up and pouring the grapes into the hopper while Senhor P himself took the important job of turning the handle. The grapes went through, along with the stalks and even a few leaves, coming out of the other side crushed and juicy, landing with a wet sloppy sounding 'Splat' in the bottom of the enormous red bucket.  While all this was going on I asked him how many litres of wine he would be making from these grapes. He replied that for every kilo and a half of grapes (or at least that's what I thought he said) he would get about one litre of wine. He then told me that we'd carried through about 80 kilos of grapes today but that he was getting a further 400 kilos on Tuesday. "That's about 320 litres", I thought to myself. My next thought was, "That's enough for one litre every day for the whole year, not counting his month in the Algarve", which surprised me at first, but then I thought about it for a moment more and realised that he must have always been planning to ferment more than the initial paltry 80 kilos considering the size of the large red container currently taking up at least a third of his back yard. It's only now, as I type this, that the thought crosses my mind that all that wine might not actually be just for him. After all, I know that he has a wife and at least two sons, one of which is married, to help him drink it all.

And so, grapes all crushed, the job was complete for now. Being neighbourly, I offered my services again to lift buckets of grapes on Tuesday, said farewell and made off down the alleyway. I hadn't got far when he called me back. Dutifully I returned to his yard wondering why he might have called me back and as I turned the corner through his gate I saw him coming out of his workshop with a bottle in one hand and two shot glasses in the other. "Ginja?" he asked? The English sensibility in me took over and so initially I declined. The prospect of getting drunk on my neighbour's home brewed firewater on a Saturday morning was not a good one. Besides, I'd heard of this drink for the first time only a couple of weeks ago, at a local Festa where a nice lady selling Ginja shots in chocolate cups had described the drink as a sweet liquer. However, Senhor P insisted that I have one and I didn't want to seem rude or ungrateful. As he poured us both a glass I told him that I'd seen the drink at the Festa, to which he laughed and explained that the stuff he made was completely different. Of course anyone who's ever tasted and kind of home brew will know that it never is anything like the commercial brands, so I really had no clue what to expect. Well, it wasn't really sweet to be honest. I mean, there was a hint of fruitiness in there, but a sour fruitiness. There was a distinctly Brandy like flavour behind the fruitiness though, and it certainly had a kick. My god, it had a kick. He offered me a second glass, which I declined. And judging by how clumsy I became half an hour later, that was probably a good decision!

Football Crazy!

I sat in the local bar last Friday night watching Chelsea FC losing badly to Atletico Madrid. Just after half time the landlord ushered me and my drinking buddy through to the back dining room. Now I knew this room existed, having previously watched people coming out of it through the narrow doorway, past the end of the bar area, with smiles on their faces indicating that they had satisfactorily filled their stomachs to bursting. However, what soon became apparent, was that he wanted to show off his new addition to the dining room, namely a very familiar looking large white sheet of plywood screwed to the wall. I instantly recognised this board as being the very same one that had previously been precariously balanced up against the wall in the main bar for use as a projection screen during the Euro 2012 football tournament. And so here it was again, in it's more permanent position, with Chelsea and Madrid battling it out in the relative dark of the dining room in super-gigantico-vision. Being projected onto the wall in such a massive way didn't seem to be helping Chelsea out much though! For those who care, the full time score was 4-1 to Madrid. Anyway, having felt suitably awed by the spectacle, and also a little uncomfortable at being singled out as the Inglês who'd be interested in the big screen, we retired back into the main bar to watch the remainder of the game on the regularly sized television. To be honest I was that focused on the game, and instead spent some considerable time harping on about my car, but as my regular readers well know, that's another story.

Anyway, previously that day, while at work, I had already had a football related conversation with one of my new colleagues. The nature of my job is split among two departments and I was being questioned as to where my true allegiance lay, by means of a football metaphor, to whit, was I supporting Benfica or Sporting? Focusing completely on the football analogy and ignoring any reference to work I replied, "Well, neither actually." as I retrieved my newly acquired Estoril Praia football club season ticket from my wallet and proudly flicked it down on the table between us.

My brother once said on my facebook page that the heat of the Portuguese sun had altered my brain because of my new found fascination for football. Back in Blighty I was not into football in the slightest. My main hobby was playing bass guitar in a metal band and the other guys in the band were all into football in a massive way. There were occasions where we'd have to re-arrange rehearsals because of an important cup tie or league game. The reality of course is that I haven't acquired this fondness for the beautiful game in so much as had it thrust upon me. It's difficult in these parts to avoid the game with Estoril Praia's stadium five minutes walk down the road and two of Portugal's biggest teams in Lisboa only half an hour's drive away. Perhaps the sun has gone to my head? Perhaps not. With my old band mates we always had music to fall back upon when the football conversation got too much for me, but here, it's either football or work. Ah well, what's a man to do, eh?

Last weekend was the first home match for Estoril Praia this season and so, of course, wanting to make the most use out of my season ticket I went. And I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the match, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. It was almost comical watching the teams run out onto the pitch and line up with the referees and linesmen between them. The opposition were clearly used to playing difficult games against the likes of Benfica and were obviously substantially more muscular than the skinny Estoril players! It was immediately apparent from the first kick of the ball that Estoril's opponents had every intention of putting those extra muscles to full use and beat us to every tackle and every header. Well, not quite. There was a fleeting moment about 4 minutes into the game when Estoril had a cross in to the penalty box with an open goal, but alas, the striker struck, and missed! He missed the ball! I cannot believe he missed the ball. It was like watching a clip from an episode of "You've Been Framed." Alas, we were very lucky to pull back a penalty in the closing minutes of the second half and equalise to a final score of one goal apiece.

Yesterday I took the liberty of checking up on Estoril Praia's standings on the Liga Zon website and was very pleasantly surprised to see that we'd had another good match. As you can see from following this link, the third game this season was against Vitória Guimarães, to whom we drew 2-2. What's more is that we'd apparently had a fantastically dramatic match, if the little graph is anything to go by; One-nil up, then two-nil just after half time and numerous yellow cards on both sides before Guimarães made one back. And it's truly a shame that Guimarães pulled that second goal of theirs out of the hat at the 94th minute, as a win would have put Estoril significantly higher up the table. Ah well. I suppose there is still a very slim chance that Sporting will lose to Marítimo on the 16th and stay at the bottom of the league. A very slim chance indeed.