The Market

The Market Building

 Back home we have the Halifax Farmer's Market over in Halifax, but it is not a 'real' market by the definition the rest of the world uses. . . . . more 'craft' market with a few food vendors. Regis says I can find a market where ever I travel, and have managed to find them in most locations I have visited.

Now Olhao has a real market, and it operates almost every day. There are grocery stores here, but they are mostly small corner operations where you can get canned goods, wine, or speciality items. The market contains the majority of the food you need. You can but meat or vegetables at the corner 'supermarket' in a emergency, but really, why go there when the market is available six days a week.

Farm Fresh Food

Sobeys, Superstore, Loblaws, and the other huge supermarkets have not taken over Olhao yet. If you need bread or rolls you go to the bakery, and will probably pick up some delicious pastries with your 'fresh from the oven' rolls or bread. For most everything else you go to the market.

Selling her Produce

Olhao's market is in two beautiful large brick buildings down on the waterfront. One contains fresh fruit, vegetables, spices, grains and other things. The other building is the fish market, and you can also find fresh meat, cheeses, but Olhao is the main fishing town in southern Portugal, so the building is mostly seafood. Around the outside of the building are the Portuguese 'Snack Bars' – mostly I think these sell beer for the husbands to sit and drink with their friends while wives are inside the market stocking up for the evening meal.

Saturday Market Day

The fruit & vegetable buildings contains stall after stall of people selling lovely fresh produce. Tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes grown in a garden, piles of fava beans waiting to be shelled, red green & yellow peppers, crisp lettuce, onions, leeks and garlic. You can buy strawberries, raspberries, bananas, lemons and oranges. A couple of euros will buy you a 4 kilo bag of slightly smaller oranges to make into juice (And we wondered why you couldn't get good juice in the store . . . . .) In between you will find stalls selling a wonderful selection of honey, delicious almonds and other specialities. Other vendors sell spices, vast buckets of olives, cages full of live snails, or bins of dried beans and rices. At one end of this building there are also butchers selling chickens, pork, and rabbit, as well as a variety of delicious portuguese sausages and cured meats. There are also a couple of stalls selling a large selection of cheese, and as in Spain, they make a large percentage of their cheese from goat or sheep milk, so I am very happy.

Walk outside the middle door of the vegetable building and you know you are headed to the fish market. Inside are tables of melting ice loaded with fresh fish and seafood. Don't bother going on Monday however, because the fleet is tied up Sunday, so there won't be any seafood until the boats return later that day. You know everything is fresh. There are eels, octopus, squid, and so many kinds of fish I cannot identify. Of course the names are all in Portuguese, so we rely on what is recommended. On our first visit we wanted sardines, to fry up for supper (no sardines do not come in a can here), but were told it is a bit early for good sardines, we should wait for june to get the best fresh sardines. We elected to take our chances with the available ones, and Pete cooked them up with some local port. Wow, I can't imagine how the 'good' ones in June would be.

Selling on the Seafront

On Saturday this wonderful market actually expands with stalls spilling out onto the sidewalks and the waterfront malecon, and it seems that the entire town comes to the market to not only shop but more important to socialize and catch up with friends and relatives or find out the local gossip. Off to one side a gypsy market sells clothes, crafts, and everything else you didn't know you needed.

We do need to go to the grocery store for coffee and dried pasta, but our grocery bag will not be very heavy.

The Neighbourhood

 “Number 24” is not an apartment in a tourist resort, it is a regular apartment in a nice new building on the edge of the old section of the town. Let me describe for you the neighborhood.

Looking out over the front balcony, there is a train track, and beyond that old section of Olhao. You would think that living beside the train track would be noisy, but in fact you never hear it at all. The train runs through a man-made concrete valley, and unless you are outside on the balcony or sitting in the kitchen with the window open you can not even notice the train.

Bringing in a coffin

I noticed right away the people coming and going from the building to the right of the apartment. They were always dressed up, the men in suits and women in dresses, and they all carried little briefcases, or what looked like day-timers. These folk were coming and going all day, but I did not really know what it was about. Finally one day a big silver blue van pulled up, and I could hear a lot of animated conversation. Looking over the balcony, I watched them open a big glass door on the back of the van, and extract a coffin. Was this a funeral home? Questioning Suzanne about this mystery, I was told it was a Jehovah Witness Temple, and there must have been a funeral of one of the members. Fortunately, the balcony out front is three stories up, and although providing me an excellent spot to watch the population of Olhao go by, folk on the ground would have to really crane their necks to notice me watching them up there, so I have yet to have the knock on the door for the religious conversion speech.

