Portugal

Just as we all descended upon Connecticut for Nana and Pop-Pop’s 70th birthdays last year, this spring it was time for Morfar’s 70th, to be celebrated down at his home in Portugal.  We had all been having a rough half year or so, and were tired and stressed and browbeaten by the endless damp chill of the Danish spring.  We couldn’t get out of here soon enough.

On Saturday morning, May 12, we drove down to Mormor & Jørgen’s.  Moster Mette had arrived at their place the night before.  The seven of us joined forces and boarded the Metro for the airport.

A three-and-a-half hour flight later we arrived at Lisbon airport.  Morfar was waiting for us when we stepped out of customs — or the unmanned “Nothing to Declare” gateway that now passes for customs on intra-European flights — and we spend a pleasant hour or so in the airport garage waiting for his man Friday Mikhail to arrive with the second car.  (Mikhail had gotten lost.)

After that hour ticked by, we got some ice cream and let the girls play a little.

By the time we got to the house it was about 10:30 pm and everyone was exhausted.  Maddie and Molli Malou had passed out in the car; Maddie could not be stirred and was set directly to bed, Molli Malou came excitedly to life and joined us for our fabulous 11pm dinner.

None of us really had any idea where we were or what was going on.  We had a lovely meal and then wandered to our various bedrooms and collapsed…

And woke up realizing, Hey!  We’re in PORTUGAL!  Wheeeee!

(If this was a video, see, the exciting music would have been cued there.)

It was probably about 85F when we woke up: we wasted no time heading out to the pool.  You can see it’s still in its morning shade.

The view had been mostly dark emptiness the night before: now it opened itself up before us.

At least, for those of us willing to look out from the pool…

After breakfast — and oh, what breakfasts we ate every day! — after breakfast that first day, the girls and I wandered around the property.

And finally the girls got their wish: the chance to touch and be photographed near a palm tree!  (I so badly wanted one of these photos to come out fantastically, and in the camera it looked like they had, but alas they are merely okay.)

Here’s a shot of the girls (barely discernible) standing at the front door.

On the highest hill opposite the hill on which Morfar’s house sat was a building used as a camp or training facility for the local soccer team.  We never saw any activity around the building, but it was such a central part of the view that I kept taking pictures of it.  I don’t really know why.

Here are some shots of the house and pool area.

At our next swim (either our after breakfast swim or our before lunch swim, I forget which), Maddie set a new record for herself.

Wow, the pictures are really small here, but what she’s doing here is swimming the length of the pool (and back!) unassisted.  Yes, of course, she’s in her swim wings and she’s doggy paddling, but we thought: wow!  The breakthrough we’ve been waiting for!

Alas, it was the very last time she would “swim” at all.  The whole rest of our visit she either played on the steps at the shallow end or let us push her around on one of the inflatable airplanes that will soon be making its appearance.  In her most adventurous moments she might let someone carry her a few steps away from the stairs, but that was it.

Which isn’t to say she wasn’t having fun!

The girls renewed their acquaintance with Flash.

The buildings in the distance here are in Quarteria, I think — I’m just guessing based on a quick check of Googlemaps.  There really weren’t any substantive cities around us — Faro is big enough for a soccer stadium and an airport, but then again so is Værløse.

I tried getting pictures of people in moments where they weren’t expecting to be photographed.  It probably made me a nuisance, but I think I got some homey shots out of it.

And the tables were turned from time to time…

I was bedazzled by the blue of that pool against the browns and greens of the landscape, all of it under the broiling, broiling sun.

Here are Flash and Tara.

And an utterly random group shot.

I loved the color and texture contrasts of this clay pot of flowers.

The tree in the background above is actually a pepper tree.  The next shot is a close up of the peppers growing on it.  It was kind of fun to pluck some now and then and chew on them.  I have never in my life chosen to chew peppercorns before, but they have a kind of peppery freshness that’s actually kind of pleasant.

That afternoon Morfar led us on a tour of the grounds to point out which plants were what, and what he hoped to grow where.  We started by the palm tree you’ve already seen, where Trine and I tried to get a suitable family photo for a 2012 Christmas Card.  I include them all because none of them are any good in and of themselves, but they’re kind of cute as a series.

Molli Malou is growing so fast — she was actually able to jump high enough to pluck her own peppers!

The picture below shows the “fruits” of a very common tree in the area.  It was probably the most common tree around, or certainly up there with almond and olive trees as the most ubiquitous.  We had no idea what those green bean thingies were.  Do you?

