Happy Boxing day! I hope the Canadians reading this have many boxes to plow through this Christmas, and are enjoying the unseasonal weather in Canada. For the non-Canadians, I hope you are enjoying or tolerating whatever weather you are either lucky or unlucky enough to receive. There's a rather longish missive following, as I struggle to recap our last few weeks.
After toiling in the soil for two weeks, Amy and I had decided to pass through the south of France before crossing the Pyrenees towards Spain. We considered a few places we'd read or been told about: Carcassone, a medieval city and Nice and Cannes, higher-end beach cities, to name but three. In the end we figured we'd visited quite a few medieval cities, and after spending a few weeks in the rustic Ardeche, we decided to visit Montpellier, a vibrant city with a big student population.
Montpellier has made great strides in becoming very pedestrian-friendly. The first of which are large blue trams which run along the major streets, connecting the vast majority of the city. In fact, most of the downtown core is open only to pedestrian traffic. The feeling towards cars seems to be very strict; even at stop lights, the city has gone one step further than just relying on the driver to halt at the command of the light: solid steel pylons with flashing red lights raise up out of the street to form an obstacle, and descend when the light is green.
The highlight of our brief visit to Montpellier was a wine tour of the city. Given that we were well outside the height of the tourist season, the local vintners have opted for a different approach to wine tours: instead of hoping people will come to your vineyard where grapes aren't growing, bring your wine to the city. In coordination with the tourist office, a group of about twenty of us walked to three different historical sites in the city and sampled wines from three different winemakers. Our arrival also happened during the release of the new Beaujolais for the year, so these were the wines to be tasted. Our three historical sites were the city's opera house, an ancient apothecary, and a subterranean church. At each stop, a rep from the vineyard was there to describe his or her vineyard's style and offerings, and answer any questions about the wine we were tasting. I didn't retain much from the wine tasting other than they were good, the company was very nice, and being able to taste the wines in a triplet of unique settings was a neat experience. Beaujolais isn't a wine to be cellared, apparently, which seemed to be just fine for Montpellier, where huge street parties were underway to celebrate the release of the stuff. Of the wines we've drunk, I'd say that Beaujolais is one that your average wine-drinker would associate as being the most "winey" - that is, if you were to conjure up a mental image of what red wine tastes like, ie., fruity, jammy, with berries and currant - you'd probably be hitting a Beaujolais.
We were fairly noteworthy in the wine tasting party as being Canadian, and we got questions from several people in the group about Canada. Mostly, did we get certain wines from France? Had we tasted them? They were more than a little surprised to here us defend Canadian wines, and the fact that we have a thriving industry of our own. The only thing Canada seems to be known for abroad are a few things: Dessert wines, Canadian Club whiskey, and Labatt Blue.
I guess we didn't get enough of a taste of wine, so we hopped a train to Bordeaux. I found Bordeaux to be like a smaller and more easily tackled version of Paris: big boulevards, monuments in roundabouts, and most annoyingly, bakers that bake fantastic bread but don't serve coffee. I know it's a French thing, that they do things differently there, but I just don't get it: you bake up mouth-watering croissants, and expect people to buy them to take away. Where? To a cafe, where they brew some coffee to eat them with. And then you have to hope that they don't serve croissants of their own, or else you might feel guilty for having brought food into the joint... it's all very complicated.
It was in Bordeaux that I found it: a boulangerie which actually served coffee. And had tables to sit at. I figure it can only be attributed to the higher-than-normal student population, but for whatever reason, it was a nice way to end our trip through France. The food was good, the coffee was nice (it isn't always the case in France) and the prices were very reasonable. So if you're going to Bordeaux any time soon, check them out: Les Pains d'Alfredo, 14bis rue Duffour-Dubergier, where the street ends at Cours Pasteur. Also a plus: non-smoking interior, with a patio for anyone who wishes to puff away happily.
The other nice find for us in Bordeaux was concerning, of course, wine. It seems that if you're a wine producer and you produce wines in the Bordeaux region, and more importantly if you want to be able to label your wine as an official "Bordeaux" wine, you have to send a sample of your wine to the Bordeaux Institute in, well, Bordeaux, for analysis and qualification. The building for this institute was right down the street from the hotel where we stayed, and had recently decided to remodel their downstairs from an office space to a presentation space, where they would host events and more importantly, offer tastings of twenty different wines from the region on a rotating basis. Le Bar au Vins was not officially open in its grand capacity, but they had dipped their toes into the water by opening the corner bar while the rest of the joint was having its renovations finished. We did get an informal tour of the redone interior, with its hardwood floors, luxuriously comfortable couches and tables, tasteful statuary and high ceilings. I can only imagine the receptions and parties that will be held here, and unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to stay for the grand opening just a week away.
