Portugal Part VIII - Epilogue

I. Porto

By the time Frances and I had woken up the next morning and gotten ourselves ready to explore Porto, half the team had already begun their journeys home. Cher was in the lobby with her copious luggage when we descended the staircase, and moments later a cab arrived to whisk her off to the airport. John had left a few hours earlier, as had Bebe and Catherine. Nicholas was scheduled to take a train heading north back to his parents' house in France. I wasn't leaving until the next day, as was Frances, and Lili had scheduled three extra days in a bed & breakfast on the Rua de S. Nicolau near the river. The participation fee I'd paid only covered one night's stay in the Porto hotel, but Frances let me share her room an additional night without charging me.

We handed our heavy room key to the grumpy desk clerk and walked out into the drizzling city to find breakfast. The rain had slowed, but it had been a near-constant for two days now. We settled on a cafe that had a pastry display in the window, and enjoyed the novelty of what felt like big-city bustle. On the street, people walked past the cafe at a brisk clip, and inside customers engaged each other in lively conversation. I looked out the window I saw the familiar figure of Shirley blending in with the locals, and waved to her. She smiled, waved back, and approached us.

"I'm glad I ran into you," she said, "I have something for you, and I was going to leave it at the front desk - my flight leaves in a couple hours and I'm heading out soon." Shirley had spent the past couple hours shopping for a gift for Frances; back in Braga, before watching the soccer game, we'd decided to pitch in €5 each and buy a gift for Frances as a gesture of our appreciation for leading the team. Frances had been just as taken with tile as I was, and we'd planned on buying her some as our group gift to her. Unfortunately, by the time we got to Porto there hadn't been time for shopping, and since today was Sunday hardly anything was open. Shirley had settled on a hand painted ceramic platter instead. I decided then that once I got home I would send Frances one of my tiles - I'd accidentally bought two of the same kind, and while the platter was nice, it wasn't the same as a piece of antique Portuguese tile.

We met up with Lili for lunch at the Majestic Cafe, a belle epoque building that featured leather seats, mirrored walls, and served expensive tea in fine china. We split up for the afternoon, each of us exploring our own interests. I spent some time at an Internet cafe that had reasonable rates and explored the city on foot, marveling at the buildings, and naturally, the tiles that covered them. We connected again at dinner, meeting at a three table restaurant called A Grade (pronounced ah grahday) that was owned by the B&B where Lili was staying. We dined on the most exquisite cod, squid, and Portuguese wine I've ever tasted. It was easily the best food and most fun meal of the entire trip.

Unsolicited, the owner of the restaurant came out from behind his station at the bar, approached our table with an ornate looking bottle and three shot glasses, and poured us all a serving. We toasted each other and downed the shots. It was surprisingly pleasant, whatever it was, and a moment later the owner returned and served us a second round. We hesitated, and finally Frances said "Oh alright." I lifted my glass up and said "If Frances is having one, I'm having one." A small boy at the next table began to parrot me: "If Frances is having one, I'm having one," he said, and then repeated the phrase. I took out my notepad to write down the name on the bottle label when a man at the next table - the father of the little boy who was parroting me, turned in his seat and began speaking to us in perfect English. He explained that the owner of the restaurant used old bottles for his own homemade hooch, and I'd only be writing down the name of what was originally in the bottle. By the time we left the restaurant we'd regained our sense of wonder that had been lost the day before. I was grateful for the chance to recuperate after the miserable day we'd just survived, and couldn't have found two better people to spend an extra day in Porto with than Frances and Lili.

II. The Journey Home

When Frances and I arrived at the airport in the wee hours of the morning, it appeared to be closed. "Cerrado", the taxi driver had said to us after unloading our luggage from the trunk, and "cinco horas". It seemed he was speaking Spanish. The lights were off inside the airport, and a few people were waiting outside on benches. We sat down, and peered through the glass walls into the darkened airport. After a few minutes I saw movement, there were a couple guards walking around, and I thought I saw the figures of people sleeping on the floor here and there. We tried the sliding doors and they opened, inside the only sound was the squeaky wheel of a cart piled with luggage that a lone traveler was pushing across the floor in slow motion, like a zombie in a horror movie. A flashing green pharmacy sign was the only source of light. As our eyes adjusted to the dark I began to make out the figures of more people sitting on benches, or asleep on the floor. The lights came on at about 5am. My flight was first, Frances and I said our goodbyes and I went through the security checkpoint.

I had a four hour layover in Frankfurt, where I experienced severe sticker shock. I'd become so used to Portuguese prices that €3 for an individual serving of yogurt and €16 an hour to use an Internet kiosk seemed beyond outrageous. I sent M the most expensive email of my life, struggling to use the German keyboard that seemed to be nothing but W and Z keys. A timer counted down the minutes of Internet access that I'd paid €2.50 for, so I didn't bother trying to spell anything correctly. The resulting communication was as follows:

Im in the Frankfiurt airport using a kiosk that costs 16 euros an hour, and II onli paid for 15 mins. the kezuboard is messed up so I cant spell. Mzu phone card ran out of minutes while we were talking in Portugal. Whz does the German kezboard have a Z where a Y should be? Annozing.

