One of my reasons for keeping this blog is so that when we are older and grayer than we already are, we can look back and recall details that have faded from our memories. What seems strange or notable today will eventually be commonplace for us, and therefore unremarkable. Today’s post will capture and preserve some random observations Tim and I have made in our first five weeks in Setubal.
Salt. Bet you didn’t expect a paragraph devoted to sodium chloride! We have found the cultural relationship to salt to be so different between the Portuguese and the Americans that we want to record it here. The first thing we noticed was that the Portuguese people don’t seem to use much of the seasoning that sits on every table in the USA. (Ditto for pepper.) You never see salt shakers on tables here. French fries and popcorn are served salt-free. Peanuts in the shell are common, but they’re never salted. We had to scour two stores to find crackers with salt, and even then, we could neither see nor taste the salt on them. Back in the States, I’d stopped ordering fries or chicken sandwiches at restaurants because they were so heavily salted. That doesn’t happen here. All this seems pretty ironic since the City of Setubal has been harvesting salt from the sea since Roman times. Perhaps they’d rather reap financial benefit by selling it around the world than use it in their own diet.
The relationship between drivers and pedestrians. We’ve learned that pedestrians have the right of way when crossing streets anywhere in the country, as long as they cross in the marked crossings. Steep fines are levied against drivers who ignore that law. We live in a city with fairly steady traffic on most streets, and we spent the first few days here hesitating at the curb when we needed to cross to the other side. We noticed that everyone else simply walked to the edge of the crosswalk and blithely stepped off the curb, never looking to the right or left. Every car stopped, every time. I’ve never even seen a near miss. Now, increasing the odds that this balance is maintained, I’ve observed a couple of things. First, we rarely see anyone jaywalking outside the crosswalk, showing that the pedestrians are doing their part. Additionally, crosswalks do not just show up at the intersections. On long blocks, you might find three or four crosswalks in mid block, assuring that pedestrians don’t have to go out of their way cross legally. Everyone is very civil about this; no honking horns, no revving engines impatiently if the crosswalk keeps filling up with pedestrians, causing longer delays for the drivers, no flipping obscene gestures by anyone. You should see us now – striding confidently into the oncoming traffic like we owned the place! You might also notice, if you were here, that we can’t resist the tiniest of nods or a slight wave to the drivers in acknowledgement of their kindness in not running us down. We’re confident that habit will eventually fade as we become more and more like the natives.
The public persona of Portuguese people. We have noticed that strangers on the street tend to walk with their eyes down, avoiding eye contact with passers-by. Now, if you were in a large American city, you may not find that so odd. But to this Midwestern native, it strikes me as a little sad and lonely. Also, Setubal residents seem to emit a faint melancholy as they move about their daily lives. We witnessed the same thing when we were in Sarajevo several years, not long after the bloody siege that laid waste to that great city. We know that Setubal is a working class city, unlike the shimmering Lisbon just to our north. It, like all of Portugal, suffered a deep economic decline about 10 years ago and has yet to see a full return to previous levels of employment. Nor has Setubal experienced a renewal brought by legions of tourists that some regions of the country have seen. In short, there may be a kind of public malaise – a general sense of this is as good as life is ever going to be. Yet, as we meet and interact with individual Portuguese, we can scarcely imagine kinder people. They are delightful in their willingness to lend a helping hand, answer questions, even speak English to the best of their perhaps limited ability.
Priority Service Law. There is a national law that gives pregnant women, parents with small children, frail elderly, and the disabled priority service in all public places. This means not only preferred parking spaces, but front-of-the-line status at government offices. That seems to fit in a country that takes the word of a citizen, or the presence of wedding rings as official “documentation” for important transactions. (See previous blogs.) Kindness and a sense of humanity seem to permeate Portuguese society. The whole place seems a bit like Mayberry to these two immigrants from the USA.
Creature comforts. Not everything is rainbows and unicorns around here. There are some quirks in our apartment, and most other personal residences that we’ve heard about. First, they do plumbing differently. The drains are routinely installed without traps (that U-shaped piece of pipe you find under sinks in the US). The purpose of traps is to maintain an amount of water in the drain which acts as a shield against rising sewer gas. Here, where there are no traps, bathrooms can sometimes smell like…well, sewer gas! That was a huge struggle for us when we first arrived, but now we’ve learned to keep the sink and tub drains plugged up when not in use, and that seems to do the trick. Maybe because housing is smaller than the average American home, most residences here don’t have large hot water tanks. Instead, water is generally heated on demand by propane gas. Besides conserving space, it also conserves the energy required to keep a large amount of water heated, waiting to be needed. Still, we need to run water for quite a few minutes before it gets warm enough to shower in. We’ve forgotten the luxury of washing hands in soothing warm water. Almost no homes in this country have central heating, and even fewer have air conditioning. Couple this with the fact that homes are built with no insulation, and you have a recipe for “chilly.” Even though our weather since we’ve been here has been sunny and in the low 60s by day, nights have begun to drop into the low 40s. As you can imagine, it gets pretty nippy inside. Just before we arrived, our landlord installed a heater/air conditioner in the living room, which helps take the chill off, but rarely makes the apartment toasty. Everyone we talk to is in the same boat – they just add another sweater or huddle under blankets to keep warm. In daylight, everyone takes to the streets where they can pass the time in sunny sidewalk cafes. Fortunately, folks who’ve lived here through all the seasons tell us that summers are very comfortable, even with no A/C. The buildings tend to stay cool inside, and most places are built with good cross ventilation to capture breezes.
Home laundry. I may have mentioned the fact that most people here have small washing machines in their kitchens, and dry all their clothes on clotheslines or racks. We happen to have an ideal terrace attached to our current apartment, so I don’t need to stretch precariously out the 7th floor window to pin sheets on the line. Instead, we drape everything over a big folding rack on the front terrace. Most days, I do a load just before going to bed at night, and then place it out to dry when I first get up. Everything is usually dry by late morning, but we won’t have it so easy when the rainy season starts any day now. It may take a day or so to dry a load inside a cold apartment. In some ways, I really like the simple, organic ritual of hanging clothes out to dry. I feel my carbon footprint shrink with every clothes pin I use. I flash back to memories of a happy childhood when my mother instructed us in the most efficient ways to pin wash on a line. BUT, there are times when I really miss my dryer. Without the dryer, clothes tend to get wrinkled. The energy we save is probably lost by the need to use an iron more often. Our towels and blankets have lost their fluffiness. And I screwed up royally this week when I neglected to remove a tissue from the pocket of a sweater before running it through the wash. The sweater and everything else in the load emerged with a thick coat of shredded tissue. A dryer would have magically removed all that fuzz, but, alas I was forced to spend lots of time and effort hand-picking all the bits off everything. I’m not making that mistake again!
Well, that’s the end of my whining for the day. On a positive note, we successfully picked up our certification of residency from the UGO today. Tomorrow we push on to the bank account. We’re also having our first Portuguese lesson with our private tutor tomorrow evening, which gives both of us shivers and jitters. Yesterday we approached a table of fellow diners in a lunch restaurant when Tim thought he heard them speaking English. Sure enough, the guy Mike is from Quincy, MA and his wife Helena is Portuguese. We had a nice conversation, exchanged contact information, and made plans to meet for dinner next week. Mike actually laughed at a weird, funny line Tim used, so they will either be kindred spirits, of too darned strange to bother with.