Artist: Caleb Law
File Size:307 KB
Picture Dimensions: 1035 x 1420 Pixels

Description: Rynel
Rynel is a Thief from London searching around with his friendly Gremlin Curbie. Rynel’s standards are low but constitution high with a master skill of thievery getting around with his trusty fork-spoon.

Curbie
Curbie is a Sprotolin a small friendly Gremlin which helps Roger with whatever he does.
His favourite food is Cheddar Cheese and Crackers

Here I was, sad about leaving, and she happy to be getting away. But you know, I’ve never bitten the meager fruit of poverty. And it’s one thing to vacation somewhere, another to live there.

We went and were treated gruffly by a man there who said he hated George W. Bush. He even had a cartoon that he shoved under our noses as I was signing in. Something from Le Monde. The man was going on and on in Portuguese and French about what a monkey George Bush was.

He had no idea what my politics were; for all he knew, I too disliked Bush. But he didn’t care. I was American, and that was enough. I made one mistake. I said, “But surely there’s more to America than Bush. You know, our culture, our people, freedom, democracy … ”

This simply touched him off again. America had no culture, freedom and democracy were a joke, etc., etc.

Cathy was becoming very nervous. So too was the man’s boss, who may even have been the owner, and who must have been wondering what our idea of Portuguese hospitality was. I can assure you, our idea of it is very, very good. You get people like that guy everywhere. It’s part of living abroad.

Thinking of the dictatorships and the coups, and of the stray dogs, I shook my head. Was I in Latin America again? No, Europe. But Peripheral Europe, Iberian Europe. You’re closer to Africa here than Paris. This very hill I’m standing on, this Castelo, was Muslim until the siege of 1147. The name of the charming quarter below me, Alfama, is Arabic. No region of Western Europe brushed so close to Islam as Iberia.

Even in recent times, the experience of Spain and Portugal differs greatly from that of the European heartland. I was surprised to learn that Portugal actually did fight for the Allies in World War I. She stayed out of the Second. Spain took no sides in either of the world wars. Up in northern Europe, by contrast, you can’t drive a few hundred kilometers without passing a war cemetery.

Walking around Alfama, I saw a thick old lady standing on a street corner, at the foot of a hill. Faintly she called to me. I came. She asked me to help her walk. Though big, she apparently had trouble walking. I let her hold me. She gripped me tightly. We shuffled uphill together. I left her safe at her door.

We explored the Bairro Alto, atop one of the seven hills. Its streets are narrow enough to squeeze out most auto traffic, and there are old ladies walking in the streets and looking out their windows and greeting one another, and there are grocery stores so narrow you can barely turn around in them, stretching meters deep to the back, where through a half-open door you can just glimpse a stout old tree in a secret courtyard. I would have lingered on every alley.

At night, we taxied to the Clube do Fado in Alfama for dinner and music. Four singers entertained us in shifts, an old man, a middle-aged woman, and two beautiful young women. Two men on guitars, another on the double bass. As we’re eating, Cathy motions for me to turn around, and there’s the lady who had ordered me to put out my cigar in Coimbra. “Because of you, I quit smoking,” I said. In the dim light, she didn’t know who I was at first. Then she recognized me. Everyone laughed. She’s Greek.

After my self-guided tour, I was back in the parking lot, opening the door of my car. As I was about to get in, I noticed something crawling out from under the car. It was a dog, scrawny and mangy, about to lose his shade. He looked friendly enough, the sad sack. As soon as he wiggled out, his comrade joined him. He too had that forsaken but friendly look. I gave them both a thorough rub on their heads and wished them luck.

Back in Lisbon, Cathy and I dropped off the Polo at the airport and took a taxi to the Marriott. Now, the Marriott is a fine hotel, an American hotel; you know what to expect. You know you’re not going to get keys left in the door and a Jane Eyre videocassette for your use. You’re going to get standard luxury. I missed the quirky experience of a European bed and breakfast.

The Marriott’s out a ways, near the university and the zoo, and the metro’s a few minutes walking. It’s a clean tube. We rode it for about 5 km, from Jardim Zool”o down to Baixa/Chiado, right in the middle of everything. We sat in a square and watched a stray dog walk around and around, looking for something, anything, to eat. I said to Cathy, I’m beginning to think stray dogs are a bit of a challenge for Portugal.

Portugal is like West Virginia: full of ambitious and expensive roads through the mountains. Only, Portugal’s aren’t finished yet. So we made do on the two-laners. It’s a pretty country, but most of the forest I saw was pine and eucalyptus.

In Coimbra we stayed at Quinta das L’imas. Are you going to Coimbra’ Invest in a night in this classy establishment.

Cathy had business in the area, so we met up with Sergio, her co-worker from the plant down the road. Sergio is a lucky Portuguese: He found a good job in the region he was brought up in. I was about to say “born in,” until I remembered that Sergio is a young retornado, one of the hundreds of thousands of Portuguese who fled the African colonies after their independence in the mid-1970s. Sergio was born in Angola, says he’s one-sixteenth African, and was an infant at the time of the revolu’.

He drove us to the old section, to a parking area, where we saw a ragged man directing things. Sergio parked and handed him some coins. Otherwise, Sergio said, the man wouldn’t “protect” the car. Apparently the protection is well worth having, because of the uncanny way cars get scratches without it.

Over dinner I heard fado for the first time. Fado means fate; it’s usually sad music, in a minor key; the Portuguese blues. Two men with guitars, men and women sitting around a table singing, no microphones. Not everything was fado. The man sang in Spanish, “Comandante Che Guevara,” a tribute as stirring as its subject was undeserving.