I’ll tell you: they are carob beans.  And they are unripe.  You have to wait until they turn black to harvest them.  But we learned all that later.

Molli Malou, our critter collector, had no problems scooping this critter up within seconds of sighting it.  It was just the first of her many critter captures.

We took a trip down to Vale de Lobo, the posh tourist area with all the celebrated Golf Clubs, and took a stroll out on one of the beaches along the nature preserve.  If you look just a little southwest of Vale de Lobo on Googlemaps, you’ll be surprised from how “high” you can see this walkway across the tidal marsh (in Satellite View).  It’s at least a couple of football fields long.

Back at the house, by now you may have noticed the great stairs leading down to the pool area from the ground floor terrace.

Maddie loved those stairs.  She loved going up and down them.  We made her promise over and over not to go up or down them alone, but that became her mission in life.  If you were down by the pool she would suddenly bolt to rush up the stairs, squealing that she had to pee.  If you were up on the terrace she would rush to go down the stairs for the same reason.  (There are bathrooms up- and downstairs.)  We were constantly terrified she was going to fall and crack her skull open.  She never did, but it sure wasn’t for lack of trying!

One morning Maria informed us that a hair stylist had dropped by.  Six euros per haircut.  Any takers?

Trine also got a trim and Molli Malou finally had the blue braid and feather removed from her hair.

That afternoon the four of us, Moster Mette, Mormor and Jørgen made our first trip into Faro.  The first thing that struck me was the ubiquity of stork’s nest on every high spot.

Almost every high spot, anyway.

It’s a cozy little seaside town and probably great fun in nice weather, but the weather was not nice.  The heat was atrocious.

Here we are not long out of the air-conditioned car, looking fresh and lively.  (Mormor and Jørgen wandered off for some time on their own.)

You can almost see Maddie’s thoughts in this picture:

What the hell am I doing out in this insane heat?!

Molli Malou began to lilt almost immediately.

Some kind of bubblegum pinball machine perked them up briefly…

….but we were all roasting and hungry after just ten minutes in the heat, so we hurried to find the first air-conditioned restaurant we could find.  That brought the smiles right back.

…but only until the food was served.  Trine and the girls ordered pizzas — I ordered calamari.  The calamari was delicious, in a junky kind of way (they may as well have been onion rings).  But the girls were unanimous: it was the worst pizza in the history of the universe.   Doughy, spongy “crust,” flavorless cheese, tomato sauce like ketchup… blech.

But the girls had had some cool drinks, I had enjoyed a big old beer, and we were ready to resume our touring.

Yeah, that’s right.  I’m wandering around a historic city in Portugal for the first time in my life, and it’s all about advertising mannequins, dimestore bouncy rides, and seesaws.

The sun is so powerful that parasols become habit forming.  (That was for Uncle Gene.)

This is a building you see in a lot of postcards.  I’m not sure if it’s because it has some historical significance or because it’s just so cool with all those stork nests up there.

Seriously: it’s not just that there are nests: the storks are actually in them!

Look!  It’s the green train!  Green train!  Wave, everyone!

We’d only been wandering around about 20 minutes since our lunch — including the ice creams we got after lunch — and the heat was already starting to kill us again.  The following photo does a good job, I think, of expressing just how oppressive it was.

Watch us wilt.

The next shot is a detail of a picture.  I love the color juxtaposition of the original, not sure how intense it will turn out on the web…  depends, I guess, on the monitor.

Finally we reached the end of this quay and realized the girls had had enough.  Molli Malou was talking to pigeons (probably flashing back to San Marcos square in Venice)…

…and just look at poor Maddie.  She was burning alive.  We actually began to worry about them and I rushed back for the car, picked them all up, and we drove straight back into the hills.

Back at the house…

And into the pool!  With the inflatable, water-gun equipped airplanes we’d purchased in nearby Amancil.

The next day we thought we’d try a trip into Loulé, the little city just a bit further into the hills.  Oh… but first Molli Malou wanted to pose in a hat.

It was the four of us, Moster Mette, and Maria.

Maria wanted to do some shopping for that night’s dinner and needed to pick up some dog food, and promised to show us around Loulé.

It was another very hot day, but not quite as hot as it had been in Faro.

Maria guided us to a children’s clothing boutique.

Molli Malou knew what she wanted.

I posted an iPhone version of this picture on Facebook, but this shot from the real camera is spectacular in full size.

