16A: Queima das Fitas - Video

And, as promised, here is my video account of Queima das Fitas:

http://vimeo.com/23986361

Hope you enjoy!

16: Queima das Fitas

I'm finally back with a much more upbeat blog post (because God knows we all need to be more positive nowadays).


Queima das Fitas, or "The Burning of the Ribbons," is the biggest student celebration in Europe... and it happens right in my little city of Coimbra, Portugal.  As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Coimbra is Portugal's first and oldest university and it has quite a few very old traditions.  Queima isn't a tradition that stretches back to the university's founding in the 13th century but it is at least one hundred years old and celebrates the senior's (or finalistas) graduation and the burning of their school ribbons as a symbol of such commencement.  The 8-day celebration (a day for each department at the University) starts on the Friday of May with a midnight Serenata in the wee small hours of the morning.  From then on it is complete madness in the city: mayhem, drunkenness, debauchery, and all that follows.  I sincerely doubt several of my friends here would remember the week if they didn't have incriminating photos to help them piece together the events of each day. :)

Tacos for Cinco de Mayo!

 The Thursday before Queima was actually Cinco de Mayo, so with the Midnight Serenata that night it felt as though the two party traditions of my heritages were coming together for a truly epic night.  After a "Mexican dinner" (thanks to an overpriced El Paso taco kit), Tatiana, Amy and I joined forces with Barbara and Ashleigh, split a bottle of wine, and headed to the Midnight Serenata.

Fadistas singing on the steps of Sé Velha

The square was packed at 11 PM, though we weren't surprised in the slightest.  Students in full Coimbra uniform had been waiting since the afternoon on the steps of Sé Velha, and Amy had seen them receive a pizza from a delivery boy sometime around 3 PM.  We stopped and bought individual half-bottles of Barbara and Ashleigh's favorite Portuguese wine, Mateus.  I've decided that I have family connections to this winery.

Mateus wine for everyone!

After dodging far too many drunk Coimbra students (the guys were very excited to see us and the girls glared as if their looks could kill), we found a pocket were a few recognizable Erasmus faces were stationed and enjoyed the concert when it began at, you guessed it, midnight.  We weren't sure exactly how long the concert was going to be, but with the help of Mateus we ended up enjoying the somber fado celebration quite a lot.  After stopping back at our apartment, Tatiana and I headed back out at 2 AM for the first real Queima das Fitas festivities: a party underneath the Quimica (Chemistry) and Física (Physics) departments.  The rest of the night got a little crazy... all I will tell you is that I met Tatiana back at the apartment at 6:30 AM and enjoyed delicious grilled cheeses before falling asleep and definitely missing my 9 AM class the next morning.

The Gates of Heaven.

The Stage

Ashleigh and THE CANDY

Friday night marked the first night of the "Noites do Parque," which took place across the river in a huge area.  Each night there was a giant concert, where the opening act usually began around midnight and the headliner graced the stage around 1 or 2 AM.  The first night featured The Editors as the headliner, and while they were great we didn't stay at the concert the entire time.   The facility was huge: near the stage was a giant complex for food, souvenirs, and beer.  Behind the food were three enormous tents, each with its own DJ blasting dance music.  And of course, port-a-potties and public urinals tucked out of sight.  That night Amy, myself, Barbara, and Ashleigh got giant bags of candy.  There were people all over the place handing out random things for free, and we ended up with pink balloons and condoms whose wrappers called attention to human trafficking.  We also bought delicious sangria from a booth sponsored by Bigorna, a favorite bar close to our apartment.

A shining beacon in the night.

The next day I went to visit my family with Amy, but I'll talk about my adventures with my family both that Saturday and this past weekend in my next blog.  When we returned, Tatiana and I headed out to the Noites do Parque again, where we watched Brazilian musicans Marcelinho da Lua and Marcelo D2, who were both fantastic and high-energy.

Concert-goers.

The next day was what most would call the highlight of Queima das Fitas: o Cortejo.  O Cortejo is a huge parade where students from all of the different departments create giant floats that traditionally feature some sort of political, social, or cultural satire about contemporary Portugal.  From these floats, each the color representing the department (yellow for Medicine, dark blue for Humanities, red for Law, etc), students already drenched in beer, liquor, water, and juice pour these things from the sides into other student's open mouths or drop cans and bottles into their waiting hands.  The parade starts at the Old University, continues down the hill, turns around Praça de Republica, and continues through the city.  We practically traced its path, as we saw many of the floats waiting up at the university.  There the students first got drenched by their friends and colleagues, who poured and sprayed whole cans on one another.

Classy.

