We've already extended the rental on our car twice as we were racing down the N-1 to make it to Lisbon during the pathetic two hour window that Eurocar is open between their two hour lunch break and when they close. Somehow all the businesses can manage being open for only 4 hours a day, I have no idea what people in Portugal do if they need to rent a car after 4 pm. Avoiding the tolls means taking the smaller roads that wind through industrial parks, main streets of small towns and the "rotas du vihno" which lead you through wine country but take you no where near vineyards that you can actually tour or taste. It's infinitely more scenic than the toll roads, but takes twice the time.
It looked like we might just make it, even though we had to forgo out planned stop for Leito, the regional specialty of roast suckling pig. At first, when talking to the football team that more or less adopted us at the wine festival, I assumed that it was just a smaller breed of pig. Two days later, in the rare silence between Leigh and I, I burst out "oh, suckling, as in baby pig!" It was one of those classic Genna finally catches-on-moments, followed by the classic Leigh-makes-fun-of-how-slow-Genna-is moments. But, if we held course and weren't tempted by a road side coffee shop we would make it in time to drop off the car and find a place to sleep in Lisbon.
Up ahead the cars in front of us were all swaying to the right to swerve around something, which I assumed was trash or a dead animal. It isn't until we approach that it hits me as Leigh makes the same jarring swerve trying not to hit it, a kitten! Holy shit, what is a kitten doing in the middle of the road! What the hell is a kitten doing in the middle of the road!
As Leigh swung the car to the right to avoid it, it looked like it is rolling over on its back, almost like it were playing, proving it was still alive. A hundred yards up when got our breath back Leigh asked if we should go back, pull it out of the road. It's still there, still alive, when we get back to it and I lept out of the car, getting splashed by the passing trucks and honked at by other drivers who must have thought "what is this crazy girl downing in the middle of the road." I must looked like an idiot, scooping up near road kill in the middle of the wet road with the bright green scarf that I bought in India. Luckily, it looks like everybody was taking to toll roads and traffic was sparse, it was easy to make it over to the shoulder to set the limping stray in the grass, where it just sat there, limp but living. It was so wet and pathetic that it looked more like a drenched rat than something little girls would beg their parents for. Leigh as pulled the car back on to the road, she looked at me with that a sort of sad desperation. "We can't just leave it there."
So ten minutes later were driving towards Leiria, a town on the way to Lisbon, with the car reeking like wet cat. Leigh had no idea what to do, I had no idea what to do. We were now in a country where we spoke nearly none of the language with a barely living kitten we found of the side of the road. How do you say vet in Portuguese? How were we going to explain to explain that yes, we know stray animals die in the roads all of the time in this country? Yes, we were those bleeding heart Americans who wanted to save this furry little creature.
These are the kind of situations where I am usually the sensitive one and Leigh acts and the reasonable half of our operation. You couldn't say our pair is brains and brawns so much and brains and a little too much heart. But this time, as we are both becoming aware of the possibility that the best thing we can do it to put it to sleep, and the fact that we might be the ones left with that terrible responsibility, you can tell that she is as soft as I am. We can't kill it ourselves, we've got to find a vet, somehow.
Driving into the next town, the tiny wet creature I've got in my lap starts to move. When I first wrapped my fingers around its fading body it was barely moving. Breathing seemed like all it could do, you would expect a stray to struggle as you plucked it off of the road, but this one just lay in the scarf passively. Its front leg was twisted, looking deformed and broken, but finally, just as we are entering the next city, it is starting to move, to put weight on its legs and to notice that the inside of this car was not the environment it was used to.
Leigh pulled in to the parking lot next to the town market that was just coming to a close. With the cat in my arms, hoping that "kitten wrapped in scarf" might come across as "where is the nearest vet?" to whomever we could find. In the pattern of our constant dumb luck, the town vet is just around the block. More dumb luck, it was open even though we have arrived doing Portugal's gaping lunch hour. Oh yeah, and the vet was the most attractive man I have ever seen. This is the man women fantasize about when they fantasize about vets. As he opened the down, the two of us where stunned. It took several minutes, between our language struggle and our general goofiness around good looking men who aren't immediately trying to sleep with us, to explain that we had a stray cat that we found on the road, and yes, we wanted him to do something about it.
Naturally, good-looking-vet-guy was also super-compassionate-vet guy. He brought us into his office, where I am sure each of us secretly hoped he would seduce us, felt the kitten's insides with a stethoscope, helped it to poop (which seemed to be it's biggest probably), found it's dislocated hip, and gave us the best news of our life, "it is probably going to recover just fine." I was shocked when Leigh, who swears to never want a pet, asked the question I was thinking, "do you know the rules about flying animals from Portugal to the US?" In the same soothing voice he used to tell the cat (in English, by the by) "I know, I know" as it squealed at having it's little cat turds pushed out of it, he told us it needed rest, to come back in three hours and it should be much better. After dicking around in town, looking for a wine co-op and ending up at the super-market instead, we returned to find our wet rat transformed to a fluffy, adorable, and calm kitten, thanks to some rest, food and kitty drugs.
Don't freak out Mom, I am not bring a kitten home with me. Not that I didn't contemplate the possibility of either bring him to Macedonia with us, or even returning there after to pick him up. Turns out smuggling cats into the United States is almost as hard as smuggling drugs into the United States.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Adventures behind the wheel
First gear, second gear, third girl and I am thrilled to be driving a stick again. Our luck, or simply the fact that we are in Europe, that we should get a manual when we finally decided to nut up, rent a car, and wonder through the parts of a country that you can't find if hitch hiking is illegal. Naturally, the first thing we did was empty the contents of our packs on to the back seat and assemble sandwiches to eat on the road. Not exactly home, but we did our best to make it that way. Thank god Eurocar didn't give us an automatic.
Personally, I'm a little shocked that they let us rent a car at all. A little strung out after an all night, sub-zero, bus ride followed by a staggering morning, our gate into the airport is no less than a wobble. The bright orange sign that looms above us says "Budget," and after asking the clerk if he spoke English, Leigh announces "right, we would like to rent a car" in a such a matter of fact tone that I was surprised the reaction wasn't a chuckle and "yeah, right." It might just be the fact that after 6 months of constant contact we can read each other's tones like a secret language, but something in the way she announced "WE would like to rent a car" was conscience of the joke of it all. WE would never rent a car to people like US, two girls who look like they might be fifteen and who clearly have no idea what they are going to do, how long they want the car for, or how much is should cost. To all of our surprises, the clerk presses the keys to our Suzuki Ibiza into Leigh's palm, looks disconcertingly at me, and reassures that I will not be the driver of the vehicle. Is it the sweat pants, the frizzy hair or the fact that I'm carrying a sack full of snacks that makes me look like a bad driver? But whatever, sure, I wont be driving the car..
Which is only a partial lie, most of the trip I occupy the passenger seat, begging Leigh to pull over for every road side cherry stand between Coimbra and Porto. Old women sell us the fattest cherries I have ever eaten, cherries so meaty I couldn't say they were a vegetarian product, by the kilo. I am sure collectively we consumed two kilos of cherries a day. Not that I can tell you exactly how much a kilo of cherries is. Six months outside of the US and we still haven't mastered the metric system. Either way, its a lot of cherries and still it is not enough.
Stirring clear of the exorbitantly expensive toll roads, we opt for the scenic route. Village after village ambles by in a blur or awnings, tiled churches, vineyards and gardens. It might be degrading to a country full of adults, but Portugal is cute with a capital C. Outside of the larger cities of Porto, Lisbon and Coimbra, the landscape seems to be aging with the people. Beautiful buildings, older than my country, are deserted with broken windows and the people hobbling along at a crawl and scowl at us as we drive by. This may seems like a sign that the Portuguese are unfriendly, but it is entirely the contrary. Get lost, ask directs or simply say "Bom Dia" to someone and the friendliness will blow you away, and sometimes in the wrong direction.
In an eagerness to be helpful, we have had several people give us directions that they themselves didn't know. Rather than admit that they can't help you, most will just make something up because they want to make you happy. With direct or misguided directions, shop owners have left their posts to walk us part of the way to the wine shop, restaurant, veterinarian (more on this later...) or hotel you are looking for. They'll spend 10 minutes in a language you clearly don't understand trying to combine hand signals and half Spanish words trying to send you in a direction. It makes me want to go home and find every lost person in Colorado and give them very specific and helpful directions. Although I am not a believer in Karma- at least in the spiritual way most people are- I owe the world a lot of good deeds, I feel like a kindness sponge here in Portugal.
ps. please forgive the spelling on this particular post- I am a terrible speller and the spellcheck on blogger isn't working currently, so I will have to return to it later.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
¨littering and...¨
The time had come. After two weeks of hard work scooping shit, hugging cows and pretending to understand Catalan we were sad to leave our new family (human and bovine) but ready to return to the city. We had done a load of laundry, desperately hoping the remainder of our garments wouldn´t contaminate the very clean apartment of our friend Alberto, who was kind enough to let us crash at his place, again.
Sometime around Friday Josep, in a rare inquiry that did not evolve subtly implying that there is sometime deeply wrong with our country, asked us when we would like to leave. Thankful that we didn´t have to be the ones to bring up the topic of our departure, we ask if Monday is okay. To our luck it seems that Josep is planning on a trip to Barcelona on Monday as well, the first one in 8 years, and is willing to take us along. Saving us the 6 euros a train would have cost and giving us an opportunity to dry out the garments in the car because we were too lazy to bring them in from the rain.
Cops are nothing new for us on this voyage. We´ve bravely (well maybe not so bravely) faced the Tourist Police in Kashmir, which was nothing compared to our repeated run ins with the Indian Army stationed there. We are pros at looking foreign, dumb and cute- a useful combination when it comes to getting out of trouble with underpaid authority figures.
Some 20 minutes outside of Ripoll, we are flagged to the shoulder by a short cop wearing a gray uniform underneath the lime green reflector vest, which was just a tad gratuitous considering it was the middle of the day. After Morocco, I half expected Josep to hop out of the car, slip the copper a twenty and be on our way. After all, that was how it went down every time our shared taxis were pulled over in Morocco. There, coruption in the police force is no less common or publicly acknowledged than donut addicted cops are in the US. It´s treated as a common joke, a fact of life. The taxi drivers usually include the cost of their bribes into our fares.
So naturally, when the humorless cop sternly asked for our papers we were shocked. Really? We weren´t even driving, why does he need our passports? Before Leigh manages to fish my documents out of my purse (they were the most handy) the cop explains something in Catalan or Spanish too quick for Leigh to comprehend. He walks away with my passport in hand, leaving Josep to explain in his slow and deliberate Spanish that we were pulled over for not wearing seltbelts.
What? We die a little bit everyday from the second hand smoke in bars but you´re telling us they actually take the seatbelt law here seriously enough that they would pull us over? As the second cop car pulls up, Leigh and I glance at each other, unable to hide our shock that our personal safety choice is a grave enough offense to warrant the attention of three cops, two cop cars and doubtlessly a appalling sum of public funds. Clearly we are dealing with a bunch of small town cops who want to to be heroes but have little to do but pull cats out of trees and pull over unsuspecting tourists. Josep seems fidgety, which is nothing new, but this time it seems out of guilt and stress. He hadn´t noticed we were unbuckled and this little detour was putting off the trip to the city that he genuinely admitted made him nervous anyway.
The newer cop, a puffed up, self important son of a bitch, comes back with my passport and looks at Leigh while rattling off something in half Spanish half Catalan. He repeats himself twice, after Leigh informs him that she is not a native, is confused how this is a big deal, and needs him to speak slower. The jerk doesn´t slow his pace with each repetition, just increases his tone of indigence. ¨Vale?vale?¨ meaning Ok. He repeats like a broken record with no pause included for us to slip in ¨No, no vale!¨ I, of course, don´t understand a word of it except for a few numbers, which is cannot discern between 105 and 150. Surely that can´t be the fine.
Leigh responds as patiently and deliberately as she can, even though I can hear from the cracks in her voice that her anger is starting to burst through. She tells him we´re Americans, tourists, and that we didn´t know the law. He looks dumbfounded, as if he didn´t understand a word, which seems unbelievable considering that Josep uses the exact set of words to explain that we are Americans, tourists, and didn´t know the law. We´d be good little girls, put on our seltbelts (after all, who needs personal liberties) and drive away safely now. We´d learned our lesson, all we needed was a warning.
But that was not the case, apparently this was the cop who had SEEN us drive over the hill seatbeltless, and CALLED his buddy to insure that we were properly reprimanded for our crimes. He was the hand of justice. A hand that held the passport of a curly brunette but was too stupid to discern that it was not the same redheaded girl he was trying to fine. After several moments of confusion on his part, he returns to his car to do god knows what with Leigh´s passport, the same thing that had taken him 10 minutes to do with mine earlier. For once in my life, I had hoped the gigantic BUSH on the inside of her passport would do us some good. Fat chance.
Josep is getting increasingly anxious as time wears on. We´d been stopped for 30 minutes and he was already behind enough to miss the sporadic hours of whatever office he needed to visit. In the cop´s absence, Leigh and I practice the use of every curse word and insult we knew, disregardful of our conservative companion. ¨Fucking Fascist sons of bitches, they can´t really be writing us a ticket for not wearing seatbelts!¨ The both of us are spastic, seething with rage and disbelief. The seatbelts that we had retrospectively strapped ourselves in, even though the car was still, could barely contain us. I half expect her to bolt from the car for the hills, or worse for the cop car to reason our way out of this absurd charge.
When the cop returns and hands the ticket to Leigh she nearly jumps out of her seat. ¨105 Euros? That´s like 150 dollars! Is this for the both of us?¨ No, the duchbag explains, seeming to want us to think he was being compassionate for only writing the one citation. He wasn´t sure if I had been wearing a seatbelt, whih I had quietly slipped in on with the same ear for danger that as a teenager made me put on my bike helmet only when I was somewhere my mother could see. So 105 euros was for one person, and the slime ball wants us to think we were lucky!!!
At first I was convinced this was blackmail, extortion, which I ask loudly with the cop still lurking outside of Leigh´s window. I half hope he understands English, he should know that he IS the crook. The paper work is extensive, and the fine is immediate, meaning we could pay right on the spot or pay twice as much later. Somewhere in there it is implied that if we didn´t pay eventually, they would come and take Josep´s car. Josep seemed to want to get the whole episode over with as soon as possible so he could return to his cows, who love him even without a seatbelt. Still there was symbathy in his voice, turns out that he had also had been pulled over and paid an extraordinary fine for not having the proper light on a tractor he was driving on the dirt road from a neighbor´s house to his own. This, also, happened in the middle of the day. Had it not been for Josep´s nervous presence, and the chance that we could get him in trouble, I am almost certain we would have refused the fine, called the cops the arms of the fasict authoritative system that they are and gotten hauled off to some cell for disorderly conduct.
But we can´t let them get away with this entirely. When he comes back, he hands Leigh her credit card and it´s slip to sign. She grudgingly signs it, all the while muttering things under her breath that, thankfully, only I can understand. Next is the slip documenting our heinous crime. He explains in his inflated baritone is the denouncement. I am sure this is just the Catalan word for tickets, but the connotation is still there. Leigh is to sign it, agreeing to the fine and the ticket, whatever that means considering we had already forked over 105 Euros, at least six days worth of living. Instead, like the pistol she is, she looks him straight in the face, saying ¨Yo denunico la denunica,¨ roughly I denounce the denouncement. Good girl, the denouncement remains unsigned, denounced, as it were. Unfortuantly, even though a little of our dignity had been salvaged, we still drive away 105 Euros poorer and with much less respect for the Spanish government. Not too mention, the delay makes getting to Barcelona in time impossible and our host is forced to drop us off at the train station, where the ticket is somehow four euros more expensive than the one to Ripoll even though we had driven half the way.
Sometime around Friday Josep, in a rare inquiry that did not evolve subtly implying that there is sometime deeply wrong with our country, asked us when we would like to leave. Thankful that we didn´t have to be the ones to bring up the topic of our departure, we ask if Monday is okay. To our luck it seems that Josep is planning on a trip to Barcelona on Monday as well, the first one in 8 years, and is willing to take us along. Saving us the 6 euros a train would have cost and giving us an opportunity to dry out the garments in the car because we were too lazy to bring them in from the rain.
Cops are nothing new for us on this voyage. We´ve bravely (well maybe not so bravely) faced the Tourist Police in Kashmir, which was nothing compared to our repeated run ins with the Indian Army stationed there. We are pros at looking foreign, dumb and cute- a useful combination when it comes to getting out of trouble with underpaid authority figures.
Some 20 minutes outside of Ripoll, we are flagged to the shoulder by a short cop wearing a gray uniform underneath the lime green reflector vest, which was just a tad gratuitous considering it was the middle of the day. After Morocco, I half expected Josep to hop out of the car, slip the copper a twenty and be on our way. After all, that was how it went down every time our shared taxis were pulled over in Morocco. There, coruption in the police force is no less common or publicly acknowledged than donut addicted cops are in the US. It´s treated as a common joke, a fact of life. The taxi drivers usually include the cost of their bribes into our fares.
So naturally, when the humorless cop sternly asked for our papers we were shocked. Really? We weren´t even driving, why does he need our passports? Before Leigh manages to fish my documents out of my purse (they were the most handy) the cop explains something in Catalan or Spanish too quick for Leigh to comprehend. He walks away with my passport in hand, leaving Josep to explain in his slow and deliberate Spanish that we were pulled over for not wearing seltbelts.
What? We die a little bit everyday from the second hand smoke in bars but you´re telling us they actually take the seatbelt law here seriously enough that they would pull us over? As the second cop car pulls up, Leigh and I glance at each other, unable to hide our shock that our personal safety choice is a grave enough offense to warrant the attention of three cops, two cop cars and doubtlessly a appalling sum of public funds. Clearly we are dealing with a bunch of small town cops who want to to be heroes but have little to do but pull cats out of trees and pull over unsuspecting tourists. Josep seems fidgety, which is nothing new, but this time it seems out of guilt and stress. He hadn´t noticed we were unbuckled and this little detour was putting off the trip to the city that he genuinely admitted made him nervous anyway.
The newer cop, a puffed up, self important son of a bitch, comes back with my passport and looks at Leigh while rattling off something in half Spanish half Catalan. He repeats himself twice, after Leigh informs him that she is not a native, is confused how this is a big deal, and needs him to speak slower. The jerk doesn´t slow his pace with each repetition, just increases his tone of indigence. ¨Vale?vale?¨ meaning Ok. He repeats like a broken record with no pause included for us to slip in ¨No, no vale!¨ I, of course, don´t understand a word of it except for a few numbers, which is cannot discern between 105 and 150. Surely that can´t be the fine.
Leigh responds as patiently and deliberately as she can, even though I can hear from the cracks in her voice that her anger is starting to burst through. She tells him we´re Americans, tourists, and that we didn´t know the law. He looks dumbfounded, as if he didn´t understand a word, which seems unbelievable considering that Josep uses the exact set of words to explain that we are Americans, tourists, and didn´t know the law. We´d be good little girls, put on our seltbelts (after all, who needs personal liberties) and drive away safely now. We´d learned our lesson, all we needed was a warning.
But that was not the case, apparently this was the cop who had SEEN us drive over the hill seatbeltless, and CALLED his buddy to insure that we were properly reprimanded for our crimes. He was the hand of justice. A hand that held the passport of a curly brunette but was too stupid to discern that it was not the same redheaded girl he was trying to fine. After several moments of confusion on his part, he returns to his car to do god knows what with Leigh´s passport, the same thing that had taken him 10 minutes to do with mine earlier. For once in my life, I had hoped the gigantic BUSH on the inside of her passport would do us some good. Fat chance.
Josep is getting increasingly anxious as time wears on. We´d been stopped for 30 minutes and he was already behind enough to miss the sporadic hours of whatever office he needed to visit. In the cop´s absence, Leigh and I practice the use of every curse word and insult we knew, disregardful of our conservative companion. ¨Fucking Fascist sons of bitches, they can´t really be writing us a ticket for not wearing seatbelts!¨ The both of us are spastic, seething with rage and disbelief. The seatbelts that we had retrospectively strapped ourselves in, even though the car was still, could barely contain us. I half expect her to bolt from the car for the hills, or worse for the cop car to reason our way out of this absurd charge.
When the cop returns and hands the ticket to Leigh she nearly jumps out of her seat. ¨105 Euros? That´s like 150 dollars! Is this for the both of us?¨ No, the duchbag explains, seeming to want us to think he was being compassionate for only writing the one citation. He wasn´t sure if I had been wearing a seatbelt, whih I had quietly slipped in on with the same ear for danger that as a teenager made me put on my bike helmet only when I was somewhere my mother could see. So 105 euros was for one person, and the slime ball wants us to think we were lucky!!!
At first I was convinced this was blackmail, extortion, which I ask loudly with the cop still lurking outside of Leigh´s window. I half hope he understands English, he should know that he IS the crook. The paper work is extensive, and the fine is immediate, meaning we could pay right on the spot or pay twice as much later. Somewhere in there it is implied that if we didn´t pay eventually, they would come and take Josep´s car. Josep seemed to want to get the whole episode over with as soon as possible so he could return to his cows, who love him even without a seatbelt. Still there was symbathy in his voice, turns out that he had also had been pulled over and paid an extraordinary fine for not having the proper light on a tractor he was driving on the dirt road from a neighbor´s house to his own. This, also, happened in the middle of the day. Had it not been for Josep´s nervous presence, and the chance that we could get him in trouble, I am almost certain we would have refused the fine, called the cops the arms of the fasict authoritative system that they are and gotten hauled off to some cell for disorderly conduct.
But we can´t let them get away with this entirely. When he comes back, he hands Leigh her credit card and it´s slip to sign. She grudgingly signs it, all the while muttering things under her breath that, thankfully, only I can understand. Next is the slip documenting our heinous crime. He explains in his inflated baritone is the denouncement. I am sure this is just the Catalan word for tickets, but the connotation is still there. Leigh is to sign it, agreeing to the fine and the ticket, whatever that means considering we had already forked over 105 Euros, at least six days worth of living. Instead, like the pistol she is, she looks him straight in the face, saying ¨Yo denunico la denunica,¨ roughly I denounce the denouncement. Good girl, the denouncement remains unsigned, denounced, as it were. Unfortuantly, even though a little of our dignity had been salvaged, we still drive away 105 Euros poorer and with much less respect for the Spanish government. Not too mention, the delay makes getting to Barcelona in time impossible and our host is forced to drop us off at the train station, where the ticket is somehow four euros more expensive than the one to Ripoll even though we had driven half the way.
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