Shopping Till We're Dropping

Now that the festivities of the past week or so have died down, we can get back to normal.  As normal as the weather allows anyway.  It has gotten very moody: stormy and gloomy one minute and fair the next.  Pat says it reminds her of Gerrit.

One confusing aspect of learning a language is "false cognates" (or "false friends" as they're called in Portuguese), words that look or sound similar between languages but their meanings aren't.  For example, if you went into a Portuguese pharmacy and saw remedies for "constipação", what would you think they were for?  Well, you'd be wrong.  "Constipação" means the common cold.  Or you come to doors in a building.  You would push on the one marked "puxe" and pull on the one marked "empurre", right?  Wrong.  "Puxe" means "pull" and "empurre" means "push".  You can always tell the English speakers by the way they yank in frustration at the doors.  Or if you wanted to compliment someone on their exquisite taste you might be tempted to say "esquisito", but you'd get a puzzled look.  "Esquisito" means "strange", not "exquisite".  "Recipiente"?  Not a recipient, but a container.  "Pasta"?  Not spaghetti, but a folder or briefcase.  "Gripe"?  Not a complaint, but the flu.

Saturday March 8 we heard from the handrail metal fabricator and got engineering drawings.  All the details of the project look great, and he expects to be able to install at least the main stairway railing the week of the 24th.  We're looking forward to that.

We've been shopping for a few replacement items too.  The wooden handle to Gerrit's hatchet broke off so he replaced it with a nice plastic one which required a little customization  Then the blinds in the master bath pulled completely out of the ceiling, so Pat found a nice stained-glass-looking translucent window applique to function as a privacy screen instead.  This is the kind of thing homeowners do.

On Sunday we did some cleaning and housework, then garbage dumping and grocery shopping.  That sure sounds boring.  We're going to have to self-censor and only post once a month if this keeps up.  Or scrape photos from the internet and claim we went there.  Oh wait, there was one exciting development that day: we ordered a rowing machine.  We liked the one in the gym at the trailer park we were moored at back in 2022, for a good full-body workout.  We hope it will help ward off the decrepitude for a few more years at least.

Tuesday the weather had shaped up and we went on a shopping spree in Guimarães, one of our favorite little nearby cites.  We picked up our rowing machine, got the legs for our coffee-table-to-be plus a bunch more hardware, visited a 105-year old hat shop in the old part of town, had a delightful little lunch nearby, tracked down a ceramic Barcelos Rooster which Pat had fallen in love with on an earlier visit, and finally got some algae cleaner to try on the exterior of the house.  After unloading all that late in the afternoon we were ready for a beer on the balcony in the beautiful setting sun and breeze.

New hats

Nice lunch

Our lunch deserves a bit of elaboration.  The little cheese shop advertised what looked like a nice lunch of baguette sandwiches.  We asked for that and a couple beers, and the friendly proprietress said "just five minutes, I need to buy the bread".  Off she ran after serving us our excellent Spanish beer at an outside table.  She was soon back, and fixed us some delicious sandwiches of very fresh bread, ham, and some of the creamy soft shop cheese.  After enjoying our lunch we picked up a quarter kilo of the delicious cheese plus two of those Spanish beers to go, and left happy.

At right is a picture of Bart the new Barcelos Rooster.  He is a handsome devil and his hand-painted craftsmanship is superb.

Wednesday we did some grocery shopping, and on the way home the country road was blocked by a tractor from a local farm which was stuck across it.  After a minute a woman jumped out of her car and went up to help.  She was joined by another, and they all got the tractor free.  It was another example of the helpfulness we see here all the time, but there seemed to be a darker side too.  The old farmer and his wife who needed the help seemed frail and a little ashamed.  Growing old even in comfort and security is hard, but having to stay working the farm your whole life is really punishing.  And that's the way a lot of the world has to do it.

Gerrit finally finished mounting his homemade clock shelf, and boy is it ugly.  Perhaps a coat of wall-colored paint will help.  Help it blend into obscurity that is.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

Home