Everyone was smoking, Portugal not having yet joined the war on nicotine. I joined in, with a cigar. A lady with a bloodhound’s nose sniffed me out from a few tables away and climbed over to our table. What is sport to you is death to me, and all that. I was going to make a fuss; I was going to say, “Who do you think you are, Michael Bloomberg?” But I merely acquiesced. The key to it was, I really didn’t like the cigar.

In the morning we walked in the hills above the estate. There’s the river below, kind of sluggish from the dams; vineyards terracing up the slopes; and the rough outlines of the ridges above. A very pretty scene. It was warm and we were sweating, and the sun all full on your face.

Back at the estate, we admired the porch, roofed over with grapevines, from which the lusty purple fruit dangled. We toured the wine-making facilities with the Dutch couples and Filomena, our cheerful guide. At the end we bought a tawny and a ruby. Port is the main thing they make at Quinta de la Rosa. I was surprised to learn that, after all the careful work they do to prepare the port, much still depends on the quality of the brandy they mix in, and Quinta has nothing to do with brandy.

I swam for an hour in the pool. A lizard had fallen in, so I helped him out.

Walking near dusk in Pinh’ Cathy and I watched the swallows darting into their mud nests under balconies and eaves. Rows and rows of mud nests under the balconies and eaves, and the swallows darting in and out of them. Semi-stray dogs on the streets below, and the townspeople, and the train station with its azulejos (glazed tiles).

Back home, in the common room, we plopped in a videotape of Jane Eyre, the one with Timothy Dalton as Mr. Rochester. The windows were open; there was the black night and Mars; the river below, down the steep hillside; the TV before us; we were alone. We were alone watching the story of the sturdy young British governess. I was sipping a glass from our complimentary bottle of ros’I said to Cathy, “We’re watching Jane Eyre in Portugal.”

It was a lot of driving, much of it on narrow mountain roads. Often, the landscape was beautiful. Often, it was charred, the calling card of the fires. Around Muxagata, the area looked semi-arid: few trees, and the gorse like tumbleweed. It was hot in that remote little village, with the old men killing time sitting in front of a store, and the old women, many of them dressed head to toe in black, lining up to get into the local church. Stray dogs kept a wary distance from you.

In the early 1990s, many Portuguese wanted to dam up the C’ Then someone found engravings made 20,000 years ago by the Cro-Magnon men. Unlike the engravings and paintings in France and Spain, these works of art are not in caves, but outside. After the discovery, plans for the dam were laid aside, and the park was born.

Muxagata and Castel Melhor were remote enough. Then Dina, our guide, loaded our group into a four-wheel drive truck and drove us into some real backcountry. There were Cathy and me, three girls from Australia and a couple from Spain. Dina drove for about 30 minutes, taking us past spectacularly steep vineyards, and olive and almond groves. She was speaking Portuguese to the Spanish couple, archaeologists at the University of the Basque Country. The Spanish couple were answering back in Spanish. Dina spoke in English for the Australians and us. She had a relaxed, personal manner that everyone liked.

At the bottom of the valley, nothing moved, except John, the guard?s dog, snapping at flies. Just the heat and the stillness and the feeling of going back 200 centuries. Any minute I expected a wolf or a lynx (still found in that region) to slink past.

Some of the engravings are obvious at a glance; there’s a horse’s head, there a bull?s horns, there his bulk. Others require careful delineation. All are fascinating. I told Cathy later, I don?t care whether they?re broken or faded. What matters is, the pictures really are there. It takes imagination to see the engravings as they may have once looked; it takes imagination to see the artist there, pecking, scraping. But we?re not looking at shapes in clouds here. No, those are real patterns, made by real, prehistoric hands. Wow.

After the tour, I had a question for my Spanish friends, who specialize in the Neolithic and not the Paleolithic period. Where are the Basques from? They are descendants of local Cro-Magnons, they said. Descendants of the people who made Lascaux and Altamira and Foz C’ They said they couldn’t be sure, but the way they looked at me I could see they thought it an intriguing possibility. The Indo-Europeans are probably descended from Western and Central Asian Cro-Magnons, the Spaniards said.

In Lisbon, the skies were bright, the weather warm: about 27 C (80 F). We welcomed the sun, not only because of the contrast with the fog earlier, but because the car we rented had air conditioning. It was another VW Polo, this one a station wagon.

We drove out of Lisbon to Sintra, 27 km (17 miles) west of Lisbon, near the Atlantic coast. Upon arriving in the Estef a district, we met an old man, walking with a cane. He had no voice box. He showed us where we could park for nothing, and he told us to beware of thieves, who, he assured us, are not Portuguese but foreigners. The gentleman said he was 81. Never smoke, he rasped. I understood so much of what he was saying that I said later to Cathy, they ought to lump Spanish and Portuguese into one big language and call it Iberian.

We checked in at Pens Nova Sintra. From the terrace you get a good view of the Castelo dos Mouros (Moorish Castle), perched atop a mountain nearby. We walked to Sintra-Vila and ate in a restaurant called Tulhas, near the information center. Cathy had duckmeat with rice; I tried bacalhau (codfish) in cream sauce. While we awaited the main course, our waiter brought us cheese, bread and olives, which we ate, thinking they were included. We learned otherwise later. Still, the meal was cheap by European standards, and we liked the food.

We climbed the hill to the Moorish Castle. The forest was shady, the climb tiring. The view was what we?d come for, and it was superb. To the west, the Atlantic; east-southeast, Lisbon; east-northeast, a thick haze from the forest fires. Far below, Nova Sintra, and, through our binoculars, the window to our bathroom.

For sunset, we drove to Praia das Ma? (Apple Beach). As the waves licked our feet, the sun kissed the sea good night. We climbed a rocky cliff and watched the gathering gloom. Surfers were trying to ride the gathering waves. The sky, all oranges and pinks and purples. Behind us, Mars, still faintly copper, rising.