O Mundo de Claudia: Portugal Archive

June 22, 2009

More Portogallo

R (still in shock over the low usability level of the Lisbon airport): Your slogan should be "Welcome to Portugal, where we unnecessarily complicate what could be extremely simple."

*****

(comparing passports - forgot to bring reading material for the flight)

The Portuguese Passports
First page has an illustration of a scene from a 500 year old poem glorifying the feats of the Portuguese explorers. The illustration features naked ladies which means that immigration officers in sexually repressed countries usually say "Hmmm, I'll have to take a closer look at this in my office before stamping it. I'll be right back." The naked ladies are a Goddess and her companions who, by swimming alongside it, save a Portuguese ship from the enemy. As in, "Christ! We're lucky the tide turned!". So much for confidence on their sea faring skills.

The American Passport
It's the pocket version of those unbearable motivational posters + cowboy movies cliche imagery. Whenever an american is abroad and is feeling overwhelmed by, say, the portuguese pessimism or general european cynicism, he/she can get a boost in their can-do attitude by opening the passport in a random page and reading some of the inspirational quotes printed above old wild west drawings. You know, stuff like "It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win" next to a cactus in a desert.

*****

C: The latest news is that 28 notable economists say that all the big public investment projects should be re-evaluated - as in stopped. You know, the high speed train connecting us to Spain and the rest of Europe, the new and hopefully bigger airport, more highways...
R: Uh? Yeah, isolation will solve all your problems.

******

Trying to get to the check in area in Lisbon Airport. For some unknown reason, you have to cross a security barrier to get to it.
C: Hmm. Check-in counters are in there right?
Security: Yes. You need your ticket in order to get through.
C: My what?
Security: You know, proof you're on a flight today.
C: Well, I won't get that until I check in.
Security: But when you booked it you must have been given a ticket.
C: It's an electronic ticket.
Security: Yes, where's your print out of it?
C: It's an electronic ticket. The point is to not have to print out anything. I show up at the check-in counter, hand them my ID and they give me my boarding pass.
(meanwhile a hundred portuguese people better informed about this silliness and with no love for trees go by me waving around their sheets of paper and being let in)
C (sorry she was too lazy to check in online): Look, I have a flight in 1.5 hours and I need to check in.
Security (condescending): Oh well, ok, but I shouldn't let you. Next time, print your electronic ticket.
C (I'll be damned if I ever check in here ever again): Uh...sure.

*****
First installment here.

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January 29, 2009

Portogallo

or an exercise in frivolous commentary on what's going on in the little rectangle by the sea as seen from the living room sofa. C reads the Portuguese headlines, the American R comments.

(published on the Guardian on the day after the 1974 revolution)

C: The teachers are on strike again.
R: Why?
C: They don't want to be evaluated and don't want their career progression to depend on the evaluation.
R: Are they all incompetent?

***

C: So, this sociologist says that only peasants would care to think of a personal achievement like Cristiano Ronaldo being elected best football player in the world as something that a country could be proud of and claim responsibility for. And that the silly optimists in the government are trying to use it to make people believe Portugal is better than they think.
R: Hasn't he heard of role models? Of an enabling environment? Of self confidence being the key to achieve stuff? You people need to be less hard on yourselves.
C: Well, he says that there are more important achievements like the lowering of the child mortality rate.
R: Yeah, the crowds go wild when you throw data at them.

***

C: The Portuguese are the most pessimistic in Europe about the economy.
R: About everything... you people need to relax.

***

Watching the Pt news online on Inauguration day. Supposedly, a happy day as seen from the heights of American optimism. Wrong.

R: Why are they spending so much time on Ted Kennedy?
C: They're saying his seizures at the luncheon ruined the whole day.
R: What?? The images we're watching right now of Obama and his wife smiling and shaking hands with the people are from after that happened. Do they look like their day was ruined to you?
C: Anyway.
The anchor addresses the american correspondent and asks him if the americans were disappointed at the speech.
R: What?? That's the first thing she asks? Why would they be disappointed? What the hell? You people are so negative.
Fast forward to "reactions from other heads of state to the inauguration". Somehow, the conclusion of the segment lingers gloomily on Putin's "From great expectations come great disappointments".
R: That's it. I'm not watching this crap anymore. I'm pretty sure the show ends with someone singing a weepy fado.

