[Bits & Pieces]

My buddy, the museum

I cannot count the amount of times I have wondered museums by myself. It became one of the ways I get to know the place I am visiting, and sometimes the sole reason I go there in the first place. If I don’t go to a museum, I feel like I have to go back just for that purpose.

There is nothing like seeing what you’ve only read about. There’s nothing like realizing you recognize certain periods, styles, artists or even artworks just by looking at them. In that sense, I need to recognize the efforts of all my art history teachers - Zelinda, the two Ritas and Sérgio. At some point I thought I might join your crew. These days I focus on photography, but I still love late Gothic/Renaissance paintings.

And of course, there is nothing like finding unexpected things that make you smile.

Bird’s eye view

If you want to feel small, travel by airplane. The things you see, their scale, makes everything else feel meaningless.

If you want to take that feeling to the next level, become an astronaut. 

Home away from home

You’ll always puzzle me.

Music memories

Many times I hear or think of a song and it automatically associated with a specific moment in my life. Today I want to celebrate my family through song. It’s a big family, so there will be a lot of music videos to accompany it. A massive mash of things that would normally not be associated with each other.

Oh Magyarország 

A place I had dreamt about since I was no more than thirteen years old, with a great view on a sunny day.

I will forever cherish the copious amounts of food I ate there. Oh, the chocolate lavender cookies...

And László, we couldn’t really speak to each other but thanks for taking me in your taxi to the airport.

Déjà vu

The house I grew up in was decorated with, among other things, a few reproductions of oil paintings. I started paying them more attention after I began having art history classes and learning about different periods and styles. One of those fake paintings hung over my bed, not more than 40x50 cm. When we learned about the Rococo style in school, I thought the original painting was probably from that time, but it didn’t seem to be important enough to be on my manual. And, to be honest, it was one of the artistic currents that I was the least interested in.

Fast forward to a good sixteen years later, I traveled to Hamburg for a conference and stayed an extra day to explore the city. Not that I needed much encouragement to go to a museum, but it was the dead of winter. And so I went to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. I was roaming around the galleries when I saw a massive painting with something familiar. A large tree, some people in the foreground, the colours, the composition... And then I thought about my childhood bedroom. Wait, what?

A little internet research later, my suspicions where confirmed: those two paintings were brothers from the same father.

_

The flashback instigator:

Object type: painting

Title: The Fischer [De Angler]

Maker: François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)

Date: 1759

Medium: oil on canvas

Physical description: dimensions (image): 230 x 192,3 cm

Inv. n.: HK-785

Institution: Hamburger Kunsthalle

Online record

The object of my affection:

Object type: painting

Title: Pastoral with a bagpipe player

Maker: François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)

Date: 1749

Medium: oil on canvas

Physical description: dimensions (image): 259 x 197 cm

Inv. n.: P489

Institution: The Wallace Collection

Online record

Sky detail of an oil painting by Jules Dupré (1811 - 1889), seen at De Mesdag Collectie. 

Gorgeous color.

Child geniuses

I was lucky to grow up in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. I was always the youngest one, and hence the most annoying, but there were times when that didn’t seem like a problem. Especially when we were playing together.

One day, when I guess both my neighbor and I were bored out of our minds (I was about 7 or 8, he was about 11 or 12), we decided to do something different. We had a little green glass bottle, that originally belonged to my dad and had some sweet Madeira wine. By then it was empty and it had become something we were allowed to play with. Whoever thought letting children play with glass was a good idea was wrong, although not for the most obvious reasons.

We decided to concoct a perfume. But not just any perfume - we wanted to make the worst perfume in the world. To achieve our goal of absolute foulness, we decided to look around for absolutely disgusting things and mixed them all in the aforesaid bottle. I can’t recall every single ingredient anymore, but I definitely remember adding dark brown soil from my mom’s garden and goat poo that was on another neighbor’s house.  

By the time we considered the “perfume” to be ready, we didn’t know what to do with it. So instead of just throwing it away, we took it to the neighbor’s house and left it there, next to the rest of the goat droppings.

No one ever traced that bottle back to us - at least we were never reprimanded for it. We really got away with silliness.

So how come all these years later I still feel guilty?

No leftover policy

There was a period in my life when my mom prepared my work lunch. The colleague I often had lunch with was often amazed by the variety of food I had in my plastic containers. Not only that, but she was also a witness of how I was often already full but somehow always finished my meal. My parents made sure my siblings and I knew that their childhood had times when they didn’t have enough to eat. I still find it difficult to waste food.

Around that time, my mom’s birthday came around. She’s not someone that is easy to give a gift to (she generally doesn’t want anything! she doesn’t want us to spend money!), so my sister and I had to think a bit outside the box. We decided to give her a pet bird because mom talked about it once in a while, how she loved to hear them sing. So my sister and I bought a cage and some bird food. The actual bird came from a friend of mine that had a family member that raised parakeets. Our mom was happy when she saw our gift but she wanted two birds so that they would keep each other company. It didn’t take her long to get another parakeet through her uncle who also raised birds. So the parakeets lived happily ever after. Or did they?

A Saturday like many others came around. I was at home, getting around some cleaning when my mom called me. Somehow, one of her precious parakeets had died. That was weird. I mean, I assumed neither of them were old - what is the life expectancy of parakeet anyway? (well, here’s the answer). We both ran downstairs. One of birds lay lifeless, legs sticking up, the bottom of the cage. The other one was still perched higher up but it didn’t look great. This couldn’t be a coincidence. I asked my mom if she had changed anything in the birds’ routine. The answer was “nothing”. So what had she feed them that day?