BeautifulTan

Plants Everywhere

Across the railway track is the start of the old part of Olhao. For about five or six blocks it is narrow streets with single family houses. The houses are built of concrete, and are all attached together for the entire length of the block. From the street side these look very similar. There are a few with brightly coloured tiled surfaces, but most are white or beige painted concrete. Looking down at them from the apartment balcony, you see them from the back and there are not two with the same design in the entire block. They are all narrow and usually at least two stories, often with elaborate roof top extensions. Some of the roofs are tiled and some simply concrete, but most have a room on the roof of some sort. Stairs go in all directions to various levels. Everyone has a clothes line on the roof, and some have gardens. One house across from me is decorated in shades of tan and brown, and another down the way is brilliant white all the way down to the train tracks, where another directly across is simply aged and mottled, unpainted concrete, but every flat surface has a potted plant waiting for the rain that I am told is not expected until November . . . . .

So you see . . . . . it is way more interesting than being an apartment in a “resort”.

More on the neighbourhood to come.

Doors of Olhao

 

When I first went to Ottawa to get our son Ryan settled into University of Ottawa, I spent some time wandering the city. One thing that struck me was the variety of lovely old doors I saw. I started taking photos of them with the intent of making Ryan a poster out of the pictures. Collecting the pictures of doors in Ottawa, made me aware of doors when I travelled to other cities, and I started taking pictures of them all over the world. I became especially taken with old doors; doors showing their history and sometimes showing their age. I found wonderful doors to shoot in China, in Brazil, in Spain, and in Mexico. I even found a few interesting doors in the US, but in Canada and United States, the old doors tend to get replaced with shiny new steel ones to provide better security and insulation. Interesting doors with character are few and far between in North America, but here in Olhao there are hundreds of them. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.

Lost In Portugal

 

Although our hosts here in Portugal left us a lovely 'welcome pack' of fruit, wine, bread and other useful items, we wanted to pick up some groceries to be ready for supper and breakfast, so we went for as walk to find a grocery store and wine bodega. Sue and Colin, the owners of the apartment have written a wonderful guide to Olhao and have everything you might need located on a handy tourist map.

Portuguese Street Sign

A map is useful however only if you can find where you are and are able to follow the map to where you want to go. The apartment was easy to locate on the map, and the shopping centre with a nice modern grocery store looked easy to find. Off we went hiking up the road, but quickly found a problem. The map lists all the street names . . . . . the actual streets however do not actually seem to have names. I'm sure someone named them, but no one put street signs up. The older area of town has lovely ceramic tile street name plates on the buildings, but there was no such thing here. We kept going hoping to find a sign to find our way, but nothing appeared. We weren’t actually lost, because we knew how to retrace our steps back home, but the shopping centre was certainly lost.

Finally we asked a 'local' sitting in one of the sidewalk 'snack' bars.

“Sorry”, she said “I'm not from here.” She however did ask her friend who although he could not locate where we were on the map (He probably did not know his street actually had a name . . .), but he was able to point us in the direction of the shopping centre and his directions got us there.

Wonder Where Linda & Pete are?

Linda and Pete (Sister & Brother in law), had much the same experience. They flew into Lisbon, stayed overnight and took the train down to Olhao the next day to arrive the same day as Regis and I. When they arrived at the train station in Olhao, they discovered that the one paper that they could not find was the one containing the actual address of the apartment. They had seen pictures of the apartment but did not know if they could actually recognize it. They knew it was called “Number 24” but had no idea what street it was “number 24” on. After wandering a bit they gave up and Linda left Pete back at the Train station while she went to find an internet cafe to try to find the apartment through the website or her e-mail where Regis had sent her the information earlier.

No luck. . . . . no address, no idea what to do . . . . not quite to the point of panic, Linda decided she would have to get a hotel room, and perhaps contact us via e-mail to find out where we were.

Look Pete made it to Portugal

They luck and good fortune took over and a friendly Russian/latvian couple recognizing Linda's “Lost in Portugal” looks asked if they could help. Using broken English and inadequate Portuguese the situation was investigated slowly. As Linda tried to explain her brother here already and not knowing where the apartment was, they mentioned Colin and Suzanne. Somehow, Linda the Canadian had found someone from Russia who knew our English hosts living in Portugal. How's that for international intrigue? After a couple of phone calls they found Colin & Suzanne's phone number, made contact and were finally, tired and hungry from travelling, able to find us.