***

C: Ooops. There's a possibility the current PM got a 4 million euro bribe years ago when he was the Minister for the Environment...
R: Who's investigating it?
C: What do you mean? The Police, the DA...
R: Oh, so he doesn't control them?
C: My country isn't a banana republic!
R: Well, you started out the conversation by saying your PM might be corrupt...
C ignores him.

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June 27, 2007

Revenge

Araeen's Third Text magazine

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October 24, 2006

At the aftermath of the recent spanish changes, there's an ongoing debate about gay marriage here with the government dismissing it as not important at this time and as being a dividing issue.

I can't resist to summarize this three-fold comment by Miguel Vale de Almeida on the recent polls in which some newspapers/TV stations have asked random people if they agreed with same sex marriage - to which a vast majority of Portuguese people said no.

- the right to same sex marriage is a political one and not just a law issue or a moral issue: its denial goes to show how citizens are not treated equally before the law thus going against the Portuguese Constitution;
- on surveys about "values" they never ask if the respondent agrees with the situation of there being so few rich people and so many poor ones: it's a given fact, it's not questionable;
- why not come up with a survey to see if Portuguese people agree with letting women vote (they should be given alternatives such as "Yes, but their vote only should count as half" or "Yes, with the bulletin pre-filled by their husbands"); no one asks this because the right of women to vote is not a "values" related issue, it's the product of an unquestionable right to being treated equally.

++++

“I will never understand those who proclaim love as the foundation of life, while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues. What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?”

— José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Prime Minister, May 11, 2005

++++

“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.”

— Voltaire

++++

“Same-sex relationships have long been part of our African history and heritage. There is ample research illustrating that African people have loved and had sexual relationships with people of the same sex for hundreds of years. For example, in Namibia, Kenya, Nigeria and SA, bond friendships, ancestral wives, female husbands and male wives have existed for centuries as forms of same-sex relationships.

All these relationships were accepted and respected in Africa, long before Africa was colonised. In addition, these forms of partnerships and marriages were protected by common law. Same-sex practices have always been a part of our sexual desires, intimacy and practice. In SA, the practice has been traced among the Zulu, Lovedu, Sotho, Tswana and Venda tribes. It is important to understand the traditional and cultural institutions that form families, marriages, and clans before we pronounce on these matters.

There is no record of traditional African societies legislating against homosexuality. Such laws are a western import, manifested through colonial penal codes and the criminalisation of sodomy across the continent. So, one could argue with authority that it is homophobia, not homosexuality, that is un-African.”

— Fikile Vilakazi, editorial: “Protect South Africa from Sexual Apartheid”
in Business Day, September 7, 2006

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July 13, 2006

Stereotyping Portugueseness

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

--Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon disaster; Or an Examination of the Axiom, “All is Well”

*****

I am convinced Portugal is an island. Most times there's this claustrophobic feeling there is no way out of here, just an endless ocean in front of us, a sense of isolation. Portugal has the oldest unchanging borders in Europe. A whole identity based on myths and fictions and immobility. An old, old country that sees that the best it could have has already gone by. The sea here is much larger than anywhere else I've been. An abyss of water. On our backs there's this improbable Europe, miles and centuries away. There's also a huge country called Spain but whose inhabitants have nothing to do with us, we like to think. We cannot understand their pride and passion. There's only melancholy and nostalgia for an imagined past in the blue, cold ocean ahead. An overwhelming sense of the power of destiny that inspires lethargy and throws life in the hands of fortune.

A country of people obsessed with the meaning of being portuguese and that can't help themselves (ourselves) from writing about it.

*****

Malhoa, O Fado (1910)

*****

"E assim o génio de aventura, decaindo, transformou-se na mais completa falta de persistência. Ela aparece em todas as manifestações da nossa actividade, a cada passo interrompida ou abortada, o que a torna tristemente caricatural. Ei-la passeando o seu desânimo, pelas estradas que pararam, mortas de cansaço, a dois quilómetros do ponto de partida. E vive num belo edifício público sem telhado."

"And thus, the genius of adventure, decaying, has become an utter lack of persistence. It appears in all manifestations of our activity, at each step interrupted or aborted, which renders it as a sad caricature. There it is, showing off its lack of stamina in the roads that stopped, dying of exhaustion, a couple kilometers away from the starting point. And it lives in the beautiful roofless public building."

