I was really annoyed that I had to miss “Limpar Portugal” day on Saturday as we had to go elsewhere, but well done to everyone who joined in.   Limpar Portugal is an iniciative thought up and organised by a group of friends that rallied the country into a day of picking up the crap that is EVERYWHERE.  I was also really annoyed to read that some companies used the knowledge that 100,000 people were going out into the woods and roadsides this weekend to dump their rubbish the day before.  What a bunch of utter scumbags.

This country really does my head in. We (I’ve been here almost 11 years, I can say “we” now, don’t you think?) are facing bankruptcy and a good spanking from headmistress Angela Merkel, and rely massively on tourism, yet still it is necessary for a volunteer organisation to take it upon itself to tidy the place up.  Keeping the place looking good should be second nature.  It should also be damnably easy: partly because Portugal is fantastically beautiful anyway (especially where there aren’t any bloody humans) and partly because the Portuguese are fanatically clean, tidy and keen to keep up appearances.  Look inside the majority of Portuguese homes (not mine, mine’s a disaster) and you’ll not find a doily out of place, but as soon as you step outside, you may well step in someone else’s rubbish, falling down beautiful building, builders’ rubble or dog shit.

The last couple of weekends were spent away from home, that’s why I missed out on sticking on my wellies and rubber gloves and mucking in with the best of them in the nearby woodland.  And I was reminded of something else that ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH (Sorry, my headmistressly ways are coming out again…. bring back Vitriolica!). For the first weekend we were in the Alentejo, for pleasure, the second in the Algarve, for work of sorts (not mine, his) (gosh, the Algarve is an ODD place.  For me, it’s like visiting a slightly different country that isn’t quite Portugal, what with all the Union flags and cod and chips and estate agents’ billboards in English and German.  I know it’s not ALL like that, but what an awfully pervasive presence the Northern European has there… I bet you could live there for ten years without coming face to face with a farinheira…, but back to the thing…..).

After many years of being somewhere, one gets used to things… or resigned to them.  I am slightly inured to the ways of the grumpy Portuguese whose job it is to provide a service, but ONLY SLIGHTLY.  I mean the people who work in cafés, supermarkets, clothes shops, restaurants, hotels, banks, oh, you know, pretty much everybody, everywhere.  I must say, before I go on, that things HAVE been getting better in recent years… much to do with the big corps. and the brazilian invasion (I insist you read this before you read on) and when I get a girl behind the reception desk at a hotel easily saying “good afternoon, how can I help you” with a polite smile on her face I am thrilled to see that things really are getting better… only to have my hopes of service greatness dashed as she immediately drops the smile as she thinks she has done her job and hands me the room key without even looking me in the eye.

Whenever I go somewhere new I am uncomfortable.  Take a hotel.  I don’t know where stuff is.  None of us do.  Where’s the room?  Where’s the bar?  Where is the breakfast room? Where’s the swimming pool?  I don’t want to be lead by the hand and given a sweetie, but when I ask you where the entrance to the pool is, I do want you to make me feel welcome to use the damn thing and kindly point me in the right direction… I do NOT want you to look at me like I just asked if it was ok to take a shit on the floor.  I haven’t been here before.  YOU have, because YOU work here.  It is YOUR job to make me feel welcome so that I will come back, will direct friends to your hotel, will spend more money with you while I’m here.  It’s not that I want you to be subservient to me… I just want to feel WELCOME to come and spend MONEY that will pay your bloody wages.

Is your hotel food utter crap?  Because if it is, you’re an idiot, because sometimes I want to go to a hotel, not just to go out and explore, but to use as a retreat and stay IN for a day because I’m knackered and don’t want to drive, walk, cook etc., i.e. the stuff I normally do at home, the stuff I’m escaping from, and will pay good money to not have to go and find a restaurant nearby.

I know I’m talking from a foreigner’s perspective… the history professor doesn’t even notice the less than perfect service in many cases, but that’s kind of the point.  Portugal is SO in need of money at the moment, because we might be saying hello to the escudo again soon if we’re not careful, and foreigners have to be made to feel welcome to spend their escudos or euros if we’re REALLY lucky.

Also, could you PLEASE get over this LOOKS thing.  If someone comes into your shop, looking a bit crap because she has a busy life and doesn’t have time every day to put on full makeup and dress up for the opera, BUT speaks VERY politely and friendlily (?) to you, could you PLEASE not treat her like scumbag and be monumentally rude, because she would have bought that very expensive bottle of perfume from you for her moth-in-law’s special birthday, but now has told all her friends not to shop with you, and will be sticking her tongue out at you every time she passes your shop, you horrible, badger-haired old bag.  EVERYONE WILL SEE MY ENORMOUS TONGUE.