See zou soon, love zou, miss zou,

J

I had coffee at Starbucks because it was the cheapest thing I could find, and ate granola bars that I'd brought with me from Chicago and were still in my luggage. Looking around I couldn't help noticing that I was the worst dressed person in the airport. Everyone around me was neatly dressed and coiffed, I had a red bandanna on my head and wore the same underwear I had on the day before. I smelled a little ripe too. Whoever sits next to me is going to wish they paid for an upgrade, I thought as I lifted my €3.80 latte to my lips.

Before I could present my information at the check-in counter a woman with excessive mascara and white eyeliner rimming the inside of her lids asked me a barrage of questions: where had I traveled - Marseilles, Barcelona and Porto; how did I get from Marseilles to Barcelona - by train; did I have any checked luggage - no; who had I visited - my father, a high school friend, and a Habitat for Humanity project; why did I say I'd flown from Barcelona to Porto, but the records indicated that I'd flown to Lisbon - because I missed the flight to Porto; and did I have access to laundry facilities? When I answered affirmatively to the laundry question the woman relaxed a degree and said "That explains it, no woman would travel with such little luggage."

From there I searched the mammoth airport for my gate, stopping to ask directions from a stout, mustachioed man dressed in a security uniform and carrying an assault weapon. When he didn't understand my question he looked me in the eye and said simply: "a-gaaaain" in a flat tone that reminded me of Lurch from The Addams Family. Behind him a photocopied flier with names and mug shots of wanted terrorists was fixed to a pole.

At the gate all passengers went through security twice, once on entering the gate area and again before boarding the plane. There were two aging stewardesses on board, one had bleached blonde hair and a ponytail extension, and wore bright red lipstick. The other reminded me of Selma Diamond from Night Court. The aircraft was strangely empty, no one sat next to me, I spread out and slept most of the way home.

III. Chicago

Back home, things were pretty much as I'd left them. There was only one voicemail waiting for me on my cell phone - my chiropractor's office had called to remind me of an appointment I'd scheduled for the day after my return. I was so used to straining to understand what people were saying around me that it was an assault on my ears to hear English being spoken everywhere, on the train to my appointment I felt as though people were speaking two inches from my head. Michigan Avenue seemed ridiculously wide, the sidewalk a massive platform of cement under my feet. In addition to a chiropractic adjustment, I had a massage scheduled with Chris, one of the Romanian masseuses on staff. He asked me what was new, I told him I'd just returned from Portugal, and our conversation turned to soccer. I've never heard Chris say so much in all the years I've been going to that office. The second qualifying game between Portugal and Bosnia was in progress, and Chris had been checking the score (Portugal won). We discussed Portugal's chances at making it to the World Cup, the team's star player Christian Ronaldo, and how nice it would be if the office installed an espresso maker in the waiting area.

I stopped by a drug store before getting back on the train, and overheard a cashier say: "the penny is the brown one" to a customer. A wave of sympathy came over me as I realized the customer was a guest from another country, trying to figure out what all the coins in his pocket represented.

Portugal Part VII - A Series Of Unfortunate Events

It took a few minutes for Frances to discover that her wallet was missing. Cher, Nicholas, João and I were waiting in the lobby of the hotel for her. It was our last night in Braga, and Portugal had just beaten Bosnia in soccer; we were heading out to a bar to celebrate.

Frances descended the stairs looking harried. “My wallet’s missing,” she said, and in just three words an evening that was destined to become fodder for nostalgic trips down memory lane instantly dissolved into a searing reminder of our status as outsiders. We had all felt so relaxed, since arriving in Braga I hadn’t checked for my wallet once in all my wanderings. Not even the nights that I’d called M from a dark public payphone, street sounds entering the mouthpiece, traveling up into space, feeding their way through a satellite, and finally beaming back to earth and into M’s ear canal in Chicago. I’d never felt the need to watch my back, not once.

Cher and Nicholas headed to the bar as Frances, João and I retraced our steps. Frances had settled the bill at the restaurant, and not five minutes later we’d stepped out the door into the rainy night. We scanned the cobblestones beneath us with intensity, and at the restaurant João spoke to the manager in hushed tones. Nothing had turned up, the wallet was nowhere to be found. I offered her what I could only hope was supporting patter. “It’s just money,” I said, “nobody got hurt.” And then: “you have to take it like wasabi - it stings for just a second, then you breathe and let it pass. Don’t let it ruin the whole trip for you.”

Earlier in the day Frances had paid the restaurant where we’d enjoyed our team lunches, and the bill had been surprisingly low. She’d withdrawn extra money just in case; when the bill came to just shy of €150, she offered to pay a tip to the sisters who ran the restaurant. They refused, insisting that whatever we’d intended to pay them as tip should be donated to the Habitat Portugal office. In all, Frances was carrying around €400 when her wallet was stolen. She felt responsible for the theft, I could see it in the tightness of her jaw, in the shortness of her step, and the fix in her eye. In the end there was nothing to be done but move on. We gave up the search, and I convinced her to come out for the celebratory drinks that we’d intended. I told her that just going home and going to bed would only make her think about the unfortunate incident more.

