10 Gallon Ascots

On Saturday I planned to head south for the weekend to the Algarve, in the hopes of visiting a series of beaches and crashing at the nicest for the night. This was the plan anyway. It was a plan that required getting up early and getting a rental car. The French flatmate Gerald, a student of Tourism in a University in Montpellier, was in charge of arranging the car rental. So we got a bit late and headed across town to the Praça de Comercio to get the car. Unfortunately there was no car rental agency anywhere near this plaza and so we spent a couple hours searching for the Hertz building without an address, but rather a general “feeling” of where it was based on the map he had seen. About an hour and a half into the search I really felt the need to say, “In the university courses on tourism, don’t any of the lessons include something like, ‘if you want to find a place you are looking for, you should know the address’, because I think they should add that if not”. These words were literally burning like acid on my tongue for the rest of the hour, but as satisfied as I would have felt had I said that, I knew he already felt stupid about this mess and delay, and as much as possible I am trying to not just say what I want to say, but try and think about what I would want said to me if I were the one who screwed up. So I said something like, “It’s only a couple of hours delay. It’s not a big deal”. But God that hurt to carry this perfect assault in my brain and not let it out. Two hours later we discovered that the rental agency was actually all the away across town.





So we left Lisbon in the afternoon and still managed to hit 4 beaches before we set up tent in a beach outside the town of Aljezur. We set up tent in the dark on a huge empty beach and opened a bunch of wines and gingha (which is a Protuguese cherry liqueur) and made sandwiches of Iberian ham, camembert, and baguette. The gingha I tend to like, but this brand was disgustingly sweet so I threw it out. We hit three beaches the next day, which is fine and dandy, but they all seemed more or less the same to me. The best was Odeceixe (pictured above) if you are ever in the area. For lunch, I tried combining canned tuna and camembert on baguette with pickled vegetables and it actually turned out pretty well. Its a bit franco-morrocan (á la La Belle Vie), and balanced in texture and taste, but that all depends on the raw materials. I would love to hear Dana’s wine recommendation for my new plate. I drank a Sagres beer with it, which is basically one of the four beer choices in Portugal: Sagres, Super Bock, Cintra, and Sagres Bohemia. The first three are all basically Portuguese Nascar beer, the fourth (as the name implies) is a bit darker and you typically drink it with a clove cigarette, black beret, and Camus. The microbrew is just starting to catch on in the more advanced areas of cosmopolitan Europe. This is another oddity for me since Belgium monks (as I’m sure myriad other people across Europe) had been making the best microbrews for generations. But you do not go into a bar in Portugal and ask what’s on tap. You go in and ask for a size and a form: uma garrafa (bottle), chope or presão (draught), caneca (pint), etc. Asking for a brand (there is usually Super Bock or Sagres—exactly the same beer) is typically seen as a waste of the bartender’s time and is often received with a roll of the eyes. Everybody in the United States is making their own beer and have some favorite brand that can be the most obscure beer you’d ever heard of and yet someone in the group will be like, “yeah its good, but its nothing compared to the Surly version of (insert I.P.A, Maibock, etc. here) they did in 2006.” People are following beer in the states like sports fanatics follow stats or hipsters follow b-side reissues of bands that existed for a week in 1978. I can’t quite tell which culture I find more livable, the depressingly streamlined disinterested Orwellian Lisbon, or the fanatically individualized retroshock multi-leveled irony culture of Minneapolis. Someone please help me sort this out.