Remember your Kipling?  I call the next shot, “Triumph and Disaster.”  (If I wanted to be really snooty I would just call it, “Those Two Impostors.” )

There was some kind of local museum that we didn’t go into but which had some very interesting outdoor displays.

(Battering ram, get it?)

And once in a while Maddie would demand the camera.  Most of her shots were crazy, awful shots of cobblestones, blurred walls, or people’s legs, but I thought this one of me was cute.

The next shot is trying to show the juxtaposition of the very slick, very modern cubist building on the left and dilapidated pile of crap on the right.  Instead it’s illustration of my need for a wide-angle lens.

Maria treated the grateful girls to some ice-cream in a shady alley café.

…and we continued on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the heat.

And hats.

At length we ended the tour, took care of the shopping, and piled back into the car.

There was just one quick errand on the way home — we had to stop at the pet store so Maria could pick up some dog food.

The rest of us waited in the car and were just beginning to wonder whether something had gone horribly wrong in the store when Maria emerged — with a puppy.  It was a little street puppy, abandoned, and the store was trying to find it a home.

Well, it found a temporary home, anyway: the deal Maria struck with the shopkeeper was that she would keep the dog for three days, ask around if anyone was interested, and would have the right to return the puppy to the store if she couldn’t find a taker.

Well, she obviously found some very interested parties…

And it was an adorable little puppy — smart, healthy, curious, friendly, intelligent…

But let the puppy — who was called only “dog” or “puppy” by everyone in the household, with everyone using their own language (and there were at least four in play on most days) — let the puppy melt into the background for a while.  Life went on.

Another of Molli Malou’s critter captures was Suzie the Gecko.  (It took a fair bit of Googling to satisfy me that Suzie was in fact a harmless Moorish Gecko and not one of the poisonous lizards that live in the area.)

Suzie provided a few hours of entertainment, but the competition was never far off…

The heat and the girls’ complaints having effectively ended our attempts at tourism, we decided we would keep them at the house the rest of the trip, with a single trip each afternoon for ice-cream or some other treat. 

And so we passed a leisurely day or two doing little more than swimming a lot and eating too much.

Finally the temperatures began to cool from “blazing inferno” to “merely hot,” and we made a little family trip to the beach.  Not the beach we’d been to before, but one of three along Vale de Lobo.

It was too windy and the water was too rough for us to be comfortable letting the girls in the sea unless they were holding our hands — but they had a blast anyway.

And yes, the shot below of Molli Malou is even more enchanting in its full size.

Some clouds rolled in and the weather finally cooled off for real.  (From “merely hot” to “delightfully warm.”)  The girls enjoyed just swinging in the hammocks — Maddie in particular.

By Friday morning, the day of Morfar’s birthday (and Hannah’s!) it was actually cool out.  We were all less eager to jump into the pool, and long sleeves appeared at the breakfast table.

…and the granddaughters were more than ready to help Morfar unwrap his presents at lunch!

The day warmed up again…

I don’t know why I chose to take this picture, but it reminded me so much of LA I decided to keep it.

Here’s Morfar manning the grill in preparation for the birthday dinner.

And here is it at last, the birthday boy at his birthday dinner!

Mikhail and his wife and their two children came by to offer a present and their best wishes — it’s hard to make out in these pictures, but their present was Moldovan cognac in a sword-shaped bottle.  (Mikhail is originally Moldovan.)

The plan all week had been to visit the farmer’s market in Loulé on Saturday morning.  I begged off on that one, so Trine took the photodocumentary responsibilities onto her own shoulders.

That afternoon Trine and decided to just take some time to ourselves and have a walk around the neighborhood.

The following photo is of a tree that was so archetypical Trine just stared at it and said, “That’s such a perfect palm tree it doesn’t even look real.”  And I had to agree.  It was the palm tree from central casting.

The house sits on a hill that curves around one end of a very small valley.  Our walk took us around the lip of that bowl, allowing us (with zoom) to get this picture of the house from an angle we’d never seen it from before.

Coming down of the rim of the bowl, so to speak, the last bit of “road” before leading into the largely untended brush of the bowl’s bottom was littered with lemons.

Beautiful lemons.

Entering into the wild we encountered this very bizarre plant I had noticed when looking down into the valley from the terrace.  It looked like some kind of bizarre alien creature.

…so I tried to ham it up, and made poor Trine take a dozen pictures of me trying to look terrified that the thing was going to gobble me up, and they all came out just as foolish-looking as this one.

Looking up at the house from the bottom of the bowl:

And now a thistle from central casting?