“Once in a while, I give them a fresh lettuce leaf. But this morning when I was cleaning your work tupperwares I saw you hadn’t eaten all your salad”.

I had left one lettuce leaf in one of my food containers and my mom didn’t want to throw out. It had been sitting in vinegar for about a day. Moral of the story: eat all your food or you might become guilty of involuntary bird-slaughter.

Home sweet home

If I imagine the house I grew up in, it is white. And it was white for many years, but that’s not the truth anymore. This is a true immigrant problem: things change in your absence and then you don’t know how to process that information.  

My memory refuses to reset. Every time I go back I’m confronted with a shade of yellow that I never learned to like. This house is no longer my home.

Flavor is stronger than words

Sometimes, unappealing names hide amazing flavours. That’s the case of the bufalino. When I was first asked if I wanted to try one, my brain went elsewhere. I associated it with bufa, a Portuguese word for that means fart. Was this thing going to taste shitty? No, not at all. Quite the opposite.

A bufalino is an Italian flatbread sandwich with buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto. It’s eaten warm, after it’s toasted on a hot press. This simple concoction has lingered in my memory because it blew my expectations. All because of a pitstop at an Italian gas station. That’s casual food at its best.

The misery of unlearning

When it comes to language learning, if children are sponges, adults are Teflon coated pans. Only after a lot of wear and tear things start to stick, and when they do, it’s usually a bit of a mess.

As a kid, all new information is absorbed because there are no set of rules to compare things to. Once your brain acquired a structure, everything else that follows will try to fit into the same mold.

For adults, diving into a second or nth language is often about unlearning. It’s almost impossible to compartmentalize your brain and stop inadequate pronunciation and grammar from getting through.

The way we communicate is never a complete fail, it usually just needs a different context.

Airport purgatory

Travelling on an airplane is an undeniable privilege. It’s an amazing technological feat and I’m so grateful for it. However, until somewhat recently it was not affordable for most people. Its democratization has pros and cons on many levels. I am not particularly particularly fond of packed airports. Simply put, flying low cost is drag, especially if you are travelling by yourself. I tend to be overly punctual, afraid of missing my flight, which means I am just prolonging my own suffering. But I’ve missed a flight before and I really did not enjoy that experience.

Even during completely lackluster trips I’ve seen things that made me smile. I commend parents who manage to keep their kids entertained. And who can deny the power of real life “Love Actually” moments? Crappy trips are always worth it if that means seeing your loved ones once again. They are worth the sacrifice.

One of the cultural hurdles I face when talking to people about food is trying to explain the shape/flavour of fruits and vegetables that I grew up eating. This also happens when talking to people that grew up in mainland Portugal, because many of the the semi-exotic things I ate as a kid don’t grow there.

Here is a list of some of those culturally challenging foods:

- Anona / sugar apple

- Banana-de-Adão / Monstera deliciosa

- Banana maracujá / Banana passionfruit

- Araçal / yellow guava

- Tomate inglês / tamarillo

- Pepinela / chayote

- Pêra-melão / pepino dulce

Wine making & the grapes of wrath

[Disclaimer: not really related to the book, even though I have read it. It’s just about my own, personal wrath, with far less tragic undertones]

One of the few products Madeira is known worldwide for is its wine. Even so, it always takes me by surprise when people know about it around the world. For example, cooks in Masterchef Australia (which I admit to being a fan of ) would once in a while use Madeira wine in their cooking experiments.

I grew up around wine culture but never really enjoyed much of it. My family had vineyards hanging from trellises around the garden. More than any other plant, grapevines set the tone for the seasonal changes in a place where most trees are green all year long. First, we had Jacquez grapes (known in Madeira as Jaqué), but I assume that because of issues with diseases, my dad later decided to have these plants grafted with American style grapes (Isabella). This last type of grapes are quite sweet and have a great smell but apparently only produce low-quality dry wine.

I never really appreciated the whole process of making wine because it felt like I had to put in a lot of work for something I wasn’t really going to enjoy. The garden had to be swept year-round from the constantly shedding leaves and twigs. At the beginning of the year, grapevines need a bit of TLC after the winder. The family grown-ups would prune the grapevines and I would be part of the cane collecting crew. Once that’s done, green starts to take over. In the summer, some of the leaves had to be removed so that the grapes would start to mature. Again, I was rounding up leaves from the floor. When harvest season came around, I  slowly but surely became livid: ripe grapes attract all sorts of insects, reptiles, birds, and rodents that made my life miserable. The floors around the house became a sticky mess and I was constantly itchy from all the mosquitos that seemed to have permanently taken over our house.

For the first time in many years, I was back in Madeira in September 2019, during full-on winemaking season. The fragrance of discarded grape stalks, seeds, and skins lingered in the air. This inescapable smell triggered my brain into thinking of the years when this ritual was actually part of my life. And then I started to remember some good things too: squishing grapes with my own two feet and drinking freshly pressed must. But most of all, playing under the shade of those grapevines.

In any case, a piece of advice to those who are fond of low maintenance plants: grapevines are not the thing for you.  

California dreaming

Not that the sky is grey today, but I feel like reminiscing about what still feels like an unreal trip.

An important thing I learned in the land of palm trees: crickets sound the same everywhere.