Sanitized for Your Protection

It was Joyce's idea, and a good one. She wore it all more properly.

The original had artistic license, and couldn't have been actually done, due to the realities of the weight of some materials and the weakness of others. Also we would have needed a screwdriver.

Sometimes archeologists do get it wrong.





For anyone reading who doesn't know what's being historically-re-enacted here, keep an eye out for the book Motel of the Mysteries. It's about what people know, and why, and how, and the importance of archeology. Or something.

Mattress and roasted pig Pretensioso

Here's some trivia from the last few days.

The mattress I'm using is called "Sultan Elsfjord." One of the shops inside Obidos was called "Ibn Errik Rex."  Two fun amalgamations of languages, both including Moors and Norsemen.

Their "pub sign" was either suede or cloth with the letters cut out, sewn (long ago) around a piece of painted particle board. It looked pretty cool:

One large restaurant (two story with entrances from both levels, because that's how steep the hill is) was called "the Pretentious Restaurant and Bar" ("Restaurant Bar Pretensioso").  It sounds cooler in Portuguese.  Sounds like a Hogwarts spell to make a restaurant snootier.  Or maybe to turn any business into a restaurant and butter-beer establishment.

An older Japanese couple standing near me saw this and reacted pretty strongly.  I have felt the same way about things the Japanese eat.  And, a time or two, the Portuguese.   But this one, as objectively disturbing as it might be internationally, is familiar food to me.

Marta's house

This is Marta's street, Marta's door, Marta's husband Bruno, the entryway and stairs, and the room they've let me use (which is sometimes used by Bruno's teenaged daughter). They're on the second floor, and the apartment is big and modern.

   

   

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.

Symposium in Lisbon (notes afterwards)

Photos of the speakers, by Antonio Souto (shared by permission):

I'm going to add more photos and comments so that someday I can find them, I hope.

Conference site, Lisbon

The community center where we'll be speaking is in the old part of downtown. I didn't take enough photos of the inside but here are a few around the entranceway and of the office (the glass wall) and of Marta:







What Marta wrote on the site of the event:

Temos excelentes notícias hoje: encontrámos, finalmente, um local óptimo para o simpósio! O simpósio vai, então, ter lugar no edifício da Junta de Freguesia de Santos-o-Velho -- muito agradecemos ao Senhor Presidente daquela Junta de Freguesia, o Sr. Luís Monteiro, pela amabilidade com que disponibilizou as suas instalações para este evento.

We've got excellent news today: we finally found a great site for the symposium! It'll take place at the Local Council of Santos-o-Velho -- many thanks to Sr. Luís Monteiro, the Council's current President, for kindly letting us have our symposium there.

About the site: http://www.jf-santosovelho.com

The photo makes it look like a one-story building, but there's a gym on top of the big room, and upstairs and to the left are offices and a kitchen.

Street art in Lisbon

There's just a tiny section of tile near the upper left, and the rest might have fallen off or have been stolen. You can see where the door and windows were filled in, long ago. But only the front wall is there. There are a few holes in this big fish, and here's the view through one of them: