Life in Portugal: 11 weird things that seem normal now

thoughts while jet-lagged at 3:00a

Sandra Stephens

Aug 07, 2024

Insects: Portuguese lightning bugs are smaller than those in the US. The tiny lights are hard to detect unless there is a squadron of them. Mosquitoes are smaller too - you never know they are around until they get right up next to your ear. I never realized how central the sound of cicadas was to my childhood ‘til I moved to a place where summers are without their ceaseless singing. I have tinnitus, which gets more noticeable the more quiet it is. How’s this for irony - now that we are (after eighteen months) inside a house with working windows where it is so soundproof I can barely hear the noon whistle, or the roosters, I find my tinnitus is louder than ever.

You’re lucky, mom said when I mentioned missing the cicadas. They were deafening this year, you could see them hopping in the grass. I wonder if there is a horror movie about cicadas yet. There was a spate of insect horror in the late 60s and early 70s - ants, spiders, bees. Also rabbits. The one with ants starred Suzanne Somers. Why my brain should think it needs to retain this information instead of instant access to Portuguese verb conjugations, I do not know.

Having hens living in the house for the nonce means almost no insects survive long inside the palaceta despite the many many points of ingress available. I have trained myself to refrain from spasmodically killing the enormously long “house centipedes” that will scoot away from you in a many-legged S shape that makes the skin crawl. They eat spiders and mosquitoes and ants, the h said, as we watched an especially long and disgustingly fat one squirm into a crack in the floor, where I could see its little antennae waving the whole time we ate dinner. After that I was careful to give my shoes a good shake before putting them on.
Fruit especially berries. The h talked about it all the time, how poor the fruit - especially the apples and blueberries and oranges - have gotten in US supermarkets. He’s not wrong - good fruit seems weird, I’m still not used to how great it is all the time here, that’s how accustomed to bad fruit we’ve become in the US where it is many things that seem good but are not in fact related to taste - plentiful, yes. Variety, certainly. Homogeneously gorgeous, always. Seasonal, pshaw! You can get as many blueberries as you want in the dead of winter, all the way from Chile. But they often have no flavor, they are just blue berries, not blueberries. In contrast the fruit here is always marvelous - sweet, juicy, dense. Take blueberries - a little quarter pint of tasteless organic blueberries was sometimes $6+ in the US, here I get a two pints of sweet juicy blueness for $5. In the US I’ve eaten oranges so dry you could buff the calluses off the heel of your foot with a slice; here, we regularly buy enormous bags of oranges and juice them for breakfast.

Things grow very well here. The peaches and apples off the trees on our property are smaller than what we get in US stores, and intensely sweet. We are growing crazy things I have never before seen in ‘the wild’, only in stores - persimmons, pomegranates, avocadoes (I know these grow in the US, this is just the first time *I* have seen them hanging on trees next to my face.) There are grapes everywhere, growing wild and cultivated. They are the rice of the fruit world here. Neighbor Alberto grows green and red; we have two varieties of green. We will likely never purchase a grape again at least not in the summer, when we are buried under a monsoon of them even after giving most of them away. We don’t yet grow blueberries which is too bad because the orphan hens loooooove them but they also like apples and cucumbers and we have plenty of those. They get so excited they slip and slide and fall down, so fast they chase me when I have a plate of them all cut up in baby hen size bites. You should see them when we give them a slice of watermelon, their little chicken joy would break your heart.
Potatoes at the grocery store are smaller than those torpedoes you can get in the US to go alongside your grilled ribeye. However we grew about 30 quilos of potatoes this year, and I was pleased to note there are US-sized potatoes among them, so we can work “baked potato bar” night into our retinue of recipes. I am partial to the ones the size of marbles, myself - I like to roast a batch in the air fryer along with pearl onions and cloves of garlic.
Shelf-stable milk and eggs. In the US the most-purchased items are along the perimeter of the store - all the impulse purchases are in the middle, like a giant Skinner box. Here, milk and eggs are smack in the middle of the store. Plant-based milks are found in the smallish health food aisle, alongside vegan and gluten free options.
The bidet. I’m a fan of the built-in bidet, basically a warm water hose attached to your toilet. All of the bathrooms on our property feature the separate pedestal bowl bidet - they take up a lot of room, we’ll be switching them out for the hose-style. I truly believe if most Americans could try that hose thing ONCE they’d never go back to toilet paper, I am convinced.
Hanging clothes to dry. All of Portugal features the smiles of clotheslines across the front of apartment buildings. A lady in our neighborhood pins the clothes in order of size - from the very small tops and pants of a toddler on the left, to a few pairs of dad’s work pants hanging on the right, Mom and the other kids’ clothing - two boys from the looks of it - in between. Back in the US I’d idly look at the groceries of the person checking out in front of me and make guesses about their lives, here the clotheslines provide the same kind of entertainment.

