Europe Gone Fat

Just an update: I talked with my French friend about Pinon today and he said he isn’t a midget and he never was, he just sort of looks a bit like one. So that clears things up for me. But the no subtitles thing is still confusing for me. I mean how many languages do these people know? This is certainly not a challenge one would encounter watching a movie in Block E.



So all the Italians in the apartment and the ones that come to visit whenever we make a “special” dinner (which seems to happen to frequently to be termed special), call me Rocco. My nickname is based on their idea that I look like the doppelganger for Italian porn star Rocco Sifreddi (pictured here). They actually fed me lines and filmed me doing a Rocco impersonation (which to me just seemed like an Italian impersonation of Hugh Hefner (who I know was not a porn star per se (I’m just referring to the robe and self-confident swagger))). It was an Italian commercial that was banned by the Vatican after two weeks of being aired because of the double-entendres used throughout.

Today I finally got some new shoes to replace my broken boots. I got them at Zara for next to nothing and while I was trying them on an old Asian lady approached me and asked if I would do her the favor of trying on a bunch of clothes for her. Well me, I got a heart for “the kindness of strangers” bit ever since I saw “A Street Car Named Desire” so I agreed. It turns out her son is the same exact size and so everytime I came out to show her the outfit on me she would either be very excited or shake her head in disgust. It was kind of like some Avant-Garde version of “Pretty Woman” I guess. So that ate up the better part of the hour and I still hadn’t picked out my shoes, but had a meeting to get to across town within a half an hour and still had to find a shirt to replace the extremely dirty and sweaty one I was wearing. So after I picked out the shoes I went to the young men’s area. This is embarrassing in the United States but due to my odd size many times I can’t find clothes that fit “men”. I figured that would be different in Portugal since, being a part of Europe, people tend to be about my height, and seemingly, my other proportions as well. None of the pants in the men’s section are ever below the European equivalent of 30 waist and rarely seem to be less than 32. My conclusion: (kind of like Screaming Jay Hawkin’s song “Africa Gone Funky”) Europe gone fat. I don’t know if it’s the prevalence of new international fast food chains or the extremely oily diet is catching up to them finally as the shift of peoples from rural to urban environments, and then the shift of the same from industrial sector jobs to the service industry has led to an inability to burn off all these extra calories from the fats they consume daily. Maybe its a little of both. I have noticed that most of the flatmates and Erasmus students I have met have no idea how to cook and say that their parents rarely cook that often either from scratch. This is especially interesting to me as I have noticed the slow food movement catching fire over the last couple of decades in the U.S. has produced the exact opposite effect. Whereas families in Europe are getting busier and both parents typically work long hours (and so opt for quick boxed/canned meals/fast food/delivery), in the U.S. the generations that grew up in Alice Water’s America have opted for a deeper connection with the food they consume and want to be involved in every part of its production. The slow food movement (being directly opposed to fast food by definition) leads one to eat slower, savor the food more, and typically get more nutrients per calorie, which I think has led to a (slightly or partly) slimmer America. What is odd is that this movement started in Italy and has forever been seen as primarily European. The whole attitude goes beyond food consumption and often affects every part of one’s daily life. Typically this means walking or biking instead of driving and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry for the tangent, but anyway my argument concludes with the fact that I’m pissed because once again I have to go to the children’s clothing section to buy pants and shirts.

This leads me to my final Andy Rooneyish complaint: So all these Portuguese are lethargic from the food and then tend to be sluggish at work and inefficient (leading me to wait forever in line wherever I go), well then, how do they remain competitive and make up for this lost “fat” time? Driving like maniacs. I already described this a bit so I will only add one more note. Though the Portuguese doesn’t always drive 60 on urban housing streets, they tend to drive faster if someone is trying to get across the street a block up ahead of them. They also change lanes according to how far you’ve crossed the street. This maniacal urge to bear down on a pedestrian cannot be good for their nerves, nor their blood pressure. Portugal, you are heading for a heart attack.