Oh, BTW, the apartment is two blocks from the train station, and had Regis and I been relaxing with a glass of wine on the front balcony rather than enjoying the sunset on the back balcony we probably would have noticed Pete sitting forlornly guarding a pile of suitcases outside the train station; we can see it from the balcony.

Welcome to Portugal

Regis is in Portugal

Even with 'on time' and smooth flights from Halifax to Toronto, to Frankfurt, Germany, to Faro, Portugal, and finally a taxi drive to Olhao, we were on the road for close to 24 hours, so we arrived here tired, but happy; the sun was shining and it was 24°C. Welcome to Portugal!

We got here about 1:00 PM, and decided to try to stay up until evening to quickly adjust to 'Portuguese time' so we had time to wander the town for a while.

Olhao is not a tourist town, and this area of Portugal although on the Algarve which is a popular 'tourist' destination, this particular area is poor and in places a bit run-down. We however, knew this and were looking forward to being in the 'real' Portugal, so were prepared for the area.

Looking towards the sea

Tiles & Balconies

The apartment is absolutely wonderful, in a new building in an older area of town. It is modern, well equipped, and the owners could not be more friendly and helpful. Looking out the balcony off the living room, you look over the old town of Olhao with it's tightly packed varied two and three story houses in white concrete and on to the sea coast, and the balcony off the bedroom looks out on a business area and on to a newer area of typical Portuguese houses and apartments.

Sunset on the back Balcony

We walked down towards the seaport area of town. There are a lot of deserted building and crumbling concrete, but this really gives the town character, and there are many interesting buildings, some with lovely tiled surfaces and ornate windows with little balconies like we saw in Mexico or Spain. Arriving at the actual seaport, you find an actual working area, as this is the biggest fishing port in the area, and further along there is your regular 'malecon' type park with paved (cobble-stoned) walkways and seawall like we had in Mexico or in Spain. Across the street from the malecon are various restaurants and 'snack bars' with locals sitting outside with beer or coffee.

Welcome to Portugal!

Internet Caution

 

I know my way around the Internet pretty well. I can say that so far I have not had any problems other than the normal viruses and worms that manage to find their way into the old Microsoft based PC's I used to use, But the other day I was almost taken in. I thought I'd write about this one, because it is so well done, and if you fall for it, you can lose a lot of money.

I was on the Internet the other day and found an add for a Language Learning system called the Pimsleura method. Now I have travelled to many countries and I've always managed to get along with my English and a few words in the local language (Hello, thank you, etc.), but I have always felt I really should put more effort into speaking the local languages when I visit a country. The problem is that I am really no good with languages. I only passed Jr. High French once and that was because the teacher kept me in every day for weeks drilling me. This system seemed perfect, advertising a natural way to learn. There was a video where a pleasant girl explained the system, and she had me convinced it would help me learn Portuguese prior to our trip to Portugal this year. Best of all, it was a deal; only $9.99. Even if it didn't work, I was only out ten bucks. I was almost ready to click the button to pay my money.

I finally thought, wait a minute, lets actually see how well this works. The internet has lots of reviews and testimonials of anything. I went to Google and typed “Reviews of Pimsleura Language Program.” Now be careful here, because like most of these Internet scams, they have themselves created numerous so called “Review” sites that extol the virtues of their product, so look at lots of the sites and find “real” reviews.

WOW, I never did learn if the system works. What I did learn is how one individual could make millions using the Internet to bilk people out of hundreds of dollars.

This Internet scam works by depending on people saying, like I did, “I'm only out 10 bucks if it doesn't work.” If you read the fine print, and even then it isn't clear, you will find that although it sounds like the $9.99 price is all you need to pay, in reality you are signing up for an ongoing $64.00 a month subscription that goes on forever. There are lots of statements about “Money Back Guarantee.” and “No Obligations.” but from the reviews and horror stories in the reviews of this company, they do not work.

Basically what happens is that once you sign up and pay your $9.99 with a credit card, they start charging you $64.00 a month, and it is almost impossible to get them to stop. Even if you send the product back (You pay return and shipping fees)they deny receiving it and continue charging your credit card. There were stories of people finally having to cancel their credit cards because they couldn't even tell the card companies to stop charges. All the testimonials emphasized that they found it almost impossible to get the charges to stop.

Another example of if it sounds too good to be true, read a real review.