The Art of being Portuguese (1915) - Teixeira de Pascoaes

*****

"O já agora, e a variante popular Já que estás com a mão na massa..., significam a forma particularmente portuguesa do desejo. Os Portugueses não gostam de dizer que querem as coisas. Entre nós, querer é considerado uma violência. Por isso, quando se chega a um café, diz-se que se queria uma bica e nunca que se quer uma bica. Se alguém oferece, também, uma aguardente, diz-se: «Já agora.» Tudo se passa no pretérito, no condicional, na coincidência.(..) tudo o que sucede é absolutamente incontrolável. Por isso, a mentalidade do «já agora» traduz-se na ideia de que se deve aproveitar o acaso, já que nada mais se aproveita."

Note: "Já agora" is literally translated as "now now"; it actually means something like "As long as we are here...." or "Considering that this happened..."

"The 'Já agora' and the popular variation 'now that you're dealing with it'..., are examples of the particularly portuguese form of desire. The Portuguese don't like to say that they want something. Among us, wanting is considered an aggression. And so, when you go to a café, you say 'I could have an espresso' and never that you want an espresso. If anyone offers a brandy too, we say 'Já agora'. Everything happens in the past, in the conditional, in the coincidence.(...) anything that happens is totally uncontrollable. Therefore, the mentality of the 'já agora' gives meaning to the idea that you should take advantage of randomness, since you can't take advantage of anything else."

Explicações de Português(2001) - Miguel Esteves Cardoso

*****

Oh sea of salt, how much of your salt
Is tears of Portugal!
For us to cross you, how many mothers wept,
How many sons prayed in vain!
How many fiancees remained to be wed
In order that you be ours, oh sea!

Mensagem, Fernando Pessoa

*****

”O medo é medo do poder, mas também da impotência própria diante do poder. (...) O medo de «não estar à altura» impera, arruina as potencialidades criativas; medo que implica e arrasta outros, como o de ser avaliado, de ser julgado, de «ir a exame».”

"The fear is fear of power but also of the impotence in face of power.(...) The fear of not being up to the situation is ever present, ruining the creative potential; fear that implies and drags the others, like the fear of being evaluated, of being tried, of being examined."

Portugal today - the fear of existing (2004) - José Gil

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June 21, 2006

Gerês

Will someone please cut the top off that damned tree? It's ruining the view from Pousada de S.Bento.

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June 20, 2006

Bacchanalia

I don't think I ever used my blog to advertise anything (maybe a bookshop or two and my dentist :-) but I finally found a "product" I can sponsor with the greatest conviction.

A rainy evening in Porto. A crooked street near the the river Douro waterfront, in Miragaia. I called in advance to book a table and on the other side was someone who was not just booking tables but was trying to chat with me, addressing me by my name and asking if I knew how the restaurant worked. I dismissively said yes, believing it was one more of these places mushrooming all around offering a "menu degustation". How I was wrong.

I was surprised to find a tiny restaurant. The host introduced himself and asked for our names. From then on, a very presonal treatmet: "my good friend Claudia, please have a sip of this honeydew melon juice". On the table sat beakers bearing a greenish liquid. The lamp looked also like a beaker. Later I found that this was really a laboratory. Sensory experiments.

The host, Mario, brought chilled white wine and grapes "to dress the table". We were invited to taste the wine before and after having a grape. To feel the nuances between sweet and sour. We tasted different types of olive oil, we were given quizzes - which olive oil was used in the confection of this dish?, we were incited to moist the tips of our fingers with olive oil and flower of salt and suck them like kids. Mario, our host, is also the resident DJ; a cool, lounge music was playing. A popular party outside brought some new sounds and, while we waited for our next course, Mario invited us to take our white port glasses outside and dance. An unusual combination of tastes and smells were successively presented. He sprayed balsamic vinegar on my ice cream and you know what? It was delicious.

A series of the most carefully selected wines and tasty dishes - while we played with luminous gadgets - were accompanied by Mario's bright dissertations on smell, touch and taste.

A feast for the senses and a great experience. That is what I call service. And I'm not even talking about the food...

When we left, I almost felt like I just had dinner over at a good friend's place.

