Good Bread, Good Building Standards, and Goodly Tied Shoes
All Aspirations, Sometimes Attainable
I have had the good fortune to teach both my children to tie their shoes, separated by a mere gap of 13 years.
With the latest, Ms EC age 5, I experienced the identical emotions and judgements I did with our first progeny. As I sat beside her, both of us hunched over, her fumbling with the laces and me attempting to instruct her how to cross one lace over another and then through it, and then fold one lace into a “bunny ear” (that was my teaching trick), and then wrap the other lace around the bunny ear’s neck (that doesn’t quite make sense, which EC noticed), and then poke the folded lace through the hole you just created and then grab that fold and make another bunny ear, and then pull both bunny ears tight - well, the emotion or judgement I experienced was, “She’s not going to get this! It’s too hard!”
Being a good parent (I hope), I did not express this judgement. Instead, I lied. I told her, “You’re going to get this, you’re doing great, keep at it!”
And the lying paid off, because she did get it. It did take two or three rushed sessions, but I was almost as pleased as she was, which was a lot.
Since I had gone through these phases and emotions identically with our son Max, the process and outcome was not wholly unexpected, but it still left me with a feeling of wonder at how we can underestimate others’ and perhaps our own capacity to change.
It also got me thinking: what else can I teach EC to do?
Suggestions, dear readers?
Falling
Now in our third year living mostly abroad, I don’t miss a lot about the United States, except of course friends and family. Good pizza comes to mind.
But in Prague and now Portugal I have missed one thing acutely that is more prevalent in America, something unexpected. And that is coherent and safe building standards and protocols for the public and private realms. How’s that for a turgid bit of prose? Allow me to explain with a few examples.
Not so far from our home here in Odemira is a bus stop where coaches arrive from Lisbon and disgorge and pickup passengers. It’s a brand new stop, finished while we have been here. I don’t know whether the bus company built it or the municipality. Probably the latter. It is essentially a small modernist house surrounded by a concrete ledge where people can stand. On the back side, facing a small park, the ledge drops off about 18 to 24 inches. Too high to be safe or comfortable. No signs, no railing, just a sudden drop where one could twist an ankle if not careful.
Across the street from the bus stop, is a building of some kind, an apartment building I think, and there is an accessibility ramp built parallel to the sidewalk. The ramp goes up to perhaps three feet off the ground and on the sidewalk side, there is no railing. This seems not ideal to me.
About a half-mile from the bus stop and apartment buildings are courts where I have been playing “padel,” a tennis-and-squash like game common in Portugal that The Washington Post says billionaires are pushing on The United States. This padel place has two courts, side by side, built on sloping ground which means one court is several feet higher than the other. This elevation difference is handled in a clumsy way, leaving a dropoff of about three feet between the courts as you face them from a grassy area. I could see myself forgetting it’s there, and walking off or falling off it. Not ideal.
Part of my focus on this comes from being older. I’m almost 65, I have one artificial hip, and I’m aware falling can hurt me. But I don’t think makes my focus illegitimate or unnecessary.
On all these examples, I am both annoyed and amazed that they are apparently allowed. No one insisted things be done differently. The padel courts are wholly private, but the others involve an interface between public and private. My Portuguese is not up to inquiring of public and private officials what is going on here. I hope I can someday. I can say I rarely see such things in the United States. I saw similarly bad things in Prague, although Portugal is worse.
The better and more coherent standards in The United States is an unexpected bright spot from my home country. It is particularly surprising given that we The United States are medieval with our 50 states and thousands of local governments.
A fourth example from here in Portugal I hesitate to include, because it is so extreme. I saw it during a recent family trip to Lisbon. It occurred or rather exists round the corner from El Corte Inglés, the giant department store in Lisbon. There is again a change in elevation that builders, public and private, had to deal with. The street is Rua Engenheiro Canto Resende, which ironically means “engineer street” in part.
Along this street, EC hopped up on a ledge adjacent to the sidewalk. Because the street sloped, the ledge gradually grew in height, too high to be safe to walk on. I got her to jump down. This is not a great thing, but led me to investigate what I saw further. I found the ledge was adjacent to some concrete beams, where there is a sheer drop of two or three stories down to a roadway that leads to an underground parking garage. EC or anyone could just fall through the gaps and be hurt or killed. It was and is appalling. Children even might be tempted to play on this square of grass, which is adjacent to a trap basically.
Due to the magic of the Internet, I was actually able to find this exact street and can show you one of the pictures that Google Maps provides. Believe it or not, to the left of the girl walking, between those concrete beams, is a drop of two to three stories down to a roadway, where cars travel. Appalling.
I hesitated to include this last example, because it is such an order of magnitude different than the first three. Nevertheless, I do, because its existence may prove something or be a key piece of evidence about how things work or don’t work here.
As I write this, I am starting my internal debate anew: should I call or contact someone about this? It clearly very dangerous. Yet this is in the middle of a very large city. It is no secret. It must have been approved, somehow. I pledge dear reader to try to contact someone about this.
Tummy Time: Spanish versus Portuguese Bread. No Contest.
We spent five days in Seville recently, which is only a half day’s drive from us.
The dishes we ate in that city of Andalucia were more elegant, more artistic, and more finely crafted, than what I have encountered in even the best restaurants here in Portugal. Although I really liked the Seville cuisine, it actually confirmed my judgement about Portuguese food, which is that it is basically simple, and that this is both its strength and weakness. Fish grilled and dressed with olive oil and salt; black-eyed pea salad with flecks of salt cod; really good sweet potatoes; bread soup with fresh cilantro and garlic, these are highpoints of Portuguese food. And none are gourmet fare.
But there is one thing that the Portuguese consistently do better than the Spanish, and that is bread. The bread in Seville and in restaurants we stopped at on the way to Seville was consistently soft, bland, white stuff, terrible in other words. This was true whether the bread was a roll, a baguette or a slice. Some were worse than others, but none were good. This was not wholly surprising to me, because I lived in Northern Spain forty years ago, and the bread then was usually soft, white bland stuff.
Portuguese bread, in contrast, always has some texture and some taste. My favorite is the Alentejo broad, which is off-white and the densest. The loaves are misshapen lumps. They contrast with the long tapered French baguettes, which are very different, but also great. I love great white bread. The Spanish bread is terrible white bread.
How the Spanish came to have terrible bread I don’t know. Maybe Franco, the dictator who led the country for decades, is to blame. But Spain is now a democracy, a member of the European Union, and still the terrible bread persists. It shows that with food, things endure.
The Chinatown Bus movement twenty years ago told us in the USA that you do not need official bus stops at all, you just give passengers an address! I agree, America does seem to have strong building codes.