For a few euros per generous glass, we sampled over our two visits a dozen wines; deep, ruby reds, sparkling whites, and a rosé that tasted like a red. Essentially, wines that we would only dream would cross the Atlantic. Some do, but most don't. We were served by the knowledgeable Martin, who answered all of our questions and went into the extremely technical end of winemaking when we asked questions which demanded more complicated answers. I suppose if there are people that really know wine, they probably work in Bordeaux.
I was intrigued by one of his comments, concerning how different wine producers approach the creation of wines. It echoed a theory I have about producers, in that there are essentially two kinds: those who produce a wine to have a specific flavour that is generally accepted by the public as the way a wine is supposed to taste, and those who produce a wine in such a way as to let whatever taste it is meant to have to come through on its own. I think I prefer the second to the first, and Martin was quick to mention that he's had to taste some undrinkable wines because they taste of nothing but the oak barrels they have been aged in. These wines don't get the nod of certification, but they still get sold somewhere. In that case, if the taste of oak is a mark of quality, than I guess there are some that are drowning in it.
While we were at the Bar au Vins, we met an astounding number of non-French people (Maybe it's a tourist thing: we're more on the lookout for interesting places to go in a city than the people that live there. It was the same when we lived in Toronto). One couple we met lived in London, but had come to Bordeaux for the weekend. Airlines like Ryanair are really revolutionizing the way people in Europe live in that continent; if you book far enough in advance (far enough being about two to three weeks), you can get a flight for one penny plus the gate taxes to just about anywhere you can think of. And living in London, it must have made sense for them: a cost for a weekend away in England is much more expensive than it is in France, plus, it's a bit more exotic to be in an entirely different country. While it's revolutionizing leisure travel, if the economic model continues to operate like this, it could even revolutionize a work model. Imagine working five days a week in one country, and then flying home for the weekend. Or flying to Portugal to do your clothes shopping because it's half the price there. The only thing you'd have to put up with, of course, is the actual drudgery of flying.
One last thing about Bordeaux: we saw a movie there. Babel, with Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. It was alright, if being a bit vague about why it had earned its title. The real highlight there was the theatre we saw the movie in, a converted cathedral named Utopia. A cafe downstairs and five theatres, it's a cinema-buff's delight, as evidenced by the packed theatre we saw our movie in. Our theatre was actually on the top floor of the building, and was decorated with frescoes and statues of Greek gods. Quite the environment.
We'd toyed with a few different Spanish destinations to start our trek into Spain and Portugal. Really, we had only a few weeks to occupy before connecting with our next WWOOF visit in the north of Portugal, and the weather had been souring in Bordeaux by the time we were preparing to leave. So we did what any sane person does when it starts to rain, head for the beaches. We decided to go to San Sebastian, in the Spanish Basque region on the other side of the Pyrenees mountain range.
The more Europe seems to be the same, the more I find myself looking for differences. The first thing I was hoping to find was that the electrical plugs would be different in each country, owing to the fact that I shelled out a few bucks for an extraordinarily nifty adapter which converts any plug to North American. With the exception of Ireland and Italy, this has not been the case. I don't know which country came up with the same plug that every other one seems to be using, but the end result is my fancy adapter has not been getting much of a workout. The differences aren't as extreme as I was looking forward to, other than the language: coffee is appreciated as a religion the further south and west you go it seems, but apart from that, the urbanites are all crazy about cell phones and dress like they just stepped off of a movie set.
However, Spain and Portugal have one noteable difference: their trains run on a track that is a different gauge from France, the only nation sharing a border. Thus, at some point in your journey, you have to switch trains. When we had enquired about trains to Spain in Montpellier, the guy at the counter told us that we'd have to switch at a border town called Irun. But when I ended up buying the tickets in Bordeaux, the lady scoffed at my Irun suggestion and told me that we'd be switching trains in Hendaye. I have to tell you it was a bit unnerving, having one's travel assumptions casually discarded by another official from the same company. Our conversation when something like this:
SNCF woman: Où voulez-vous voyager monsieur?
Me: San Sebastian en Espagne. Je comprend qu'il y a un train à onze heures, avec un changement en Irun?
SNCF woman: No... you switch in Hendaye. I will find it for you.
This happens more often than I'd like: they speak French, I speak French, they switch to English. I don't know whether it's because they want to practice their English, or they want to make me feel comfortable by speaking my (obviously) native language, or whether they want me to please for God's sake stop the massacre of their language with that accent of mine.
Me: (Not giving in) Hendaye? Mais un autre employé de la SNCF m'a dit que c'était Irun ou nous changeions. Aussi, j'ai vue la même au site-web SNCF.
SNCF woman: No, you go to Hendaye. The cost is eleven euros. How did you wish to pay?
Me: (Giving in) Do you take VISA?
As it turns out, you can switch in Irun or Hendaye, and it's actually more efficient to make the change in Hendaye, which is on the same run and twelve minutes earlier. I get now that she was being efficient at finding us the best route and best price, but at the time, I couldn't help feeling that somehow, somewhere, this woman's decision-making was going to haunt us. But it did work out, and we switched trains with plenty of time to spare.
The area around San Sebastian (or Donostia-San Sebastian, as it's now called) is the Basque region of Spain, which I am given to understand has had its own share of separatist sentiment. There is even a resistance movement which occasionally surfaces to blow things up and remind people there are those who wish there to be a thick black line separating the Basque region from that of Spain on the map. The bombings on the Madrid subways on March 11 were attributed by the government of the time to the Basque resistance movement, but it was largely seen as an Al Quaeda attack in response to Spain's involvement in the continued occupation of Iraq. On this issue the following election changed the government, and the Spanish military came home.
Meanwhile, in Basque Spain, there has been a dramatic campaign to reinforce the distinctive identity of the region. All street and roadsigns are now in both Basque and Spanish, and services are offered in both languages (as well as English, French, and a host of other languages; it still amazes me how many languages most people of Europe are able to speak). The result for me was that the first train ride into Spain was very other-worldly: normally we'd have seen signs that we could translate from French; now we had signs in Spanish and Basque, both of which meant very little in those first few hours. The Basque, especially. Apparently it's a very old language to which linguists are still having a problem trying to identify the origin.
We found quite quickly that things run a bit differently in Spain. For one thing, English is not very common, less common than French (which makes sense, given the proximity of that country as a neighbour across the mountains); in contrast to Portugal, where television and movies are subtitled, everything is dubbed in Spanish. The next difference is that people running pensions (boarding houses) don't necessarily sit around at home all day waiting for people to call; our first attempt at finding a place to stay was met with us ringing a doorbell and not getting any response. However we stopped in at a nearby internet café, and the proprietor, a woman named Cristina, not only answered many of our questions about San Sebastian, but even called up a friend of hers who ran a pension just down the street.
Eating in Spain tends to be a bit differently structured in Spain, as well. While most of Europe subscribes to the theory of having a mid-afternoon break, the generally hotter Spain spreads its schedule out a bit later in both directions. In a conversation with David, a local we'd chance to meet during our visit to San Sebastian, the meal schedule tends to work out like this:
| Time | Event |
| 7 AM | Breakfast; coffee and a bun |
| 10-11 AM | Morning snack; a light sandwich |
| 1-2 PM | Lunch; generally a two-hour affair with several course, wine and coffee. The major meal of the day, preceded or followed by a nap |
| 5-7 PM | Evening snack, sometimes |
| 10-11 PM | Dinner; similar to lunch, but a bit smaller, often earlier in winter due to the shorter day |
In short, David boggled at the North American (and perhaps British) standard of three meals per day, the last at six o'clock at night. As well, the fact that we didn't take a siesta and had only an hour for lunch (or less) was very disconcerting to him.
It's even a bit different in San Sebastian, owing to the Basque heritage. There are certainly formal meals available, but most folks head to the bars, where dozens of different bite-sized (or two-bite sized, in some cases) portions of food are spread out for easy consumption. We did this a couple of times with varying degrees of success: some places made sure the food was fresh, while others I suspect let it linger a little longer than it should. As a result, I came down with my very first travel illness.
But before I go there, I'll mention a few things about San Sebastian that I enjoyed. San Sebastian is situated on the Bay of Biscay, and its own bay is subject to two tides per day. As a result it gets some pretty fantastic waves and is a major surfing hub. Our first walk out along the beach was the night we first arrived, while the tide was out. It was virtually deserted, windy, and loud with the sound of waves; in short, pretty magical. People had written messages in the sand that they knew would be soon washed over by the rising tide; pools of sand morphed into formations across the rocks, creating an other-worldly patchwork of art.
