"Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins."

"Authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments. A siege mentality is taking root in nearby enclaves of pricey condos and multimillion-euro homes.... On a recent afternoon, an emaciated man in striped pants sleeping in front of a state-funded drug-use center awoke to a patrol of four officers. He sat up, then defiantly began assembling his crack pipe. Officers walked on.... Over the last 18 months, a drug encampment sprung up below a school. More homes have been burgled. One neighbor said she found a person, naked from the waist down, shooting up outside her house gate. Another had her laundry stolen three times. Residents have launched U.S.-style neighborhood watches and hired private security guards — something exceedingly rare in Europe...."

So begins "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts" (WaPo).

The city is Porto, Portugal.

We're told Portugal's approach to drugs was "globally hailed."

"I was an older woman and I couldn’t get hired. I always wanted to travel the world, write and take photographs. I thought why not take 10 years and go?"

"If I run out of money and I’m not a famous writer, I’ll come back and be a Starbucks barista or a Walmart greeter." 

Said Heidi Dezell, 57, quoted in "Want to Retire in Portugal? Here’s What to Know, as Americans Move There in Droves. Retirees are drawn by a low cost of living, healthcare, a sunny climate and tax incentives" (Wall Street Journal). 

For some, Portugal’s newfound popularity comes with a cost. “Americans are challenging the loudness scale,” says Susan Korthase, 71, founder of the Americans & Friends in Portugal Facebook group. She moved to Portugal from Milwaukee in 2010 and says she now sees the “Californiacation” of Portugal. “You hear them in restaurants,” she adds. “Americans laugh with an open mouth and they laugh out loud. Other nationalities have a quiet chuckle.”...

We're being updated on trends by a newspaper that can't spell "Californication." They're writing about laughing while not perceiving the contents of the portmanteau. Maybe the Americans who laugh too much for Milwaukeean taste are getting more of the jokes. 

I think every person in this article is female. It ends with the story of Linda Correll, 52, an Ohioan who found a small apartment in Porto where "When it rains heavily, all the water comes into my apartment."

“I don’t know if I have met any men over 50 who came here by themselves,” says Ms. Correll. “You get a lot of couples, but single women are much more common for some reason.... It’s a safe country, and the people are friendly,” she says. “The healthcare, the food, the whole vibe is the reason I’m here. I don’t have any desire to go back to the States to live.”

She says "for some reason," and then she, unwittingly, gives the reason. You're leaving your home country for some very bland comforts and no excitement. But maybe this article will prompt some older male Wall Street Journal readers to quit their job now and retire to Portugal. There are lots of health-and-safety-loving Midwestern ladies there longing — in their leaky apartments — for a man maybe something like you.

ADDED: For those who think the Red Hot Chili Peppers coined the word "Californication," here's the Wikipedia article, "Californication":

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....

"If experiential travel signifies engaging meaningfully with the people, history, environment and culture of a destination (like a local, not a tourist), then transformational travel is..."

"... supposedly the next step: Engage so meaningfully, the trip actually changes you. This can mean extreme adventure travel...  Or it can mean wellness-inflected, small-group trips aimed at building fellowship, as with a slew of female-focused companies... Black Tomato, a New York- and London-based agency, recently debuted a 'Get Lost' service, which drops travelers into remote destinations, requiring them to find their way out.... This past spring I swallowed my skepticism.... ... I was whisked from the Lisbon airport in a black sedan with tinted windows by the driver and a local guide. After dropping my bags at a hotel on Lisbon’s central Praça do Rossio, the guide, Edgar Miguel Rodrigues, took me on a walking food tour of central Lisbon. We tried ginjinha, a smooth, sour-cherry liqueur, ate bifana... Edgar dropped me off at the hotel at the point of bursting and informed me that my next guide would soon arrive for — I’m not kidding — an evening food tour, coinciding with the Feast of St. Anthony.... [T]he breakneck pace and constant chaperoning felt suffocating, and the only viable option seemed to be drinking heavily until I joined a cluster of middle-aged women dancing wildly to an onstage band playing pimba, an up-tempo style of Portuguese shlock-pop, in a packed Alfama square.... The next morning, moderately hung over, I was in the back of a car headed for... pastel-hued villas and palaces... [W]e found ourselves descending the spiral stone staircase of the initiation well at Quinta da Regaleira... 'This is the rebirth process,' said [the guide] Susana as we made our way through a tunnel... 'You are buried in the earth. You go through the dark, this tunnel, until you come out and are born again. The entrance of the cave is …' She trailed off. 'A vagina? I offered. 'Yes, like a vagina,' Susana said...."

From "Can a ‘Transformational Journey’ Change Your Life? Our Writer Had Her Doubts/Seeing the world “through new eyes” was the aim of a rigorously planned trip to Portugal, offered by a new breed of tour operator. It almost worked." (NYT). The photograph at the top at the link looks (unintentionally) like a skull. Oh! I see it's the thing that's supposed to be like a vagina.

I'm interested in that Black Tomato "Get Lost" idea. When I was a teenager, I used to drive my car until I got lost, then try to find my way back home. But that's not really possible anymore, not if you have a phone that sees where you are and gives you directions. Does Black Tomato take away your phone? This service you pay for is strangely like getting victimized by a crime. Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain of youth promo.

"Following Portugal's April 1974 Carnation Revolution..."

"... , it granted independence to Guinea-Bissau on 10 September 1974."