In the spirit of “Limpar Portugal” I suggest a “Bloody well be NICE” day.  Tourist season is upon us, and we needs their money.  I’m kind of being serious.  Who’s up for it?

There's an important thing in Portugal.  It's called lunch.

Yesterday I went on my annual trip to near Viseu to pick up my sogra* from the "termas" at the end of her two week stay.  "Termas" are hot spring spas, dotted about the country, much like Bath Spa, but still functioning as a spa and not as a railway station.  The "termas" and the experience of the "termas" is like something from another century... but that's for another day. 

I left home at seven thirty yesterday morning.  I had to be there by midday and with the inevitable stops ordered by my bladder and a quick trip to a shopping centre in Coimbra to grab something for my sogra, there was no time for meandering about, taking pictures, something I always swear I must do every time I drive anywhere beyond Lisbon.  Portugal never ceases to amaze with its beauty.  Decadence, yes, squalor, sometimes, but underlying all that, beauty.  

It was about 35ºC yesterday, overcast and humid... but I luxuriated in my air conditioning... something I wouldn't be able to use on the way home.  After the termas' treatments, my sogra can't get cold or draughty for at least two weeks, or the treatments will have been a waste of time (I really DO have to look into the science of the termas one of these days) and air conditioning is specifically a cold and draughty utility.

Every time she visits these termas, her special treat at the end is to go and eat leitão in her favourite leitão restaurant in Mealhada, which is just north of Coimbra.  So much of Portugal to see in one day.  I left home, drove up the ghost motorway that is the A13 (don’t use it, it’s MINE) to Santarém and Almeirim (birthplace of sopa de pedra), then up to Coimbra (birthplace of Coimbra University), then across to Cabanas de Viriato (birthplace of Aristídes Sousa Mendes, look him up), then back to Santa Comba Dão (birthplace of Salazar, look him up if you really know nothing of Portugal), through Luso (birthplace of more hot spring water) and finally Mealhada (the birthplace — and deathplace — of tiny cooked baby pigs). 

When I was growing up, the suckling pig featured in every illustration, film or cartoon that involved a banquet; that small pig on a silver platter, sitting on a bed of lettuce and, of course, it had an apple in its mouth.  I never saw one.  When you’re growing up you just hear the name.  It’s only when you’ve already grown up that it suddenly occurs to you that THIS IS A TINY ICKLY BABY PIGGY WIGGY!

Coming down the hill from Luso, another spa town, a beautiful one that is half preserved in aspic, you start to see restaurants with pictures of either happy rounded cartoon pigs or photographed dead and roasted ones — unappealling, aesthetically speaking — until you arrive in Mealhada, the mecca of the tiny roasted baby piggies, where it seems there is nothing to eat except those roasted baby piggies.   Everywhere you turn there’s another sign for “Leitão da Bairrada”, Bairrada being a name for this region of mid Portugal, the beiras.  The bigger restaurants along the main road have their own roasting ovens at the back of the restaurant… this is industrial scale roasting of the tiny baby piggies, with huge chimneys black with burnt pig grease smoking away above the buildings, an uneasy sight.

We went to the one we always go to.  It’s how the Portuguese side of this family rolls.  I pulled into the car park at 1.20pm and if there’s one thing that the Portuguese are punctual for (it is just the one thing) it is lunch: the place was already heaving.  Yesterday was August 31st.  This means it was the last day of the holidays and people may have just been paid.   As I did a quick tour of the car park,  20 more cars drove in behind me.  The car park was already full, but I waited until those who didn’t just give up (those who maybe didn’t belong to families who have to go to exactly the same place, year in, year out, and went to try somewhere else) had improvised an extra line of cars down the middle.  I improvised with them. 

Once through the door it was confirmed that the place was extremely full.   We saw a waiter in a big white apron scuttling past, saying to a bunch of about eight people "follow me, follow me".  We didn't follow him, because I didn’t think he was talking to us.  My sogra said who cares if he’s not talking to us.  But in our deliberating we missed the man-in-the-white-apron-train.

We went to ask at the bar.  “When you see a waiter in a white apron, follow him”.  oh.

We waited.  Every minute more and more people came in the door.  Hungry looking people.  There was no way that an orderly queue could form.  Firstly it is the wrong shape of restaurant for that, secondly, this is Portugal — people queue, but “orderly” is not a word in Portuguese — so we had to depend on the kindness of strangers that might concede that we were first, because there was leitão involved, because waiting for other people to be seated first would be a wait too long, because there was hot, crispy leitão with pepper sauce involved.   “We” were all hungry for our leitão.  I say “we” because I had become part of a crowd, a small mob of gently jostling Portuguese people, with the slight anxiety that they might not get their lunch within the next two minutes.  I don’t do being part of a competitive jostling crowd very well and I find clamouring for one’s lunch when one isn’t in a disaster zone quite undignified (I do do undignified, of course, but only when it’s fun).  My sogra was doing the talking.  Yes, we were here before the rest of you lot, she said, as nicely as possible.  I was uncomfortable.  For a few moments I pretended I wasn’t there and lost myself in twitter on my phone:

"Oh god. Leitao. Too many people waiting. Relative who WANTS baby roast pig. Losing myself in twitter."

Downstairs there must be a good 150 covers, upstairs another 100, and almost all covered by hungry baby pig eating people.  But we were lucky, it was a Tuesday and there were a few tables left upstairs.

Yes, we want leitão, said my sogra and we waited for a few minutes for our leitão to arrive, as the first rain in weeks started to fall outside, on the edge of what promised to be a spectacular thunderstorm, one that we had been driving away from for the last hour.  It was still tremendously hot, and fuggy enough to kill you, not the kind of weather, you’d think, for eating steaming hot roasted pork.

Within minutes the leitão arrived.  A dish of four or five large hunks of pork, a dish of home made crisps (i.e. the greasiest kind), a vinegary green salad, a sauce boat of pepper sauce and enough coke to replenish the half litre of sweat I had lost in the last hour when I couldn’t have the air conditioning on and only the merest crack in the window.

I’m kind of ambivalent when it comes to leitão.  It would be entirely ludicrous of me to get sentimental about it being made of tiny baby piglets, when I’m not SO sentimental about eating its mother, and I tend not to think like that…. but the fact that it’s a tiny baby animal makes it harder to disguise its animalhood, when you can be holding its entire leg or ribcage in your hand (and it’s not a chicken, who can get sentimental over a bird? not me, that’s who).  Soon after I arrived in Portugal, my father in law was once brandishing the leg of something as he spoke over lunch; picture Henry VIII and a big turkey leg that you always see (were there even turkeys this side of the Atlantic by then?).  It looked like that.  But when I got closer, I saw that this leg had tiny teeth and some eye holes.  It was half a head of a tiny baby roasted piglet. 

Roast pork is one of the best things in the world to eat.  The crackling from a proper well grown pig cannot be bettered.  The crispy skin of a tiny roasted baby piglet is something like that, but as thin as a wafer and not half as satisfyingly crunchy.  Similarly, the flesh on a proper pig, when properly cooked, is heavenly… but the meat of a leitão, especially when fresh out of the ominous looking ovens, is kind of slimey.  It’s okay, but I’m not crazy for it. 

What I AM crazy for is the pepper sauce.  On an industrial scale, I don’t know how they go about it, but when a friend of mine roasted a wild boar-black pig hybrid baby pig in his bread oven (now that WAS delicious, nothing to be ambivalent about), he baked it with ground pepper and salt, large quantities of both, sewn up inside the body cavity of the pig, making a natural sauce when it was unsewn once roasted.  This is a pepper sauce that really tastes of black pepper as well as packing the spicy heat at the same time.  The sauce in the restaurant is almost as good, but so salty that you can’t eat much.  I dip my incredibly greasy crisps into it.  I pour it over my green salad.  I dip my bread into it.  It is good. 

There was a chunk of leitão left at the end.  The waitress was about to clear it away when my sogra asked why I wasn’t going to eat it.  I replied that I may well puke if I ate another thing.  In that case, it’s a crime to leave it behind, she said, and asked the waitress to bring her a piece of bread to stick it in and take home for her dinner.

We left at three o’clock and when we got home three hours later (including several rehydration stops and no air-con on the way, before the more macho car part of you says “ugh! How can it take three whole hours to get back to Azeitão from Mealhada! Waaaah waaaaah! Waaaaaah!”) the large hunks of leitão that we had bought at the take out part of the restaurant were still hot, wrapped up in their wax paper, and making the car stink of warm pork. 

The kids had leitão for supper.

I shall eat it again this time next year.


*sogra = mother-in-law.... it's quicker to type... fewer hyphens.