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!

8: New Month, New Apartment!

3/1/2011

So much has happened since my last blog post!  I wouldn’t know where to start if time weren’t linear.

SO EXCITED AMID THE MESS

I'm sure I've mentioned several times in this blog that my roommate, Tatiana, had been searching for a room closer to campus for some time.  While Amy and I would have liked to live off campus if such an availability arose, most of the advertisements around the city were for single rooms and we were content to stay in Polo III.  However, last Monday Tatiana heard back from a landlord regarding a place with two rooms available and, though Amy was still in Spain, we figured we figured it wouldn't hurt to check the place out.  So, eagerly awaiting Amy's return, we met with the nicest man I've met so far and absolutely loved the place (and its very cheap rent).  The landlord, whose name we still do not know and therefore affectionately call Senhor Senhorio (Mr. Landlord), is the most delightful little man in the world and so incredibly obliging.  When we told him about a potential third roommate, he not only seemed open to the idea but allowed us to change the larger room into a double.  He also promised to drive all the way to Porto to get us a second bed frame and mattress from another one of his locations.  After speaking to Amy, and showing her the apartment the next day, we decided that this was it.  This was our new apartment.

The most Portuguese shopping cart in the world.

The rest of the week passed: classes, going out at night, etc.  Throughout the week we started to plan what exactly we needed for the apartment.  Amy and I volunteered to take the double room since it was Tatiana that had been doing all the work finding rooms and talking to landlords.  This weekend we began the huge process of moving everything from our residence hall to the apartment.  I don’t know how we accumulated so much extra stuff over the course of the one month that we were here but it seemed as though we had so much more!  However, we enlisted the help from Dan who used his amazing military strength to help us with our first wave of suitcases over to the apartment on Saturday.  Unfortunately only the larger room was available, as the former tenant had until Sunday to move out of the smaller room, so we moved everything into one room and then went to Dolce Vita, the curiously Italian-named mall in Coimbra, to go to the giant supermarket there and buy cleaning supplies for the terrifying prospect of cleaning the common areas.

Of course, the entire floor is not just us.  The apartment has five rooms in total, so we have three roommates.  One of them is Victor, who isn’t around much and only rents the room to sleep when he’s in town working.  The other two are more permanent: Helder, who lives right next to Amy and I, is Portuguese and tends to stay in his room and play his guitar... and then there is Santiago, a Spanish model (or least should be) who is very friendly and seemed excited for us to move in.  He seems to want more interactive roommates with whom he could practice his English.  He lives across the hall from us and makes a point to greet us whenever we were around this weekend.  He’s very friendly and that is all I will say for now. :)

The kitchen

Post-clean.  Really.

Sunday was marked by excessive amounts of cleaning.  We arrived in the afternoon and tackled the kitchen and bathroom.  After straight use by four men for who knows how long, you can imagine the state of things.  I think I killed at least five spiders and countless ants as I scrubbed the stove and pantry and Tatiana cleaned the fridge, microwave, and the huge pile of boxes and bags on top of both machines.  Poor Amy was left alone to tackle the bathroom, but she cleaned it so well that she literally changed the color of the shower, toilet, and walls.  We still have to scrub the floor, but after we left the apartment, those areas were beautiful.  Santiago even popped over and tried to help, but after he swept the floor I think he realized how intense we were and left us to destroy every place that mold had even thought about growing.  Having a Portuguese mother definitely prepared me for such intensive cleaning.  No such thing as “clean enough," right Mom?

Look at that PRISTINE toilet, thanks to Amy.

After cleaning, we returned to Dolce Vita and bought things like sheets, pillows, utensils, and rugs for the rooms, kitchen, and bathroom.  These boys will definitely feel that feminine touch in this apartment.

So sad and masculine.

Can you spot the feminine touches?  (Hint: rug, food in the pantry, multi-colored cups, cooking utensil Lazy Susan, the color pink, and general colorfulness)

The next day, the last day of February, we only had class at 2 PM, so we brought the rest of the bags from our rooms into the apartment and, after History and Literature, we went to check out at the Office of Alojamentos.  However, when we were finally able to meet with Rosario Gomes, she informed us that since we had not notified them two weeks earlier we would have to pay the entire rent for the month of March… even though we would not have keys to a room for any amount of time during this month.  We were obviously extremely upset and went right back to Polo III to speak to the director, Carlos, who informed us that he knew of no such rule, and after we called our program director Ana Paula, who also told us that she was not aware of such a rule.  Obviously my personal political views began to flare and, through the haze of anti-bureaucratic anger, I announced my personal decision to fight the ridiculously unfair and unknown rule as hard as I could and refuse to pay such a fee.  After speaking to each of our parents, my friends agreed and we officially turned in our keys.  I'm sure more drama will ensue, so I will keep you all updated.  I've always wanted to sue someone... (haha).

The window between the kitchen and the bathroom.  Soon there will be an American flag painted up there.

We spent the night grocery shopping, cleaning, and unpacking.  We ended up having dinner at McDonalds with Dan (and I won 10 free digital prints from Snapfish in their Monopoly sweepstakes!  What a night!) and then spent our very first night in our new place.  Now, on Tuesday night, the room is still a rather messy (as the pictures below indicate) and, while my bed still has no legs, Senhor Senhorio promised to fix it.  Tatiana was finally able to get into her room and has been cleaning it all day and Amy and I have been trying to do laundry with the washer, which has no words in either English or Portuguese on any of the knobs or buttons, so that’s been interesting.  At least our drier is nice and simple: three clotheslines outside our window.

View from my new room.

My little corner... color-coordinated, of course.

The room (still being unpacked!)

To summarize: the apartment is a bit of a dump, but its my dump and I love it.  Plus it came with a space heater!

Favorite part of our new room!

The space heater...