Frances, João and I caught up with Cher and Nicholas, and we shared a couple beers. We traded stories of being pick pocketed, it was hard to stay away from the subject. At 1am Frances and I called it a night, and went back to the hotel. We slept, but not well. Outside the rain grew harder, and I could hear Frances tossing in her narrow bed, the scene of the theft replaying in her mind. She gave up the fight for sleep before sunrise, showered, packed, and left the room.

A while later I went downstairs for breakfast and came across the figure of Nicholas asleep on the couch in the rec. room, facing the back of the couch like an Andy Capp cartoon. Frances was sitting across from him near the computer, where she was catching up on emails. We exchanged glances and she told me how she’d heard his sodden footsteps coming up the stairs as she sat up in the wee hours with insomnia. He’d been out all night, his clothes were completely soaked through with rain, and his mind was completely soaked through with alcohol. He’d pulled off his clothes and fallen asleep on the couch in his boxers. “I covered him up,” she said. In the breakfast room all conversation surrounded the drunken 24 year-old on the couch. In an hour we were scheduled to get on a charter bus headed for Porto, and Nicholas showed no signs of reviving. Just leave him here, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.

I headed back upstairs to get my bags, and piled into the bus with the others. Frances headed back to the hotel to see what she could about Nicholas. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty. João hadn’t shown up yet, he’d been assigned to ride with us to Porto so he could give directions to the bus driver. “There they are,” someone said, and I looked out the window to see Nicholas being supported like an injured football player coming off the field, his right arm around Frances, and his left around one of the hotel employees. He was stumbling, his feet barely making contact with the pavement, his eyes were half open slits, and his mouth hung open. A chill ran down my spine as I realized the only open seats were directly behind me.

I grew up in an alcoholic household, and nothing makes me want to jump out of a moving vehicle faster than having to sit right next to, or right in front of, someone who’s so drunk that he can’t stand on his own two feet. I have nothing against drinking in principle, and enjoy sharing alcohol with friends, but I cannot tolerate drunkards. Unfortunately for me, my reaction to drunkards tends to be that of a possum, particularly when I’m in a strange land, surrounded by people who are essentially strangers.

Frances piled onto the bus with Nicholas hanging onto her, and he slouched his way to the back of the bus. “Where’s João?” he asked loudly. “ João didn’t show up,” came the reply. “What? No way! He’s cheating,” Nicholas said, tipping his head back. “He’s cheating, he’s cheating, he’s cheating,” he repeated, as if it were new and hilarious each time. His already slow gait became even slower as he approached me. “Get back,” I said to him, a little more sharply than I’d intended. “You go all the way back, through that curtain,” I said, pointing to an orange curtain that separated the sleeping quarters intended for the bus driver on his off hours. “Whaaaat?” Nicholas said, his brow furrowing as the sharpness of my tone began to register in his soaked brain. “No way, you want me to go all the way back there?” “Yes,” I said. Nicholas planted himself into the seat behind mine. “Who wants company?” he asked, sticking his head into the aisle. No one answered. “We’re fine Nicholas, nobody needs company,” I said. He went quiet and my spine tensed, every muscle in my body readying for flight. All I could think was that he was going to stand up and vomit all over my head. I craned my neck behind my seat and our eyes met, and I quickly turned back around. The next time I checked, he was asleep.

Without João, we had no one to translate with the bus driver, and no one who knew the way to Porto if we got lost. Frances had the address of the hotel in Porto where we had reservations, I hoped that would be enough information.

We descended the bus in Porto, and waited on the sidewalk as Frances revived Nicholas and removed him from the bus. The hotel clerk couldn’t find our reservation, Frances used the lobby phone to call Irène, who was scheduled to meet us at the hotel. There had been a last minute change in hotels, we trudged the few blocks to the right address and checked in.

Its hard for me to explain the paralysis that sets in when I’m confronted with a drunkard, but I wasn’t able to speak up. I so badly wanted Frances to leave Nicholas at the hotel, but he ambled down the stairs to the lobby and joined us as we walked to the waterfront to meet Irène and to take a riverboat tour. Everyone was avoiding him, not just me. Cher gave him the cold shoulder, and I got up and moved to another table when he sat near me on the boat. Snippets of hushed conversation took place in corners as we reacted, each in our own way, to the situation. For the next several hours we were dragged through what would have been a pleasant afternoon: a boat tour on the Douro River; lunch at a restaurant where Nicholas fell asleep in his chair; and of all things, a tour of a port wine manufacturer that featured a tasting at the end.

From there we went to dinner, where a somewhat sobered Nicholas sat at the end of the table and made penitent eye contact with the rest of us. Cher continued to ignore him, but somehow by the time we made it back to the hotel they had reconciled. We gathered in a living room and began recounting highlights of the trip. We went around in a circle, each of us saying what the best part of the trip was for us. When my turn came I took a pass, in that moment I couldn’t think of one pleasant memory that still sat with me. I wanted to scream.

Finally we got up from our seats. I’d told Irène that I was interested in hearing some live music, and she’d found a place. Nicholas and Cher had decided to accompany her, and were waiting on the stairs for Irène and me. With tears in my eyes, I told her I was just too tired and to go ahead without me. It was all I could do to hold back until I walked through the door of my room, errant tears slipping past my resolve as I climbed the stairs, until the door opened and I sobbed in front of Frances. We talked for two hours that night about everything that had gone wrong in the last 24 hours, and what steps could be taken next. Finally, having exorcised our bad fortune, she asked me to show her the antique tiles I’d bought in Braga. I was so taken by all the gorgeous tile around us, and felt a special connection to it now that I’d done some tiling myself. On one of my walks through town I’d stopped into an antique shop that had its doors propped open and boxes of tiles set up on the sidewalk - just to look of course, and an hour later had left with 13 tiles weighing me down. I spread them across the bedspread and Frances picked each one up and turned it over in her hands, marveling at their beauty.

Portugal Part VI - If this were a movie, this would be the part where the camera pans around a dinner table, zooms in on each character, and lingers.

On our final night as a team, we ate fried cod at a hole in the wall restaurant favored by the local Habitat office, watched Portugal play Bosnia in the first of two qualifying games that would determine which team would make it to the 2010 World Cup games in South Africa, and drank Super Bock, the local beer. The restaurant was the size of an American living room, our waiter negotiated around the half dozen wooden tables like the steel marble in a pinball machine, and conversation was secondary to watching the soccer game. When the week began I thought I knew who my teammates were based solely on their brief bios and my first impressions of them, my opinions had changed over the course of our time together.

I’d always liked Frances, on the phone she’d come across as a down to earth Mid-Westerner, and she didn’t disappoint. If anything, she was even more folksy than I could have imagined, delighting in small observations in an almost childlike fashion (“oh look, there’s a cow!” she’d once said as our bus passed along the route to the job site one morning). Her speech patterns and word choices - “oh yeah” and “you betcha”, had grown on all of us, becoming so familiar that I began to hear them in my thoughts. We made gentle fun of her folksy ways, but it was that very quality that made her a great team leader; she didn’t force group participation through the use of ice breakers, or lead us in prayer every morning - which could easily have happened. Habitat is a Christian organization, and while they tolerate people from all walks of life, the prospect of daily prayer is spelled out in their literature. I’d expected to run up against it at some point, and try to use the time to reflect in my own way. When it never happened I asked Frances about it over dinner one night. She explained that every group was different, and trip leaders took the pulse of the team to determine how to handle this aspect of Habitat. If we’d been a church group this trip would have had a more spiritual bent, but since none of us had expressed a deep connection to religious beliefs, it wasn’t part of our itinerary.

I’d genuinely enjoyed being roommates with Frances, we’d shared more than one funny moment together - the time I was on the hotel room phone with M (using a calling card), and told him about the bidet in our bathroom. He said that was the first thing he would have checked out, which I relayed to Frances, and we laughed good and hard together in Braga while M waxed poetic in Chicago about how he wished America had picked up on the bidet traditions of the old world. We’d talked about the team, had conversations about what her job entailed when she wasn’t leading teams, and waxed rhapsodic about Michigan. When I’d first asked her how she’d made roommate selections she told me it had been luck of the draw - she’d pulled names out of a hat. Later she confessed that she’d matched people together, and purposely picked me as a roommate.

Frances was the only woman on the team besides me who hadn’t packed evening clothes, so I never felt too out of place going to dinner in a clean t-shirt and R.E.I. pants. Frances’ wardrobe seemed to contain an endless supply of workpants and t-shirts from Habitat events dating back to 2000, when she first started working there.

Bebe Neuwirth had come across to me at first as a bit tight-lipped, but her wry sense of humor seeped through her quiet ways as we worked together. She spoke to Luis and Mario in full English sentences before anyone else did. “Oh, you want this?” she’d say to Mario when he approached her with urgency in his stride, pointing to the bucket she’d been using, or the ladder she was standing on, “I don’t see your name on it.” Something about Bebe made me feel like she’d lived a hundred different lives, and the only way to find out about them all was by spending time with her.

The photo that Catherine O’Hara included in her bio had instilled fear in me; it was an arty self-portrait in bluish tones, hair spiked dramatically on top of her head, and a thousand yard stare accompanied by a slack, unsmiling face. Frances explained to me that it was a passport photo, which accounted for the giant patriotic star superimposed across the top left quadrant of the image, and that Catherine claimed not to have any other photos of herself so Frances used a copy of the passport photo that she’d included in her application. Catherine was a little quirky, but she had become endeared to me. When she wasn’t having loud, animated conversations with her teammates there was always one happening in her head - I could tell by the way her head tipped up at odd angles from time to time, and her facial muscles expanded and contracted in response to whatever piece of dialogue she was keeping to herself at that particular moment. When I told her I was too chicken to go into Casa das Bananas by myself to buy a penis shaped mug, she was more than happy to go with me and do all the talking. I never did take her up on it, but it was enough to know she’d have done it if I’d asked.

Shirley MacLaine and I had more in common that I’d first expected, she was a violinist with a subtle sense of humor and a manner that was completely free of vanity. She and Catherine were roommates, and the three of us spent an evening sitting at an outdoor café drinking hot chocolate - if you can call it drinking, the stuff was so thick it required a spoon, while they asked me about my station in life. I’d said in my bio that I was an unemployed writer, and they were curious to hear more. Shirley and Catherine were like aunts to me, and had only supportive things to say about the path I’d chosen after losing my job. “Good for you,” I heard each of them say more than once as I recounted the events that led to my decision to travel while I had the chance. It was like having my own private cheering section, and I loved it.

Lili Taylor’s bio and photo gave me the impression of a new agey, free spirited woman who lived within the confines of her own world, and for some reason the fact that she was a vegetarian only reinforced this view in my mind. I passed by her one evening during my walks around Braga and she was so completely absorbed in whatever visions had conjured themselves in front of her eyes that she walked right past me without actually seeing me. Tiling the bathroom with her I saw a different side of her - one of attention to details and pushing through to see a project to completion. She had a laugh that was so loud I could hear it from anywhere on the job site, and a sense of humor that was much more wicked than I’d expected.

John Malkovich was about how I’d expected him to be; he looked like a rugged outdoorsman in his photo, and in his bio he described himself as a Vermonter who enjoyed building things. He had a surprisingly high pitched laugh that always caught me off guard, and told me stories about previous Habitat trips that he’d been on, including a two week project in Vietnam where the accommodations had been very basic and every meal was spent on-site with the family whose house was being built.

I struggled with Cher. Because of my adventures getting to Braga I wasn’t present when she descended from the airplane wearing a fur-lined coat, lugging an oversized suitcase stuffed with party clothes, but the image has been seared into my memory nonetheless. She tried to include me in her incessant patter about New York, Florida, and the stepmother who was only about a decade older than she was and had breast implants, but to me it all just sounded like so much noise. The New York I knew in my youth was so far from the one she lived in now that it was near pointless trying to connect over it. I did my best to overcome my dim view of her, succeeding in some measure, but there were key moments that kept me firmly planted in my first impression of the recent college grad: the moment I walked into the basement of the job site to find her hunched over a bucket of cement, jeans riding low enough on her ass that the top of her black thong underwear was visible; her expression of amazement when I told her I’d been married for eight years - maybe it wasn’t quite amazement, “that’s so weird that you’ve been married so long” is how she put it; and the plunging necklines and copious makeup that she insisted on wearing to dinner every night. I’d like to think that the experience broadened her worldview, and I can only hope that it did.

And then there was Nicholas Cage. Of all my team members, my connection to him was the most difficult. He initially struck me as a spoiled rich kid, born to parents of means who had traveled the world and taken him along for the ride. At 24 years old he lived with his parents in the south of France, and had participated in a number of experiences designed to broaden his worldview - Outward Bound, backpacking across Europe, and now Habitat for Humanity. His unwavering focus on mixing cement during the day was matched only by his nightly mission to find watering holes during his off-hours; every day he told us about the bars he’d been to the night before - with Cher in tow, and every night he stayed up later than he had the night before. Nicholas and Cher created a fast bond: leaning into each other on the couch of the hotel rec. room as they watched reruns of Dallas; staying up late; and making playful jokes about the relative age of the rest of us with regard to our self-imposed bedtimes. Over time we found common ground - a mutual interest in the music and lyrics of Leonard Cohen, a shared appreciation of unpasteurized French cheese and of the French language. My opinion of him had improved just enough by the end of the week to be completely destroyed by the events that would soon follow.

Portugal beat Bosnia 1-0, and we settled the check. Having come to the end of our time in Braga, and having enjoyed several pints of Super Bock, we were all in a giddy mood. Tomorrow we were scheduled to take a charter bus to Porto for one last day together before heading home. We stepped out into the rainy night and made our way back to the hotel, walking in hurried pairs under cheap umbrellas, steadying ourselves against each other as we negotiated the wet cobblestones under our feet.

Portugal Part III - Doubts

As the days wore on, I began to wonder how much of an impact my work was having on the Habitat project. It seemed to me that what took me half a day took just minutes in the hands of the contractors, and my wrist began to hurt from the strain of repetitive motion. It took me all morning to spread the first layer of cement onto a wall, and all afternoon to spread the second. When I was done, one of the contractors would come in with a 2x4 and expertly smooth down my uneven handiwork by running it down the length of the wall, and the bits of cement that fell on the floor were swept up and reused for coarser work, like filling in the space above the stairwell between the basement and the main floor. I tried spreading cement lefty, to no avail, and went back to slowly and painfully applying cement with my right hand. I considered how much it would cost to hire a local construction worker to do my job, made estimated calculations comparing the participation fee I’d paid to the cost of paying professionals to build this house quickly, and began to doubt the utility of my labor. Once the thought had edged into the corners of my mind that my physical contribution to the project was essentially busywork designed to make me feel like I was indispensable, it latched on and wouldn’t let go. How much of my unskilled labor was actually helpful, and how much of it was designed to make my lefty, bleeding heart feel good? My energy flagged in direct proportion to my doubts; I began moving slower, applying pitifully small amounts of cement to my board and spreading them painstakingly slowly across the wall with my trowel. I looked around me and watched as the contractors sped through their more refined, skilled tasks, and fell into a funk.

