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 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.