Luís Cabral, Amílcar Cabral's half-brother, became President of Guinea-Bissau.   Following independence local soldiers that fought along with the Portuguese Army against the PAIGC guerrillas were slaughtered by the thousands. A small number escaped to Portugal or to other African nations. The most famous massacre occurred in Bissorã. In 1980 PAIGC admitted in its newspaper "Nó Pintcha"...  that many were executed and buried in unmarked collective graves in the woods of Cumerá, Portogole and Mansabá.

Today's "History of" country is Guinea-Bissau.

How did this happen?

A river, a country: It's The Gambia, today's "History of" country.

In medieval times the area was dominated by the trans-Saharan trade. The reign of the Mali Empire, most renowned for the Mandinka ruler Mansa Kankan Musa, brought world wide recognition to the region due to its enormous wealth, scholarship, and civility....

As time went on the area began to suffer from continuous Moroccan and Portuguese invasion and looting. By the end of the 16th century, as the raids continued, the empire collapsed and was conquered and claimed by Portugal....

During the late 17th and throughout the 18th century, Great Britain and France constantly struggled for political and commercial supremacy in the regions of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers....

An 1889 agreement with France established the present boundaries, and the Gambia became a British Crown Colony, divided for administrative purposes into the colony (city of Banjul and the surrounding area) and the protectorate (remainder of the territory).

"Portuguese traders who arrived in the 15th century named the country after the Portuguese word gabão, a coat with sleeve and hood..."

"... resembling the shape of the Komo River estuary. The coast subsequently became a center of the slave trade with Dutch, English, and French traders arriving in the 16th century."

France assumed the status of protector by signing treaties with Gabonese coastal chiefs in 1839 and 1841. In 1849, the French captured a slave ship and released the passengers at the mouth of the Komo; The slaves named their settlement Libreville, French for "free town." In 1910 Gabon became one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, a federation that survived until 1959.

Gabon is today's "History of" country. 



Union... travail... justice...

In 1491, King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized as the first Christian Kongolese king João I.

This happened after Captain Diogo Cão — on a mission from  King John II of Portugal — discovered the mouth of the Congo River and the Kingdom of Kongo and found the local nobility amenable to Christianity. Today, this place is called the Republic of the Congo, and it is today's "History of" country.

"The earliest inhabitants of Cameroon were probably the Baka (Pygmies)."

"They still inhabit the forests of the south and east provinces...."

"The Arab navigator, Ahmad Bin Majid, visited Bahrain in 1489..."

"... and gave a contemporary account of the country that the first Portuguese would have seen:"

"In Awal (Bahrain) there are 360 villages and fresh water can be found in a number of places. A most wonderful al-Qasasir, where a man can dive into the salt sea with a skin and can fill it with fresh water while he is submerged in the salt water. Around Bahrain are pearl fisheries and a number of islands all of which have pearl fisheries and connected with this trade are 1,000 ships."

Today's "History of" country is Bahrain. 

What's the difference between Kwanzaa and Kwanza?

Kwanzaa is that religionish holiday we were just talking about. Kwanza is the unit of currency in Angola, our "History of" country today. Before getting to the history of Angola, I pause to think of the holidays we could invent by taking the names of the world currencies. Here's a list of the currencies currently circulating in the world. Following the Kwanzaa model, you could add a letter or change the word slightly as you take off on your flight of inspirational fancy. Now, what should we do for Dollaro? Worship the Almighty Dollar is a common enough phrase.



But let's get back to the history of Angola, as quickly scanned via the "History of Angola" Wikipedia page, in accordance with our 206-day project. The name Angola comes from "N'gola," the Kimbundu word for king.

"We’re given menus, but they’re in Portuguese. The waiter has a handful of English words and as best as..."/"Asbestos? They had asbestos?!"

Meade interrupts me in the middle of my reading of Nina's post about her trip to Cascais, Portugal, which you can get to from here if you take "two Madison buses, three separate flights, one Lisbon bus, and finally one Portuguese train."

"Bullfighting in Portugal is like a play with the ending missing... Killing the bull is an art..."

"Bullfighting in Portugal... deprives the bull of his dignity." It's illegal to kill the bull in Portugal, but one bullfighter did, and he's been fined $137,000:

The crowd had begun waving white napkins and chanting, “Kill the bull! Kill the bull!” [Pedrito] recalled in an interview. Eager to satisfy, he pulled out his sword and stabbed the raging half-ton bull in its spinal cord. He received a standing ovation, was hoisted on the crowd’s shoulders and paraded through the streets....

The case spawned a national debate here. His supporters argue that a death-free struggle is a sacrilege because the culmination of a bullfight should reflect man’s ultimate triumph or defeat against the bull, while critics contend that Portugal must retain its civility and show humanity to animals....

Sociologists here say that bullfighting in Portugal is less of a blood sport than in Spain because the Portuguese, compared with the Spanish, are “soft machos.”

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a leading cultural commentator, notes in this regard that António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal for nearly 40 years, was less authoritarian than Francisco Franco in Spain. Furthermore, he says, rather than pillaging their empire, as the Spanish did, the Portuguese married and reproduced with the inhabitants of their colonies.

“We Portuguese are lovers, not fighters,” he said. “And this is reflected in most aspects of our culture, including our approach to bullfighting.”

We are lovers! We fight bulls but don't kill them. Our dictators are less authoritarian, and our conquerors refrain from pillaging. Come on, that's a concept of love, isn't it?