Fast food confusion (and some slow-moving food)

It's interesting to have that ability to read without thinking about it, but to be where they've changed the code...
In the airport shuttle after we landed in Lisbon it said:



I thought of cheese and green chile. Whatever it might really mean didn't matter. It was "LotaCow."

Then yesterday I was shocked on behalf of millions when I saw THIS:



Marta tried (on behalf of other millions) to explain that it only said something harmless like Fri/Sat (which of course I know isn't fried and sat in it) but I rejected all explanation, because that was more fun. Sex in a Saab!? They can't offer that in a drive-through.

So reading isn't really helping me.

And then there's the slow food problem: I saw some old men eating snails. Not like the French eat snails, all daintily eating big snails. This involves a plate with over 100 little snails, and nothing else on the plate, and people don't use little forks and there's no butter. But they were old men. They lived through wars and depressions and a revolution and a recession and they're not going to live much longer anyway. They were in a tiny "snail bar" it seemed. There was beer, and there were plates of snails, and two little tables crowded into a storefront about the size of two little tables.

A few days later, I saw a family sitting at a sidewalk table, and everyone had a plate of snails, even the littlest girl who could hardly see hers, but they were all happy. She didn't seem to know some foreigner had the feeling that her parents didn't really love her, if they would give her a plate of snails. But she did seem pretty excited about having her own snails.

I didn't take pictures of them. They were eating. I didn't know them. And they seemed to be doing something horrible. If they would do that in public, what might they do to some old woman taking their picture!? I just kept walking.

I looked at google image search for a picture kind of like what I might have taken. I might just need to sneak a picture here. Those online are of restaurants, not these little street shops, and their plates are too nice, and their snails are too few, too colorful, too well lit. This one is the closest to the amount and the plainness of presentation:


The snails I saw didn't look this yellow. More... grey.