While we were no stranger to the Coimbra University uniform, this was the first day that we saw the finalistas decked out in their dress uniform: sans cape, both the boys and girls had black jackets with lapels covered in colored satin (the color depended on your department) with a flower for emphasis button on their chest.  They also had colored top hats and colored walking sticks.  It is tradition to hit each senior's top hat three times (and hard!) with the walking stick (for good luck?), so most of the students had huge dents in the top front of their hats.  I was pretty jealous of their uniforms, though not so much of the hat abuse.

I didn't have any good up-close pictures myself.  How great are these uniforms though?

We walked down the Escadas Monumentais and met up with Ashleigh and Barbara to watch the parade in motion.  Absolute chaos.  If I had a Euro for the amount of times I watched someone fall down in the street right in front of me, I would be rich.  Everyone was drenched in alcohol, completely drunk, and dancing through the streets.  And this wasn't just students!  Young people (and quite a lot of older people too!) from all over the world were on the street, dancing in the parade or dodging the sprays of beer on the side lines.  As the floats passed, students tossed cans of beer to the people below.  Every once and while they would also throw bags of chips or homemade sandwiches.  One float passed by handing out little pieces of cake.  Don't worry, I fought the people at the base of that particular float and got two.  Of course I did get sprayed while trying to get a can of beer, but the mood of the entire parade was infectious and I didn't mind at all.  Unfortunately my camera got a little sticky and the zoom button still sticks a little bit, but otherwise I had a fantastic time.

Before the mayhem.

This float gave us cake.

 

Sprayed with beer. Super Bock!

Pouring vodka right into students' mouths

That night we headed to the Noites do Parque once again and saw Quim Barreiros in concert.  I'll insert a video of Quim Barreiros for you below so you can comprehend why we were at first astonished that he was headlining and then had the greatest time ever dancing to his songs.

Quim Barreiros and his accordion!

Once the weekend was over, we were a little partied out and didn't return to the Noites do Parque until Wednesday night.  Each night, though, we could hear the concerts from our apartment and, later, the music of parties going on in the different student houses around us and the bars near Sé Velha.  But attendance at the Noites do Parque on Wednesday was completely necessary: Yolanda Be Cool, who are behind one of my favorite songs of all time "We No Speak Americano" (the song I used in my Queima das Fitas video) where playing and I was determined to worship them in person.

Having too much of a good time.

In all, this week was absolutely insane.  To give you an idea of the amount of people here in Coimbra and the amount of drunkness that they carried with them, it has been reported that more beer is drank during these eight days of Quiema das Fitas than during Oktoberfest.  I really hope I can return again while I'm still young and experience this celebration again!  Later, when my video finally uploads, I'll post a link to my video about Queima das Fitas on here. 

But for now I will leave you with this, a recent vocabulary discovery I found that I don't think is entirely by accident and may be completely inspired by the Queima das Fitas festivities:

Licenciado, -a graduate

Licenciar to graduate

Licenciatura degree

Licencioso licentious

Hmm. Coincidence?  I think not.

15: Portugal, a rant.

I'm back in Portugal for good, but as I haven't been going on too many long adventures, I thought I might update you all on a few of the not so positive things that have been going on lately. 

I will start with the lesser of the annoyances: the shorts.  Or that is, the response to the shorts.  Like every American out there, I wear shorts when it is hot out.  This, I thought, was a normal practice.  Apparently this is not the case.  I look at Portuguese people in their jeans on an 80 degree day and I wonder how they can bear to be dressed like that in such weather.  Barely anyone wears shorts here, and because of this I can count on getting looks ranging from confused stares to openly belligerent glares from people in regard to my bare legs.  Old men in particular are not shy about giving me the evil eye when I pass by.  Once one of them growled. 

Now, I know I own some very short shorts (once they were so short that the counselors at Jesus Camp made me change), but after all this attention I figured I would try to limit my shorts wearing to my longer pairs.  While wearing one of these longer pairs, a random old woman actually yelled at me "Onde está o resto de seus calções?!" WHERE ARE THE REST OF YOUR SHORTS? 

An old photo of the shorts in question.

Really, lady?  Really?  Do you make a habit of yelling at young girls in shorts?  Where my legs really that offensive to you that you had to yell at me across the street?  A few blocks later I saw a young Portuguese woman in shorts even shorter than mine walking in the opposite direction.  I almost wanted to warn her about the shorts Nazi she would soon be approaching.

I would say something about the excessive cat calling that my friends and I receive (my theory is that it is not because we look American, but because we do not look Portuguese.  That and my shorts) but after surviving Italy, such behavior is almost cute. 

Almost.
 
But getting hooted at is the least of our problems here.  I can safely say that the majority of said problems are mostly the result of the Portuguese being the most stubborn and drastically self-assured people on the planet.  Of course, I already had a hint of this knowledge with my own family (and especially myself to be completely honest), but these opinions have officially become fact.  The best example of this way of life would be The Termite Fiasco. 