To compound my rapidly dissolving sense of purpose, it seemed that we simply weren’t roughing it that much. Sure, the toilet on the job site had no tank on it and we had to flush it with a bucket of water and then use hand sanitizer because the sink wasn’t hooked up, but that was about the extent of it. We were staying in a relatively nice, if quirky hotel that had thin walls but plenty of hot water to shower with, and feasting every night as a group in one restaurant after the next. As it turned out, most of our group had come prepared with evening clothes, jewelry, makeup and hairdryers, but I went to dinner wearing a cleaner version of what I wore on the job site and a smear of Burt‘s Bees lip shimmer. To be fair, I’d picked Portugal as a destination with Habitat because it was less intimidating than some other locations, but it was all beginning to feel a bit too cushy. That night, in the privacy of our hotel room, I asked my roommate Frances, who happened to be the project leader, about it.

“So,” I began, choosing my words carefully, she was just so upbeat and sunny, I didn’t want to expose her too much to my dark, doubting side, “how much of the work that we do here is, um… would it be more cost efficient if the participation fee that we pay to come here went directly to Portuguese workers? I mean… how much of the work we do is to make us feel like we’re contributing to the project?” I tried not to look too sullen, paying special attention to my body language: I sat up casually on my bed, back supported by the headboard, legs crossed at the ankle, one hand on the bedspread, the other fiddling with my hair.
“That’s a big part of it,” she began, “its to make people feel connected to the project. We have some volunteers who come back every year to do projects, there’s people who make this their vacation every year.”
“So the fee that we pay… it would probably cost less if it all went towards the project than if it went towards paying for our meals and lodging…”
“Part of the participation fee go towards the local Habitat office, and part of it covers expenses.”
“So… this is to make people feel more connected to the project?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head and maintaining an evenly sunny disposition, “and the families know that volunteers are working on the house, and that there might be some imperfections because of that.”

Frances explained some of the finer points of the Habitat model, that the family would have a loan that they’d repay, and the payments would go towards building other Habitat homes. They would also have to put in a certain number of hours helping to build both their own home and other Habitat homes. I considered all of this: on one hand I was genuinely helping someone to have a home, but on the other, it could be done much more quickly if I’d simply made a donation and left it in the hands of professionals. Of course, I wouldn’t have made the donation if it hadn’t involved traveling to Portugal and participating in the experience of travel and hands-on work; the fact that a professional team of construction workers could finish the house much more quickly than an unskilled team of volunteers was beside the point.

A family of five were going to move in once the house was complete. They’d begun construction on the modest house themselves, and then run out of money. Then they applied for assistance from Habitat. We’d met the father of the family, he worked alongside us regularly, and we’d met the mother of the family on the bus on the way home from the project site one day. She greeted us with enthusiastic hugs and kisses on both cheeks before someone explained who she was, and there were three kids who we hadn’t met yet. They all lived in a small temporary shelter near the job site. So they know that volunteers will be working on their house, I thought, and that their house might look a little jacked up as a result. Hmm. I went to bed with a bevy of doubts, pros and cons floating through my head.

The next morning I dutifully donned my cement-crusted pants, t-shirt, and trusty red bandanna, and joined the others in the lobby at 8:15am, as I did every morning. At the work site Frances and I were assigned to a new wall, a huge expanse in what would become the kitchen. It was less refined work, the cement mixture was rougher, and we were directed by the foreman to apply it more thickly. I don’t know if it was the cement, the challenge of such an enormous wall, or my need to release a night’s worth of questioning doubt, but I owned that wall. I dumped huge piles of cement onto my board, and literally threw it up against the wall with an impressive force. People walking through the kitchen stopped in their tracks and watched as I deftly flipped pound after pound of dark cement onto the wall.
“You have a technique going,” Cher said to me over lunch. It was true. No matter how much doubt had crept into my disposition, I had found a niche and grown into it. No matter that these skills would be useless once I came home (I’m fairly certain that drywall could have been used much more quickly had it been available), and that I’ll never again throw cement up on a wall like that. For a few days, I was the best cement flinger in town.

Portugal, Part II

Braga was the perfect antidote to Barcelona; it was small, quiet, and there was no chance I could get lost - all I had to do was look for the top of the cathedral that was half a block from my hotel to get back home. I couldn't speak the language but that didn't seem to matter much, people went out of their way to help me with whatever minuscule task I was attempting. I took to exploring in the afternoons after returning from the Habitat job site, walking along narrow cobbled streets and picking out my next coffee spot. The breakfast buffet at the hotel left something to be desired, and I quickly discovered that I loved the local coffee, so I began a solo ritual of leaving the hotel in the morning and getting an espresso and pastry before meeting the others. Braga was cheap too, I could get the best espresso of my life and a croissant that was barely three hours old for less than €2. In the evenings we'd go to dinner as a group. The food was always delicious, and frequently involved seafood. We'd all paid a participation fee in advance that covered everything but drinks, and frequently we'd finish three or four bottles of wine among the ten of us, then split the cost; it never came to more than €2.50 each.