I told my mom about the clotheslines all over Portugal and she remembered the spaceship-shaped clothesline in the backyard in that other beautiful village in my life, the one where I was born. I’d sometimes lay out and tan in the backyard, and hear the screen door slam, and the sound of mom putting the clothes basket full of wet clothes on the porch. I’d get up smelling of coconut oil and help her pin everything up, the sheets flapping. Our sheets always smelled like the sky in the summer, she said, and I like that memory of us folding up the sheets and carrying them with bits of sky still clinging to them into the house.
Pastel de nata, the unofficial pastry of Portugal. Like a creme brulee for breakfast. Yes that’s right creme brulee for breakfast is totally legal here. They don’t have breakfast food like pastel de nata at Starbucks or Peet’s in the US, where too-large, too-dry muffins and croissants missing about a hundred layers of flakiness are the norm, and despite their huge size (and huge cost) offer no satiety. Here, a bica (small coffee) and a pastel de nata run $1.50 and will tide you over nicely until lunch.
A side of rice comes with your fries. Also beans. Beans and rice are served with many meals here, even meals that come with fries. The portion of fries is not enormous though - if you are hungry you can eat it all. They call fries and potato chips the same thing - batatas fritas.
Bread acting as more than just a vehicle or a sop, actually enhancing the meal and sometimes even being the meal. My relationship with bread has undergone a transformation here in Portugal. In the US, bread gives me hiccups. It sounds funny until it’s you hiccupping and a million people telling you their home remedy for curing hiccups, none of which work when bread is the cause, at least not for me. We discovered Mafra bread on our own - Mafra is a town that is a World Heritage Site, and they have a week-long bread festival every year. Our neighbor barters away veggies and fruit with a bakery owner, and we get all kinds of bread and rolls as a result - cornbread, rye bread, croissants, yeast rolls, milk rolls, seed rolls. Put it in the air fryer to toast for however long you want, it doesn’t burn, because it’s not loaded with sugar. Keep your manna from heaven, I’ll have my pao from Portugal.
Dog poop on the street. Here on the streets of Portugal it is 2010. A few people pick up after their dogs. In the parks, there are bins for dog poop, along with free doggie poop bags. But on the street, it’s walker beware, people will let their dog lay one down in the middle of a narrow sidewalk and just leave it there. If I am walking with Jake I’ll sometimes pick it up, if it’s egregiously large and an older person would have to step over or around it. But even in the parks there is still plenty of dog poop on the paths - a park worker once complained to me in Portuguese that she wished more dog owners were like me, so she had less to pick up. I said, well, his poops estao muito grande and for some reason this made us both laugh.
The sun! The Portuguese sun burns hot and intense. I’ve lived in Texas, worked in Florida, visited Arizona, experienced places so hot and dry they’ve had drought for more than a decade, and I’ve never felt anything as penetratingly hot and intense as the Portuguese sun. In July and August, if I don’t get Jake walked by 9a, we have to wait til the sun goes down. In the winter it’s nice though - when the inside of your house gets too cold and damp feeling, step outside in the warm sun and you can literally feel the moisture evaporating from your clothes. The h, who is of Dutch heritage and very fair and usually only tans during ski season, is looking distinctly light bronze with little blonde streaks in his hair.
Well that’s it, those are my 3:00a jet lagged ramblings. Look at that watermelon, you wouldn’t believe how heavy it was!