The Termite Fiasco has been an ongoing battle with our landlord.  Since before Spring Break, tiny ant-like bugs with long white wings have been committing mass suicides in our shower and kitchen for no reason whatsoever.  I emailed our landlord, Nuno, before I left for Italy about the problem.  His response?  Buy insecticide.  With the little money that I had, I wasn't about to spend money on insecticide when Raid seemed to kill them well enough, so I continued to clean up the mess each day until I left for Florence.  One week later, we returned from our various adventures to find the same bugs continuing to swarm and die randomly.  We researched the bugs and discovered that they were probably termites, or more specifically, swarmer termites, whose sole purpose in life is to sprout wings, fly somewhere, reproduce, and then die. 

Hello, lovelies.

We again contacted Nuno, who again advised us to buy insecticide despite the fact that insecticide does not kill termites.  We talked to the senhora of the building who told us they were probably ants.  Despite the great amount of time we spent convincing her that we knew the difference between "formigas" (ants) and "térmites" (termites), that ants do not have long white wings, and that ants and termites have a completely different bodily structure, she decided that they still weren't termites because Portuguese homes were not made of wood and therefore Portugal doesn't have a big problem with these particular kind of bugs.  This is, of course, despite the fact that the bugs were appearing out of holes in wooden beams in the kitchen.  She told us to buy insecticide and to wrap our food better, even thought the bugs were nowhere near our perfectly contained food.

Throughout this entire ordeal, our roommates were entirely unhelpful.  Santi was away in Seville and Helder seemed perfectly resigned to live in an infested apartment.  In fact, when we asked him about the bugs he said that they came every year and eventually stopped swarming around June.  Um.  Okay.  It would have been helpful to have some support on the issue, as the landlords had categorized us as stupid whiny American girls who didn't know a thing about bugs or cleaning or "the real world."

We emailed Nuno yet again, who sent over his father, the adorable Senhor Senhorio.  He brought with him insecticide, which he sprayed into the holes.  Of course, within a day or two the bugs were back. 

Angry and frustrated, I was reduced to blackmail.  I attached a photo of the bugs and emailed Nuno that we would refuse to pay rent if he did not call the exterminator.  With the refusal of rent came the decline of stubborn pride.  By the end of that week an exterminator visited our home and told us we clearly had termites.  Sigh.  He is returning on Friday to get rid of the bugs.  We'll have to be out of the apartment for 24 hours, but at least they finally called them and we can finally have a clean apartment.

The stubbornness astounds me.  Many of the people here like to tell us that we just don't know how things work because we are American.  This is concerning things like businesses opening on time ("Oh they are always late!  You're just impatient because you are American) or the hanging in of paperwork making sense ("Oh you need to go over there and wait in another line and pay to make me photocopies of these pages even though I have a copier right here") or the mail room misplaces your packages ("Its for Alexandra."  "There aren't any packages here for someone named Alexandra."  "That package right there has my name on it."  "Oh.").  Once the senhora's boyfriend, the building's handyman, lectured Tatiana and I for at least half an hour about the cleanliness in our apartment.  The conversation went something like this:


Handyman: You need to clean more.  The bathroom is really dirty.
Us: Okay we will clean it better.
HM: What you should do is this and this and this.
Us: Okay.
HM: Because when you don't it gets dirty.
Us: Right.
HM: So just clean here and here.
Us: Look, we do clean.  The guys in the apartment don't clean at all.  We clean all the time.  You should talk to them.
HM: Right.  But you should all start a cleaning schedule and clean like this and this...
Us: We DO clean all those things.  The boys never clean.  Please speak to them.
HM: Right but you should clean this like this...
Us: Sir, that is the boys' mess. 
HM: Okay I'll talk to them.  But you should clean this in this way...

For half an hour.  This man is also unshaven and basically has dreadlocks.  I'm sure his quarters upstairs are spotless.

I love this place but sometimes I just want to scream "THIS IS WHY YOU NEED BAIL OUTS.  YOUR ECONOMY IS TERRIBLE BECAUSE NO ONE WORKS AND NOTHING IS ORGANIZED."  And we are scoffed at for being impatient, overly organized, and expecting too much. 

There is a reason why there aren't very many Germans studying here.  They would probably all go insane.

Whew.  Sorry about that rant.  Traveling and studying abroad isn't always fun travels to different countries, that's for sure.


Unfortunately school work calls, but I promise you that far happier blog posts are on the way concerning the ongoing Queima das Fitas festivities, my recent trip to Leiria to see my family, and the Quinta das Lágrimas, where the heroine of one of my favorite romances of all time was killed.  This weekend I am going to see my aunt again and hopefully see my family in Tojal so those will definitely be included! 


My optimistic blogging will continue once again!