An innate level of trust accompanied me on my solo wanderings, I bought hot chestnuts from an elderly woman wearing a kerchief on her head one evening, and I didn't understand how much it cost so I simply held a few coins out in my hand, and trusted that she'd take only what I owed her. Shop owners typed the cost of my purchases into a pocket calculator, or into the register, and then tilted the screen towards me so I could see what to pay. "Nobody understands us," Irène said when I told her about these transactions, "we're used to it. We understand Spanish speakers, but they don't understand us, we travel to Brazil and understand the Portuguese they speak there, but they don't understand a word of what we say."

On TV, foreign-language shows were subtitled; I watched Zoolander in English in my hotel room one night, scanning the subtitles from time to time to see if I could pick up any new words in the process. Portugal was a linguistic island, at once related to the language of its closest neighbors and completely on its own in a way I hadn't expected. English words were used to create ambiance, I walked past stores with names like: Remember The Last Summer; Pic-Pic; Women's Secret; and Closed. A store named Casa das Bananas sold penis and breast shaped coffee mugs and liquor bottles, right next to a store called Casa St. Antonio where you could buy Christmas creches and images of various saints.

Our hotel was quasi self-service, the front desk was manned only 12 hours a day, and it took me a while to figure out how to open the front door before 10am. By way of explanation, a sign in Portuguese, French and English was posted by the door reading:

Dear Guests,

The reception of this hotel closes everyday at 10 p.m. until 10 a.m. of the other day. If you arrive later, you must use the key of the front door that you have received with the room key, when you made the check-in.

Thank you

There was a TV lounge next to the breakfast room, with piles of outdated reading materials for guests. I picked up a 1997 issue of a Scottish publication called The Lady that had a feature called Holidays in Cornwall and read about events that were current a dozen years earlier.

Our group quickly established a routine; in the morning we gathered in the lobby at about 8:30 and walked the four blocks to our bus stop, where we took the same bus, driven by the same elderly driver, every day. The same passengers rode the bus - the two young brothers, who looked about six and eight years old, who rode the bus to school; the woman who yelled at the bus driver from the front door but never boarded, prompting the driver to catch my eye in his rear-view mirror, turn his index finger in a circle next to his ear in the universal sign of "crazy person" and mutter "ah, Port-you-gahl, Port-you-gahl, Port-you-gahl"; and the Habitat group, dressed in construction clothes, our somewhat disheveled and loud presence attracting the attention of locals.

At the job site, a small house in a hilly neighborhood called Gondizalves, we quickly specialized into jobs that suited our talents - Nicholas Cage had the loud, dirty job of mixing cement; Catherine O'Hara carried buckets of fresh cement to those of us charged with spreading cement on the walls, replenishing our supply; and John Malkovich was forever standing on a ladder and finishing walls at an alarming pace. We broke for lunch at the same time every day, and walked to the same restaurant, where aside from a few regulars - a handful of quiet men in work clothes standing at the bar, sipping espresso and watching the news, we were the only patrons.

The restaurant was run by two sisters, one cooked and the other served. We ate huge heaping piles of food: cabbage soup, salad, fried chicken, sardines, perch, pasta, sometimes all in the same meal. There was always a TV on at the bar, and though I couldn't understand what was being said, I glanced over at it every once in a while anyway. On a show that looked very similar to American Idol, a man sang I Did It My Way in Portuguese; on another, people danced competitively; and on a show called Insólito, a screen caption reading: Usava vagina para escondar jóias overlay a story that I tried my best to understand. I figured the word vagina had to mean the same thing it did in English, but the rest escaped me. It stayed onscreen long enough for everyone at the table to see it. Finally Catherine O'Hara, who was ashamed of nothing, asked João to translate. He read the text and his face fell in on itself, like a cartoon character who's just eaten an entire lemon. "Its about a woman who stole jewelry from a store by putting it in her vagina," he said, his voice heavy with resignation, just as a dramatic re-enactment of the theft was unfolding onscreen. A camera at floor level showed the back of a pair of legs standing a foot or so apart. In the middle distance sat an official, presumably the security guard who suspected the theft. The legs shook momentarily, and some jewelry fell from above the camera shot, into a little pile between them.

Portugal, Part I

My roommate's alarm went off at 7. She hit the snooze, then got up when it sounded a second time. "Hi J," she said.
"Hi," I said from underneath my bedsheets, "you must be Frances, it's nice to meet you." Frances was the team leader from Habitat, I'd sent her a photo and bio of myself so she could compile it into a document along with the rest of the team's information and email it to us before the trip. I wrote about myself using the third person, and felt like a tool when I saw that everyone else had written about themselves using the first. Secretly I was hoping that I would be paired up with Frances as a roommate, I'd considered a few different Habitat trips before committing to this one, and her easy going manner and Midwestern hominess had sold me. She's originally from Michigan, and I have a soft spot for America's high-five. Some of the best people I've ever met are from Michigan, and every summer M and I spend time at my in-laws' summer cottage in a town called Dowagiac; maybe choosing a trip based on the regional familiarity of the team leader isn't the best way to make a decision, but its not the worst either.

Frances hadn't heard me enter the room the night before, so I explained my unintended late-night check-in, and told her I'd be joining the group later with another team member who hadn't yet arrived. After Frances left the room I could hear the other team members gathering in the hallway, snippets of conversation as they made their way out of their rooms and down the stairs, and wondered which bios matched the voices I was hearing. At 8a.m. church bells rang out, first from one church, then another and another. I lost track of how many, and wondered if this would be an hourly occurrence. Just when I thought I'd never get back to sleep I drifted off.

I woke at 10, ravenous. I descended a flight of stairs to the breakfast room, where evidence that other guests had recently dined surrounded me; empty coffee cups and crumb-filled dishes populated the tabletops in pairs. I approached the buffet table and picked up what I thought was a coffee mug and realized was a cereal bowl only after I'd poured instant coffee into it. The food selection was spare: cereal in plastic dispensers; a few lonely yogurts in a bowl of melted ice; bread rolls; and a couple slices of ham and cheese. I ate a roll with butter and jam, and two pieces of something that looked like zwieback crackers. Then I went back to my room and, Portuguese glossary in hand, walked out of the hotel onto the cobblestone street.

It was raining a little, not enough to really be called rain. Misty drops of condensation landed on my face and darkened the cobblestones, creating a high-contrast tone reminiscent of an old black and white photo. A hundred feet to my left was a cathedral, twenty feet to my right was something that looked like a diner called Refrigerador da Sé . I walked to the cathedral in time to see a group of Asian tourists approach the edifice in silent observation, guidebooks in their hands and cameras around their necks. I followed them into the cathedral and looked inside, then walked back up the street past my hotel, and crossed the street into new territory. I walked past a school where the voices of young students singing in unison could be heard, and further along the narrow street the proprietor of a bar stood outside his establishment and silently watched me walk past him until I rounded the corner to a wide avenue that led to residential buildings and a dead end. I was hungry; I retraced my steps to Refrigerador da Sé, and opened my glossary to the food page.

"Sandsh?" I asked the young, dark-haired woman behind the counter while pointing to the word sandes, which according to my glossary meant sandwich. She called over an older woman, who pointed to all the words in my glossary that were available at the Refrigerador, and said them out loud to me. Then she opened a menu and pointed to the various items available; when her finger hovered over the word omelete, I made a happy sound and nodded my head. "Café?" I asked, the woman nodded and said: "sim" (sounds like si). "Can I sit here?" I asked, pointing to a small round table by the window. She held her hand out towards the table, indicating that the table was available. A few minutes later a delectably strong cappuccino and a ham and cheese omelet served with rice and fries was delivered to me. It was a small victory, but I was extraordinarily pleased with myself. I ate everything on my plate. "Obrigado," I said to the woman as I left, "Obrigado, bom dia," she replied.

Later I was driven to the job site by Irène, a Habitat Portugal staffer, along with the team member whose flight had landed earlier that day. We drove through the town and up into green hills, and parked near the small building we'd be working in for the next week. I walked in and immediately saw Frances.
"There's J!" She said. I was directed to the basement where I put on the construction gloves M had insisted on buying me at Menards, picked out a hard hat, and was assigned to a room in the back of the building to apply cement to the walls. The foreman demonstrated, slopping a pile of cement from a bucket using a trowel, and heaping it onto a flat rectangular plate with a handle on the underside. With the plate in his left hand, he scooped up several ounces of cement onto the back of the trowel with his right, and spread it onto the wall as easily as if he were icing a cake. It was much harder and went much slower when I did it. When the foreman stopped by my station to see how I was doing, he held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart and said "Mais." It sounded like maish, and I knew from context that he was telling me to apply more cement.

By the time we called it a day and walked to the bus stop a few blocks from the job site my wrist was sore from the repeated motion and effort of spreading cement. I had finally met my fellow team members, and if I were to cast celebrities in the movie version of this trip it would break down like this: there was a mother of two from Minneapolis who could be portrayed by Bebe Neuwirth; a woman from California who worked in the film industry who might be played by Lili Taylor; a young ad exec from New York City who could possibly be portrayed by Cher circa 1968; a viola player from New Jersey with a resemblance to Shirley MacLaine; an outdoors-man from Vermont who had a passing resemblance to John Malkovich; an attorney from Utah who could easily be played by Catherine O'Hara; the Habitat team leader, who reminded me of Frances McDormand circa Fargo; and a young man who lived with his parents in southern France, who could be played variously by Nicholas Cage circa Valley Girl or Leaving Las Vegas, depending on the situation. Over the next week or so I would come to know these people, but for now all I knew of them was what I'd read in their bios, and the few hours we'd spent working together.