We spent longer than we'd originally intended in San Sebastian, mostly because it rained the second day and we wanted to give it a bit more of a chance, and gambled that it would clear up the next day. In the meantime, while it rained, we visited a wine and food convention that featured vendors from a great variety of food-related concerns. Mostly, meat and wine, but also chocolate producers, kitchen utensils and equipment, and coffee. A few observations:
Blue Mountain coffee is some of the most expensive coffee in the world, coming in at around fifty dollars (USD) per kilogram, harvested from Jamaica. I did get a chance to try a cup, and I can testify it has a very rich, robust flavour, but I don't know if I'd pay eight dollars for a demi-tasse cup. Apparently it is meticulously inspected for quality, so that only good beans are shipped. But the real reason for its high price is that over eight percent of the crop is purchased by Japanese middlemen, who keep the price artificially high. I suppose it doesn't help that this particular variety of coffee doesn't grow anywhere else.
Kyocera makes a series of knives out of ceramic instead of traditional metals, interesting in their design in that their blades are pure white. The advantage is that when cutting vegetables, the part that's just been sliced doesn't oxidize; they're also really, really sharp. And they're pretty reasonably priced.
In the end, the samples of food were small, while in comparison the samples of wine were large, so we wobbled out of there in search of a restaurant. We met up later with John, a Barcelonian baker who we'd met at the convention, and had some more Basque finger foods. At the same table we met Natalie and Lewis, who would end up leading us to the pension where I'd end up spending the weekend in bed as a feverish sick person.
But before I could look forward to that, we visited the nearby city of Bilbao, with its fancy Guggenheim museum (I know there is a Guggenheim museum in Venice, so the Guggenheims must get around), designed by noneother than Frank Gehry. It is an amazing space, with curving hallways that look down into other parts of the museum, cavernous spaces to host exhibitions, and what seems to be a permanent installation of immensely large shaped steel formations. Picture taking long sections of sheet metal and putting them into curves, circules, and waves; the sheets are easily fourteen feet high, so these are installations you walk through.
And then I lost a few days to being sick; not much to speak of there. Just a cold and flu, so those of you with overactive imaginations don't need to be recoiling in horror. While it was unfortunate to be sick in a nice place, it was a good location to be sick in; we had access to a kitchen and the room was inexpensive, so at least we weren't paying a fortune for me to be sick.
Eventually, I got better and we moved on to Madrid. Apart from visiting the city, there were really only two reasons for us to be there: to secure our tourist visas in order to visit India, and to catch a cheap Ryanair flight over to Portugal. We took a bus, which was actually faster and less expensive than a train; it also gave us an idea of just how big Madrid turned out to be. As far as cities go, it's got Toronto beat by a mile; the backup of traffic began an hour outside the city and we inched forward for most of it. Thankfully, the bus company must have built this delay into the schedule, as we arrived almost exactly on time.
Our visit to the Indian embassy will stand out in my memory as an example of how I would not organize an embassy's consular section for the purpose of acquiring a visa. To visit India, citizens of Canada require a visa of some sort: business, tourist, student (and probably a few others). All of these are pretty expensive: a tourist visa is fifty euros, plus (for us) a fee of twenty-two euros to fax our applications back to Canada to make sure we're not terrorists. Amy had diligently done some advance calling to see what would be required, and if we would need to leave our passports there. We were assured we would not. So we showed up to the embassy in the morning (applications are only processed in the morning) to find a room the size of a kitchen, packed with people. Two wickets were open, with an LED display above each showing a number. The numbers were not in sequence, so there was clearly a delineation of service of some time, but there was absolutely no indication of what it was. I decided to take a number for each line and wait.
And wait we did - almost two hours as the numbers inched by. Our mood wasn't improved by meeting an American who had applied for a working visa two weeks ago, only to be told that it would take two to three months to be processed. I could well understand his impatience. However in the intervening time we were able to get English forms for our application (none were available - nor did there have to be, I admit, after all we were in Spain - Amy had to bud in the line to make a quick plea for two) and get them filled out before our first number was called. The wrong number, as it turned out - that line was only for Indian citizens. So we waited some more, and were called. A few keystrokes later, we handed over our money and our passports, and were told that our visas (and passports) would be ready in two weeks. Not good news for us, as we were to take a plane to Portugal the following day. Again, we'd been assured that we wouldn't have to surrender our passports. So much for absolute information.
I'll admit I was ready to lose it; I was on the verge of telling them to stick their country, their tourist cash-grab and their backwards bureaucracy somewhere inappropriate, but Amy was much more politic than I. With a smile and a word, she was able to convince the desk staff of our plight, and they managed what I can only imagine they viewed was an exception for us - they photocopied our passports, and returned the originals to us. To their credit, they did explain that the visa itself must be sealed into the passport, so I understand that they needed to have it for that, but at the time, I wasn't seeing much logic. In the end we've left it that we are to return to Madrid with our (hopefully) approved application waiting for us, and then hand them our passports for two to three days for the consular staff to finish them off.
The rest of our stay in Madrid was essentially a waiting game for our flight to Portugal. It's a lovely city but we expect to spend more time in it on our return from our next WWOOF visit. While we were there, we ate well, walked around the drizzly city and generally tried to get a very small feeling of this immense place. Like most cities, it's broken down into neighbourhoods, and the one we were in seemed to be filled with import/export companies that all showed the same cheaply made blouses and pants. These are the kinds of places (it would seem) that you buy by the hundred. We'll give it more of a chance on our return.
Flying with Ryanair (a budget airline in Europe) has been quite simple to organize - you book and buy your seats online - but the actual doing of it has had its ups and downs. Our trip from Madrid to Porto was no exception. We arrived in plenty of time, checked our bags, and waltzed through security to gate 42. We waited there right up until the takeoff time with no hint from the staff of a delay. It was only when the sign changed from the Ryanair flight details to a flight with Air France details that the crowd went up in arms and wrung some information out of the staff: the plane was delayed. Gradually, new details surfaced: our flight would be departing from gate 46. So a hundred travellers and their carry-on luggage meandered down the hallway to gate 46, to set up a new vigil there. We would wait for fifteen more minutes before someone revealed we would be in fact departing from gate 47: another shuffling of a hundred passengers. We waited a good fifteen minutes there, only to be transferred back to gate 46; we barely had time to put our bags down when we were directed back to gate 47. But by this time they were taking our tickets, so I suppose someone had decided somewhere that this was really going to be the gate, and we all wandered past the gate and down the departure hall, where we waited for another ten minutes.
When they finally advanced the queue of people again, we were let out onto the tarmac where a but awaited us. I can only imagine what was going on with the bus while we the passengers were shuffling around in the airport: the bus going to gate 47 while we were going to gate 46. I'm sure there was a lot of fists waving in the air. At any rate, we finally got to the plane, but not without dozens of people making the joke that in all likelihood we would end up in Barcelona, not Porto.
But we did arrive in Porto, even if it was two hours later than scheduled. Apparently this is not uncommon in Spain. Porto is, as the name suggests, a port town, both in function and in product: historically, it was a great hub for shipping goods in and out of the country, but today it is better known for the producers of port wine. At least a dozen producers have large factories here, and all of them offer tours and tastings. We would tour only one - we happened to arrive on a national holiday - the Croft distillery.
So here's what I learned about port wine: the port that's fortified with brandy tends to be sold after three years (the "tawny" style) and the red port is just extra fermented and is sold after ten, twenty or thirty years. There's also a white port, drunk more as an aperatif. We sampled the red and the white, and while I'm not terribly partial to the stuff I could definitely see having the white port before dinner. My memories of port, from those who described its proper usage to me, were that it was supposed to "burn a hole through the food in your stomach" to allow you to eat more. Not a great introduction to it, I suppose, but if you drink enough of it, it does feel like its proper usage.
Porto also features a grand bridge of two levels, that allows the local metro to pass on the top and car traffic to pass on the bottom. The elevation difference between the two levels is at least three hundred feet, and it was designed by the same Eiffel who produced something special in Paris, so it does catch the eye. Not in the same way as the tower does, mind you, but it is pretty spectacular.
While we'd thought to stay in Porto and other places in the north for a few days, running into a fellow Canadian, an exchange student named Luke, convinced us that it would be worth taking a quick trip down to Lisbon to see the sights there; we'd also met a Portuguese fellow named José during our circus-act flight to Porto who gave us a few suggestions on what to see during our stay. So we embarked on a quick dip down south and back north again, stopping in Lisbon and Coimbra, before taking a final train up north towards our second WWOOF visit with Norman and Noeme in Valenca.
Like Madrid, Lisbon is a night-owl's paradise, but it is equally majestic with its share of huge buildings, monuments, promenades and parks. While we were there the city was in full swing to Christmas celebrations and you didn't see anyone walking through the shopping districts without at least two or three parcels or bags slung over their wrists.
Lisbon has a pretty simple subway system, but effective: one thing I haven't yet gotten used to are the difference between European subways and the Toronto subway. In Madrid and Lisbon (I've forgotten about Paris's, if we took it at all) the trains arrive from the right: in Toronto, it's from the left. Lisbon has about six routes while Madrid has twelve (it's a big spaghetti mess of lines). But the trains are nice, efficient, and relatively unpacked when we choose to board them. In Madrid the trains are blessedly free of advertising: I'm sure this will not last. Lisbon has the most comfortable seats I've ever sat in.
Two visits stand out for me during our brief visit to Lisbon: a day-trip to Sintra, a small town about an hour's train ride away, noteworthy for the palaces and castles that are situated there. We devoted our time to one, the Quinto de Regaleria, an estate formerly owned by royalty, bought in the early twenties by a doctor when I guess the monarchy was hard-up for cash. It's a sprawling estate property, that the doctor completely renovated with the help of an Italian theatre designer he'd hired; with a flair for the dramatic and overtones of mythology and Dante's books, there are at least twenty areas on the property all connected by walking paths: a huge subterranean well, encircled by a spiralling staircase; a gothic chapel; a waterfall, complete with stepping stones across the water; charming grottos with statuary; and, of course, the estate itself which has been set up as a museum that documents the overhaul of the property. By the time we had finished touring around the property, we had little time left before the other castles would be closing, so we decided not to try and pack too much into the day and returned to Lisbon.
The other visit was to the Belem area of Lisbon, a suburb to the west, famous for its Pasteleria de Belem, where they serve up a type of pastry they're famous for. Neither Amy or I are great fans of custard, but that's essentially what they are, and they're delicious. The bakery is constantly pumping out dozens of the things, waiters bringing out table-sized trays of piping hot Pastels de Belem where they are bought up by patrons either to eat at tables or to take to go.
From Lisbon we hopped on another bus to Coimbra, a student town, with a long-reaching history of academic tradition that continues to this day. You will still see students dressed in traditional ensembles of black suits and cowls with a white collar; apparently (according to José) there is a strict social system and rivalry between the different academic years. Whole gangs of students get together at the gates of the old city at night, on the prowl for younger-year students that are out after midnight curfew. If they find them, the older ones can cut the hair of the younger; as well, an older-year student can "save" a younger-year. It seems like it'd be a fun place to go to school...
Coimbra was also an exceedingly cheap place to eat, probably given the student population. There are at least two cafeterias that served up huge portions for a pittance: given that I was recovering from a cold at the time, the addage of feeding a cold was well-served. The food was simple, but well-cooked; a welcome relief from some restaurants that feel you have to douse your food in oil, butter and salt to overcome any problems with taste.
We stayed at another pension in Coimbra, where another José tended to us over the four days we stayed there. As we were the only guests during the week, it wasn't that complex for him; he's a short, older guy with snow-white hair and stubby fingers. Any time we saw him, he was dressed in a dark blue wool overcoat and looked very much like he'd just walked up from the docks. He was a really neat guy from which to get the low-down of the city, but the most memorable moment for us was our discussion of what to do with the room key he'd given us. As we were planning to stay for the week, we hadn't figured this would be an issue, but he began by assuring us that when we went out in the morning, we could just leave the key in the door, which we were obviously less comfortable with than just taking the key with us. I will never forget him exclaiming in a heavily-accented English, "It's not hard - when you go out, you just to leave the key, in the door. It is no problem."
We were trying to figure it out after we hesitantly agreed to do so and he left, when he came back a few moments later and explained that he'd been a bit confused and then remembered we were staying for a few days. What he'd described was the procedure for when we were going to leave Coimbra. He would also forget the next day that we'd paid him for the previous night, which lead to a lot of fretting for us whether or not we would be paying again. But in the end he managed to find our money.
It rained a lot while we were in Coimbra: buckets of rain at times, but we really can't complain as we've had such good weather up until now. And as it happened, we brought sun to Norman and Noeme, but I'll save that for the next dispatch. Happy Christmas to all!
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