BootsnAll Travel Network



Market Day

The old devil overcharged me! —Bus prices here are a bit of a puzzle anyway: sometimes its 1�30 and other times its 1�15 per ride. I handed over 1�50 and received back 5 cents.

Then I got my maths wrong. “No, vinte!” I said. A short, one-sided debate in Portugese ensued while the driver patiently but tersely explained that if I had given him 1�20, I would indeed receive back 5 cents.
“No…” I took out my guidebook: “cinquente!”—I had given him 50 cents, not 20.
“No, cinco!” he insisted. Was I being daft?
I gave up. I guess it makes up for all the times I paid 1�15 instead of 1�30 for my ticket.

The cheaper fare is actually for the longer trip which includes a detour into the Parque Natural da Arrábida, at least up to the end of the road and back again. The scenery is beautiful and I consider visiting Sesimbra with its colourful fishing boats, further down the main road, but I doubt I’ll get tired of dolphin watching just yet. In fact, it may be a drag to tear myself away to visit Lisbon and Porto. We’ll see. If the weather turns bad, I’ll have no excuse.

So far there have been none of the fifteen days of rain which the statistics project for the month of November. I looked at the website in disbelief. “Oh NO,” I wailed to John: “and I am going for fifteen days. So guess what! And look at the rainfall figures—Portugal in November is just like Scotland!”

Not a bit of it.

Tuesday, it turns out, is market day in town. The pink market hall was open and I dreamily walked past mountains of meat, vegetables and an incredible display of marine life. There were sardines, seabass, tongue-like soles (linguado), mackerel, tiny and overfished horse-mackerel, monkfish in all their ugly glory with guts spilling out and the rump of a shark as big as a dolphin (my heart stopped there for a moment). Scabbard fish—shining blades of black or silver with menacing spiky teeth and saucer eyes—stretched across tables over a metre long. Slender eels wriggled slimily in a large plastic crate. How I wish they were smoked…

There were razorfish, clams, mussles, oysters, conches (massive and tiny), goose barnacles (which look like chicken feet of the sea), squid, octopus and cuttlefish in all sizes, lobsters, prawns, crabs (including my spiritual cousin, the shore crab)—all destined for the pot by the end of the day.

Past the seafood came the greens: heaps of dew-fresh salad, a vast array of colourful vegetables and fruit fresh from the tree, the oranges with leaves still attached and fat quinces bursting fecund yellow from wooden boxes. Just past the vegetable stalls, tiny artisanal cheeses were on offer right next to a bread shop. I bought the ingredients for today’s picnic and walked back past a row of butcher shops displaying cow feet, tripe, strings of smoked spicy sausages and slender black puddings and the biggest balls I have ever seen (must have been bulls’ balls). Eyes stared back at me from skinned rabbit carcasses—and a sheep’s head.

What a shame that I could take no pictures in the dim light.

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