*****

À mesa com Bacchus
Rua de Miragaia, 127
4050-387 Porto
Tel: 222 000 896

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June 10, 2006

So cute

Google is commemorating Portugal Day with us.

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May 15, 2006

Labyrinths

El laberinto de la soledad / The labyrinth of solitude - Octavio Paz
O labirinto da saudade / The labyrinth of saudade - Eduardo Lourenco

A Mexican poet and a Portuguese philosopher. Both tried to put into an essay what means to belong or to be born in their respective countries.

I like it how soledad and saudade sound similar but carry different meanings. Soledad meaning solitude and saudade being that very Portuguese word for the longing for other person or time that is gone.

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March 27, 2006

I am intermittently afflicted by periods of portugueseness. Meaning that I am not much of a patriot but sometimes I get hyper conscious of how being Portuguese has a big role on who I am, on my personal identity. And suddenly I have this urge to explore this feeling of portugueseness just as I would explore a newly found land.

I don't often speak ill of my country as does the common Portuguese person (whining and complaining but not trying to solve the problem is kind of a national sport) nor do I overpraise it. But I went to the old books fair and suddenly I noticed I was carrying 3 books about the Lusiads. Such a great national epic poem. Homer who?

(it took me a while to get over the fact that it was mandatory to read it in school; everything tastes more sweet when it's not forced down your throat)

++++++

Os Lusíadas ("The Lusiads") is considered one of the finest and most important works in Portuguese literature. Written by Luís de Camões in the Homeric fashion, and first printed in 1572, this epic poem focuses mainly on a fantastical interpretation of the Portuguese discoveries movement, in the 14th through 17th centuries. It is often regarded as Portugal's "national epic", much in the same way as Virgil's The Aeneid is for the Romans.

In Os Lusíadas, Camões presents the Portuguese people as descendants from Lusus, companion of Dionysus and mythical founder of Lusitania, and loosely describes the country's history until the mid 16th century — concentrating on giving a heroic edge to the journey of Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea.

Consisting of ten 'cantos,' Os Lusíadas documents the voyage of Vasco da Gama from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope, along the Eastern coast of Africa, and eventually finding some respite in Melinde, of present day Kenya. From there, da Gama and his crew travel onward to India and the East, eventually finding their reward on the Isle of Love.

--in the Wikipedia

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March 12, 2006

The Streets of Lisbon

Whenever I can, I go in the Gulbenkian's Modern Art Center and just stand there looking at this.

Anna Hatherly, The Streets of Lisbon 1977

I always get a bit emotional looking at this collage. When I was a child, the walls of the streets of Lisbon were covered by political propaganda. Beautiful murals, walls crammed with posters glued one on top of another.This reminds me of my childhood and of a brand new country, born out of a revolution. It reminds me when the future was open and everything seemed possible. It reminds me of a people who were once euphoric because they felt they were finally free. Of how lucky I am for not being born under a dictatorship but, instead, being born on one of the happiest moments of a nation. A moment when, as the slogan stated, "poetry is in the streets".

And I'm not making any judgements about the political choices made back then. These are emotional memories which I have chosen not to critically review. I am just grateful to be born into a time where ideals were taken seriously, whatever form they took. I felt that I was born into a prison whose doors were opened. Everyone was running wild. Music and poetry everywhere. Old people were being alphabetized. Women could vote. There were never ending lines of people to see movies that had been censored before.

I particularly remember how children's day was a big event. How April was a synonym of freedom. How a red carnation was really more than just a flower. How there was this wave of solidarity towards countries under dictatorships or going though wars. Especially Chile - which may explain why I have this hate for Pinochet; Neruda's poems were finally read out loud. How my parents would tell me that, just a couple years ago, the books that sat on our shelves would be reason enough for them to go to jail. How my mother remembered that, as a child, the whole family secretly and silently gathered round the radio set and my grandfather would tune the BBC - the only way to know what was really happening in the world as the news outlets were controlled by the government. How my father remembered that the family of his best childhood friend vanished one night, how he got to their house in the morning and there was broken furniture everywhere - the police had taken them all for opposing the regime. How some of their friends were killed on a stupid war in Africa which was the last pathetic attempt to maintain the colonies of that moribund Portuguese Empire. How my father discovered that he was under surveillance by the regime's police and how he would probably have been - if not worse - interrogated if there hadn't been a coup.