The dirt was so red — I don’t know if you can tell from the next photo, it was just eye-smackingly red.

To get back up to the house we found a little path that wound its way up to the cul-de-sac at the end of the street on which the house sits.  There was an old pool ruin along the way.

And the cul-de-sac itself must have been lovely once, but it had the same neglected but very picturesque appearance as so much else of the countryside.

By now it was Saturday evening, and time for another birthday dinner with a few more guests.

Molli Malou and Maddie helped decorate the cake!

…and the cigar turned out to be an indoor-roman-candle!

The guests were Carl (or Karl), a former German who had moved to Portugal over a decade ago, and his daughters Louise (or Louisa, about 15) and Adrienne (or Adrianne, or Adrianna, about 13).  The girls played wonderfully with Molli Malou and Maddie and we scarcely heard from our girls as long as Louise and Adrienne were in the house.

I realized only on that Sunday, our last full day in Portugal, that I didn’t have a single picture of Lassie, the third dog of the household.

Sunday morning a large group attempted a walk around the neighborhood while Morfar, Trine, and I did some last-minute shopping for things we wanted to bring back to Denmark.  (Make-up, bourbon, olive oil, etc.)  Molli Malou resisted the walk because she was sure it was going to rain.  Most of us assured her it would not.  Within moments of their leaving the house, it began to pour buckets.  The walk was abandoned.

So we were able to join them all later in the day when the skies were bluer…  but not everyone had faith they would retain their cerulean purity…

One of the houses closest to Morfar’s is the home of an English family that appears to have some kind of horsey business going.  They own about a dozen dogs and let them run amock in the “street,” and the dogs are also barking, chasing cars, barking, rushing up and making menacing faces, barking…  as we walked by them on our little tour, fully six of them were howling at us in full throat.

Glancing back at them as we passed, Jørgen pointed out the “Parking” sign and said, “It ought to say Barking.”

I swore I would photoshop the picture to make it so, but alas… time is short and this post is never going to get done as it is!

Molli Malou gleefully picked almonds, carob beans, and other fruits from the boughs that hung over the street.  (Sorry: “street.”)

I’ve used the word juxtaposition more times in this stupid, endless post than I probably have in the last five years, but it’s a word that kept coming to me on this trip; the conditions of the various properties you encounter in the neighborhood, for example…

A tisket, a tasket, a pocketful of… carob beans?

It’s all familiar now, right?  I mean, you recognize the walk from the previous pictures, right?

Back at the house, Maddie wanted to take some pictures.

And the last-day-in-Portugal torpor began to set in…

For dessert that night, the girls were offered mango ice cream sticks.  Maddie was enthralled and loved hers.  Molli Malou didn’t even want to try one.  It created an interesting dynamic.  Believe it or not, the series below is just a subset of the 30+ pictures I took.  Throughout it, the conversation is going like this:

Maddie: Mango.  Mango.  Mango.

Molli Malou: Leave me alone.

Maddie: MANGO.

Molli Malou: Stop.  It’s gross.  Go away.

Maddie: Mango, whoa!  Mango, whoa!

Molli Malou: STOP!

Maddie: Taste.  Mango.  Taste!

… and so on, more or less along those exact lines, until the climactic moment where Molli Malou gives in.  I give you that dialogue so you can let it roll around in your head as you view the pictures…

Maria then decked the table with some fabulous looking desserts — fruits in some kind of sauce smothered in whipped cream — and Maddie attacked one of those.

…and then we learned the “sauce” was all booze!  No wonder Maddie got so giddy!

Well, it was finally Monday morning: one last breakfast before we’d have to pack up and go.

And then it was time.

…time for the 2½ hour drive…

I like this shot for a couple of reasons even though it’s a lousy picture: first, the car in front of us is Morfar’s car, so that’s Morfar, Jørgen, Mormor, and Mette in there; second, it’s the exciting approach into Lisbon; third, look at the billboard — we really are on our way home!

This bridge crossing the bay or gulf or harbor of Lisbon was built in the 90s and was the longest suspension bridge in Europe… until Denmark’s Storbæltsbro took that honor away from it.  So at the tender age of 3½ Maddie has driven across the two longest suspension bridges in Europe!  Does she get a sticker for that, or what?

After the 2½ hour car trip it was just a 90-minute wait for our 3½-hour flight back to Copenhagen…  where we began the last leg with a 30-minute Metro ride…

…that led to a 5-minute walk to a 20-minute car ride that finally got us home.

Coming soon: the videos!