Portugal: Ideas and Impressions.

Portugal: Impressions and ideas.

I'm sitting in the main street in Quarteira, in The Algarve, in Portugal. Is a little scruffy. A Christmas fair has been running on and off for a few days and they have put read carpet all down the street, which is now rather dirty! A busker is singing a mix of the usual busker hits, like, “American Pie” and something I assume is Portuguese, but it's a really hard language to pick up and I learned more Spanish, Italian and German in 24 hours than I have Portuguese in a month - sorry.

A few moments ago a man walked by with a bucket of half alive octopus. There are lots of bikes and scooters, cars are hard to afford here. Portugal is pretty poor and pretty sparsely populated. Lots of people don't have jobs, however many of them are not unemployed, they live off small plots of family owned land, growing most of their food and bartering a bit more. Even in the town lots of bits of verge or unused land has been adopted by householders and turned into stretches of vegetable garden.

There are many empty show and decaying buildings but also little friendly business almost always kept very clean, even if their stuff is a bit old and scuffed it is usually wiped, maintained and polished. It shows a short of self respect which is typical of the almost poverty of many here. They don't act down on their luck, they act happy, friendly, community minded - without much wealth. Up the street a young woman and a weathered old lady have been dancing to the busker while minding empty stalls, at the end of the song they embrace and go back to work, see what I mean?

There are also many empty apartment buildings - I saw this in Spain too. Row upon row of holiday flats empty nine months of the year. I may a man who owned one and worked in London, he moved to Portugal but before that had owned it ten years and spent one month total in it. I did last them on my bike, and passed the building sites throwing up more and think, can't we share them out somehow? I'm not socialist, I do think you should benefit from hard work but surely a system could be worked out to learn them out to displaced families or something? I don't know but it seems so sad that people are sleeping in the doorways of 100 empty little fully functional apartments!

The coast and the countryside, the history and the wildlife are wonderful here, feasting on being surrounded by so much differentness.

Love, Kirsteen