Then Sarah knocked over three water bottles

Last night I went to a fado club to hear traditional Portuguese fado music. The best way I can describe it is Portuguese blues, but the term that the Portuguese use is saudades. This is also really difficult to describe. From what I understand, it encompasses a certain nostalgia and heartache and has no equivalent term in English. The Iberian Music class professor organized the trip and graciously invited the rest of the CIEE students along and since I hadn't been yet, and I really had no desire to write papers, I decided to go.

It was a really wonderful evening. The place we had originally been headed to was closed so after dodging an overly eager woman who wanted us to go to her fado club, and stalked us through Bairro Alto while popping bubble wrap (just plain weird...) we ended up inside a very traditional fado house where we were, at the early hour of 9 pm, the only customers. Lucky for them it was a CIEE-sponsored event so we feasted and brought in more than enough dinheiro to pay for their evening. One of the things I really love about Portugal during the holiday season is that everybody here goes nuts for Christmas decorating. It's a fairly Catholic country although most of the Portuguese people I've met are non-practicing but Lisbon goes all out in the blinking light department. Everywhere you go has at least some kind of decoration. Whereas in the US it gets pretty obnoxious (see my next-door neighbors, whose reindeer farm could power a small island) the decor here involves lots of lights strung everywhere and "Boas Festas!" signs. It's also relatively uncommercialized in most places, if that's even the right word I'm looking for and it probably isn't. What I mean is this. At the fado club there were strings of lights on the wall but they didn't look like they'd been strung by a professional lighting team. There was a golden-bellied Santa statue and some shooting star lights on the wall and a couple of strings of lights that had been taped up using clear packing tape. I guess I just like that it's authentic and intimate rather than mass-produced. That could also be a byproduct of being in a local, family-owned traditional fado house. There were lots of people coming and going all night but they all knew each other and/or were related. And you can imagine my surprise when, after the first round of singing by two men concluded, our waiter came to the front and burst out in sorrowful singing. And then the owner. And then the wife. At one point a set of young parents with twin toddlers came in and I was half-expecting the little girls to burst out in song. I think they were related to one of the cooks because a man came out that we hadn't seen yet and scooped up the girls into his arms while the 'rents chatted with the singers and the owner and the waiter. It felt like a scene out of a movie the way they all knew each other. The music was interesting, although I think i would've felt more moved by it if I had understood all the words. The emotion, however, was very tangible. The Portuguese people in the room all looked so sad and while I didn't feel blue, I definitely felt the music in my heart and started dwelling on how painful it is going to be to say goodbye to Lisbon.

On a side note, I ate the most delicious grilled salmon I've ever had in my life. I'm not a huge fish eater in this country partly because they love codfish, they don't love sauces, and I never know what I'm ordering. But I felt the urge to eat fish one more time before leaving so I went with that impulse and it paid off beautifully. I was so full I couldn't even finish my chocolate mousse (a rare occurrence!)

Then, in a moment so fully representative of my experience in Lisbon, the restaurant did not accept credit cards. And we had a 300euro bill. The moment definitely called for laughing although we did have to be serious long enough to pool enough cash to avoid dish washing. Yet, it totally fit the traditional Portuguese evening. In the words of one of my classmates, the great thing about Portugal is that its very informal, unstructured, and nobody seems to be able to explain why but it works.

I wish I could say the same about all of my final papers that I'm trying to finish. For some reason, they are not working even though I am. In other news, today at school there was an impromptu choir concert in the foyer of the main building. It was actually pretty cool except that they had set up in a semicircular formation in front of the cantina so to get to lunch, you had to go back outside and use the exterior staircase to go up to the first floor, go inside and then go back downstairs. Also, there are cats that run around the university campus and they were all inside today so I spent lunch watching them dart around, pondering the fact that in the U.S. I don't think health regulations would allow stray cats to be wandering through the dining hall.

There's also a serious health problem going on with the pigeons. Ok, one pigeon. There's one pigeon that we see nearly every day when we have breakfast on the patio on campus that looks like it's suffering from a drug problem. We call him the crack pigeon which I guess isn't really that funny except that he really is just the ugliest bird in the history of the universe. He also has slow reflexes so when you shoo him away, he doesn't really leave. Oh, cats and crack pigeon, I'm going to miss you! I could write an ode in honor of my poetry paper due this week but I don't have time. Or rather, I choose to spend that free time writing blog posts instead of poems and papers etc. Or packing. At some point in the next 2 1/2 days, I have to pack. We'll see how that goes.

TCHAU