++++

Ok. Historical context ahead (have to keep in mind that 2/3 of my visitors are not Portuguese):

More on the Carnation Revolution on the Wikipedia.
More on the regime's police - PIDE - here.

++++

25 DE ABRIL

Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo

April, 25th

This is the dawn that I longed for
The first day whole and clean
when we emerge from the night and from the silence
and free we inhabit the substance of time

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

++++

Assorted stickers; obscure little parties that were mushrooming everywhere; the newly born unions;new cultural centers; the agrarian reform and so on, and so on.

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November 07, 2005

My thighs hurt like hell

Another R&A guided hike. This time we walked (and climbed steep, rocky hills) from Cabo Espichel to Sesimbra. A great opportunity to go to some small, pretty beaches which are usually only accessible by boat.

"The Sea is Water's exaggerated way of not being shy." - Gonçalo M. Tavares in A perna esquerda de Paris

(author exchange with Sunday Morning and founding out that Pedro is blogging too)

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October 27, 2005

Feeling like a foreigner

On the last post before my holidays I quoted Chesterton:

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

So were I a foreigner and I would probably blog about:

- Portugal's banking system shuts down at 5am. Never try to pay anything with your VISA card at that hour: that's when they're "restarting the servers" :-))) Even the ATM's: "For technical reasons you are not allowed to withdraw more than 25 Euros"!!!

- A musical time warp: in every hotel, restaurant or shop it's playing music from the 80's. Really. Everywhere. Alphaville rules.

- Only a Portuguese person will feel it's natural that an old woman's gigantic panties are hanging outside a window on the ground floor; in the middle of a street in the Castle district in Lisboa;

- Will have to give this another thought: "Portuguese people like to look at problems from different angles, appreciate the exploring of possibilities but never really come up with a solution." - which could explain the high level of hours spent in meetings in every company or public institution in this country with little results;

Other random thoughts not really in any way related to Portugal but holidays-induced:

- Why does it take me no more than 5 minutes to check in at the airport counter but every other passenger ahead of me takes... forever? (e.g. people who chat God-knows-what-about with the assistant for ages or those who, carrying two carts with 37.987 bags, look very surprised when they're told they've got to pay for having exceeded the luggage weight limit)

- Another one I have to spare a bit of time to think about: the relationship between memory and olfact. There are some feelings that can be "felt" again by smelling something that evokes a memory. It's not that the smell brings back only the memory of the feeling but also the feeling itself. Like Proust's madeleine.

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September 22, 2005

Casino

Estoril, Portugal

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February 20, 2005

Portugal won!

Today was election day. Whatever the results, Portugal won. The first estimates show that there was a higher than usual participation rate. It comforts me that my fellow citizens wake up whenever the country is going down the drain...and I prefer not to describe any humiliating details about this last government (and believe me, there are plenty).

Not to mention the most ridiculous campaign song I have ever heard and the most embarrassing campaign letter I ever got in the mail - the current prime minister, a dreadful socialite, tried to play the victim of some weird, farfetched conspiracy.

By the way, fortunately this last prime minister wasn't properly elected, he stepped in to substitute Durão Barroso who suddenly left us to be the President of the European Commission (and turn Portugal into the original Banana Republic). Great timing.

More about these portuguese political depressing times on BBC and on Der Spiegel.

I always have a hard time picking the party to vote for. There are a few automatically excluded (the monarchics, the radical right, the extremely small crazy either left or right wing parties). My results at the political compass quiz might explain my difficulties... There isn't a political party in Portugal which is barely in the middle between left and right - economically speaking - and, at the same time, insanely libertarian...

The political compass has a very interesting and simple concept: instead of classifying your choices between left and right (which is the economic scale), there is an axis representing the social scale (libertarian vs. authoritarian):

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November 03, 2003

The Cemetery of Pleasures

Only in Portugal would you have a Cemetery of Pleasures and a Holy Ghost Bank.

The cemetery of pleasures (Cemitério dos Prazeres) is named after Our Lady Of Pleasures: now, THIS is an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms).

I'm interested in funerary art, especially in gravestone symbolism. This cemetery is very rich in symbols whether they are religious, masonic, profession-related or heraldic.

I took some pictures of a few interesting ones. This one is the from the mausoleum of a newspaper co-founder: