Algarve Letters

Seasons in the Sun

There's nothing like living in a different country to shake your preconceptions.

So many of us grow up in one country and get used to how things go on there that they assume that's how it is everywhere else. But of course, it isn't.

Even such obvious things seem to be anything but obvious a thousand miles away, when the weather is different, the language is too, and just about everything seems to be upside-down.

Portugal is a great place to experience the upside-down life. People often ask me what it's like here. I used to say: 'It's just like being Alice after she's fallen down the rabbit hole'.

Yes, everything appears totally different. Mind you when I first came here so many years ago I was on my way to Morocco, but the ship docked at Lisbon, and we had half a day with nothing much to do, so I got off and wandered around. That in itself was a strange experience. I could have sworn the place had died. There were people around, but not many, and it looked as if the place had been hit by the plague. It was mostly shuttered, terribly filthy, quiet, and a bit dismal. The tenements looked as if they were falling down. Everything looked as if the main mob had moved out and there were just a few stragglers left behind.

I tried to find somewhere to buy a drink, but I couldn't make myself understood, and no-one seemed keen to serve me. Wherever I went I was simply ignored. In the end the spookiness got to me and I walked back to the ship.

I couldn't understand what my friend saw in the place. I'd been travelling with a guy roughly my age who was on his way to the Algarve to build his own house.

"How are you going to earn a living?" I asked.

"No problem," he said, "I write. I can do that anywhere."

Naturally I asked him what he wrote about.

"I write pornography for a Swedish magazine," he said, which rather stopped me in my tracks.

Anyhow, he walked off to the bus station to get some transport south, and I got back to the ship. I didn't envy him.

It was half a lifetime before I came back. Lisbon had certainly changed, but I did wonder about the rest of the country.

The first thing that struck me was the ludicrously high prices of the real estate. Perhaps I should have built a house back when my pornographic friend built his. Then I started using the local currency, the escudo. I was a little surprised to note there were 315 of them to the Pound. Hold on. That's a lot. I did a bit of research and found that there were about 60 to the pound when I was last here. Wait a minute, that's a whacking great crash in the value of the currency. That means house prices would have to rise 500% just to keep up with the crashing currency. Wow! What is this place I've come to? It sounds like a bit of a disaster.

Actually, my second arrival was similar in many respects to that first arrival all those years ago. When I first walked round Libson it was dreary and quiet and everywhere looked closed. When I arrived the second time it was exactly the same. Our idiot airline dumped us off in a shut airport. Apparently the staff were on strike, and we sat in the plane for two hours, then we were decanted into an underground corridor for another three hours before being bussed out to a hotel.

My first real introduction to the infrastructure was when I tried to use the phones to try and find out what the heck was going on, as no-one had warned us of the disaster we'd walked into. None worked. In desperation I lifted the handset of an emergency phone. I dialled the required number and was switched through to an answering machine.

I soon got used to this kind of thing.

I required local currency so I went to the hole in the wall. In Portugal it's called a Multibanco. It worked tuesdays wednesdays and thursdays, but not the rest of the week. Now this is a tourist place. What happens when the happy holiday mob descend on a saturday and look to go out for the evening? They cant get any money till next tuesday! Nice one!

Instead they have to queue for ages at a bank.

I noted that it was hopeless trying to get anyone to take credit cards. "Sorry, our card machine has broken" was the usual reply. And this is a holiday zone?

I used to waste hours in banks while people verified my identity, or so they said. And they would never let me have more than €1500 on any one day. Once I demanded to speak to the interbank section, which, curiously was called Unique. They asked me how much I wanted. I said €10,000 (I had to pay a builder). They said that would be no problem, and I handed the phone back to the clerk, who wrote down the inter-bank guarantee number, and then calmly counted me out €1,500.

I did a double-take. "But they agreed ten thousand. You have their guarantee."

"Yes, but we cant give you ten thousand."

"Why not?"

"We are concerned about fraud. We dont know for sure if this is a secure transaction."

"It doesn't matter who I am, you have the interbank guarantee."

"No, we cant give you the money….." and they kept saying the same thing. The fact that they had their own interbank system guaranteeing the transaction didn't seem to penetrate the brain.

Back at the beginning of the century, getting money from the bank was a nightmare. It was easier to drive to Spain. But then so many things were easier if you simply drove to Spain. I used to get my building supplies from there.

The first time I tried buying floor joists was surreal. But then so much in Portugal is surreal if you aren't Portuguese. The situation developed like this.

I was in what appeared to be the biggest builders' merchants in Portimao, which is the biggest town in the Algarve. I pulled at the chipboard. It wouldn't move. I gave another mighty heave and it slid slightly towards me most reluctantly. Good god, how big is this darn thing! It seemed to go on for ever. In the UK chipboard is simply eight by four. I got out my tape measure. This chunk of wood was nine feet by six feet, almost twice the size. I couldn't get that home on the roof of the car. Krikey, it was going to be difficult getting it in thru the door. Actually, come to think of it, there was going to be the small difficulty of actually lifting a sheet of the stuff to get it as far as the check-out.

I put the problem to one side for a moment and went to look at what timber they had for the joists. The state of the timber was unbelievable. There were sheets of the stuff that looked as if they had been stacked flat in the rain for months. If you lifted the top plank you uncovered a plank below that was still wet and covered in mould. I shifted about four of them, and all were absolutely sopping wet, and all were covered with great blotches of greeny-black mould. I couldn't use this stuff.
I went to another section. There were hefty chunks of timber that would obviously make excellent joists. Some were a bit twisty, but they looked solid and dry. Unfortunately there was a problem. There were only nine joists the right size, so I went down to the desk to make an order to be delivered from their depot.

The girl at the desk carefully wrote it all down, then went to find someone else, who promptly went to find someone else, and so we were four who all trooped up to the wood section to look at the joists. The girl counted them. It came to nine. "There's only nine," she said. "Do you want nine?" She looked at my order for thirtyfour.

"No, I want thirtyfour," I said. "Haven't you got any more in stock?"

There was a silence. One of the guys counted the joists. It still came to nine. He seemed surprised. "We have to order," he said.

His companion looked hard at the wood, and then counted out the joists very slowly. It still came to nine. He looked very puzzled. "Muit complicad," he said. He shook his head as if he had never come across anything quite like this before. And there we all stood, staring at the offending nine joists.

"You have more at the depot?" I asked.

One looked at the other, until there weren't any others to look at. "Muit complicad," agreed one of the guys.

This was ridiculous. I was standing in the largest building materials store in the town, and they only had nine joists. What happens when a really big order comes in?

We went back to the office and one guy telephoned somewhere else. "You leave the order here," he said as he put the phone down. "We will have the wood next week."

I didn't believe him, but I went home anyway. There is, after all, a limit to the number of times one can count nine joists in the hope that they would somehow spontaneously grow a few more; and there is also a limit to the number of times one can mutter "muit complicad".

The following week I chased the order. The guy behind the desk looked very unhappy. I thought he was going to say "muit complicad", but instead he made a phone call. There followed a shrug of the shoulders, "Maybe next week?" he said. Or maybe not, of course. I needed a plan B.

Things were just as weird when I finally found another place selling timber. They had joists but none the right size. I thought I could get away with using a particular size if they were cut down the middle. I explained what I wanted.
Foolishly I only measured two or three joists. I was thinking along UK lines. Here be the 100mm joists, and they are 4 metres long.

The following day a guy came out in a little truck and delivered the joists. I wont go into the description of how he counted out the money or how long that took, but the essential fact was I now had the right number of joists, and I set to work constructing my floor. All went well for a while, but when I was half way across the room something odd occurred. I couldn't get the joists to line up with each other.
It took some time before I realised that the only problem had to be that the wretched joists were different sizes. I measured them. There were no less than five different depths to the joists. What the heck was going on?

I went back to the store, with no less than 17 joists that were the wrong size, almost half my stock, sticking every which way out of the car. There were joists tied to the roof, joists sticking out the windows, and joists strapped on the outside of the car to the window handles on the inside. I'm surprised no-one stopped me and booked me for some obscure driving offence.

I strode down to the place where I'd bought the offending items, dumped them on the floor and went back for some more. The pile grew, customers dodged out of the way, and staff looked worried.

I thrust the bill under the nose of the nearest clerk, and asked him what he thought he was doing.

"But you asked us to cut the wood in half."

"Yes," I said cautiously.

"But we cut it in half."

"Yes, but did you drink a bottle of vodka before you cut it?"

The guys looked pained.

"Look at these joists. They change width all the way down."

"Yes, but those were the joists you wanted."

"Yes, but I'm building a floor. Every joist needs to be the same depth otherwise the floor will go up and down like mountains."

There was a puzzled silence. "Yes, but those were the joists you wanted."

This is where one has to start thinking out of the box. What is going wrong?
"But if the joists are different sizes, then someone must have made a mistake measuring them before cutting, or someone didn't cut along the line."

I was accusing them of inefficiency. That wouldn't do. They fiercely denied any such thing.

"Okay, then the wood must be different sizes."

"But of course," he said calmly.

"What?"

It was to him perfectly natural that the joists could be any size so long as they were roughly right.

By this time my brain is boggling on all cylinders.

"And another thing, some of the joists are too short."

"Yes, but some of them are longer."

"Yes, but…. how can I use the extra on the longer ones when I need it on the shorter ones to reach the other wall?"

"Yes, but…" There was a trail into silence.

"I suppose they are not all the same length as well as not all being the same width."

"Of course."

"Then you tell me how I build my floor."

This charade went on for half an hour. I eventually got them to take back 17 joists and give me 17 more that were the right size, but I'm sure they thought I was weird.

Another little oddity which caused no end of trouble was the electric supply. It came, it went, it came again, and of course it went again. You could be standing in a queue in some store, and the power went, so down went the computer. They couldn't sell you anything without it going through the computer, so we all sat down and waited and waited, sometimes five minutes, sometimes half an hour. Then the lights came on, and we waited again while the computers were re-booted, and connections re-made, and on we went again. Each deal took about five minutes to process. It was a nightmare. I despaired of going out to buy anything.

There are other problems which just dont make sense. A builder charges a certain amount for his work, then because work dries up he charges more. His idea is simple enough. As he is now working only three days a week he needs to raise his charges by about 30% to take home the same money. Only now he is no longer competitive so he gets even less work, so he has to raise his prices even further until he has no work at all.

I was travelling on the train back from Lisbon. It's a long way and the train takes its time. It take four hours to do the journey.

You have to book your seat. So there we were, settled in with our sandwiches, when I noticed a gentleman further down the coach. There was a problem. Some blighter had taken the wrong seat and then probably gone off to the restaurant car leaving his bag on the seat.

The chap who had booked the seat was very worried. He couldn't sit on another seat as he hadn't booked it. He couldn't sit on his own seat as someone else's bag was firmly in the way, and he didn't want to move it as it wasn't his. He was also responsible for it because it was on his seat. There was a fifteen minute curious pantomime acted out over this wretched bag.

Another curious situation unfolded when we were at a boot fair. My friend has a table at these fairs, and one we attended was supposedly being vamped up a bit. They wanted more custom, so they had employed this girl to go round and smile at everyone. So far so good.

When they got to our stall Julie suggested that they advertise the market in the local papers. The girl smiled sweetly and said that wasn't her job, she was only concerned with advertising.

Ummm. Well, what can I say? You tell me what the next line is.

Every country has it's little quirks, but there is a different logic going on here. I dont understand it. I say something, they say something, and I dont know if we are speaking the same language. Maybe we are, but we certainly aren't using the same logical system.

There is one other very noticeable difference between Portugal and the UK and that is the seasons. Portugal has some strange seasons. It's nice to have such a short winter, but is it winter? In fact, does winter come in the summer in Portugal?
I know that sounds an odd question, but look at it this way. Summer starts at the beginning of May and it continues right through till the end of October. November is autumn, and winter begins in December. Spring starts in February and runs to May when summer is back with us.

Or does it?

Let's do it all again. Spring actually starts in December when the jonquils come out. We have a series of springs, because there is a more pronounced spring starting in february when the mimosa is in bloom. The odd thing is that in a certain sense summer may very well begin in May when spring is over, but certainly by july we are into winter. It may be a hot winter, but how are we defining these seasons?

It doesn't rain after the beginning of may so the land dries out. By the end of june the grass is brown, the fields have gone into hibernation, or is that aestivation? Everything is dead. It's like winter in the UK. Things only liven up when the rains come again in November, and the grass starts to grow and the vegetables spurt back to life.

So, let's re-write the seasons here. December is when the cold spring starts. The warm spring starts in February. Summer starts in May, and the hot winter starts at the end of June. The hot winter doesn't end until november when we get a conjunction of spring and autumn, and the stuff up top (leaves on the trees) falls, whereas the stuff down below (grass and vegetables and things) take up the water and all start growing again.

Fun isn't it?