Eating (and drinking) our way through Portugal

We did a thing. An empty-nester thing. We buy tickets for international vacation travel less than a week before departure. Who does that? Not us - oh no, you plan and get excited by your plans, you pore over travel books and sites, read blog posts, and reviews. You find a zillion interesting things and then decide which of the few you are most likely to fit in. Most of our itineraries are fluid and change as we go.

Aah… this itinerary is certainly fluid, mostly because it is all so sudden. We can even check the 10-day weather forecast of the places we want to visit. We change plans and cities based on weather. This has never happened before!

We had been thinking of Portugal for a few months. It didn’t quite happen the way we were planning for it, and I may or may not have been relieved. For truth be told, if given more time to think about it, I would have bailed.

I go back to the past several months, to a few new diagnoses that make my life a little harder, previous symptom worse and a looming uncertainty of what’s ahead. More doctors, new doctors, new treatments, new drugs, I feel stuck in the hamster wheel again.

With illness comes uncertainty and the uncertainty and anxiety are often far worse than the reality. For when things go wrong, you muster up courage and do the do. But in the harrowing haze of uncertainty lies a certain gloom that can suck it all out of you.

But less than a week before travel, once the impulsive tickets are purchased, I no longer have time to think if I have energy or enough good health for this. Ahem… I’m efficient like that, I make time and find room for stress and worry. But the excitement and the craziness of the last-minute travel overshadows it. I feel lucky even if I shake my head in disbelief.

But wait, what am I going to eat? I have new allergies - to everything - environmental, pollen, dust, food, everything - my allergist stops testing for food allergies since most everything shows up positive. There’s no point, she tells me, your immune system is in such overdrive, there will be a lot of false positive. Great, I think, and I want to travel to a new country like this?

I pack all my medication. My medical kit is in my backpack. My angry face rash is an indicator of how bad things are on any given day. I can do this, I decide. It’s not like things are in remission, even I stay right here, in the safe confines of my home. Besides I am not a very big eater (or drinker), but the novelty of things, I do want to experience.

I decide to take it all in, I decide to not let fear come in the way of my living. And I have a whole country to eat (and drink) through.

We do so with aplomb. We find restaurants tucked away in narrow cobbled alleys filled with locals, and a few tourists like us who somehow whiff them out. We’re in luck, it is off season and there are few tourists everywhere. A wait time of 15 minutes at 2 pm on a weekday for a restaurant (surrounded by empty restaurants) is got to be good sign, right? It is. Spectacular. Everyone is drinking their house wines. My husband asks for a glass of the vino verde (green wine). The server looks at him quizzically and says, “only one liter” or “half liter”. Makes sense. Who drinks just one glass of wine in this beautiful weather, with the ocean nearby?

Sardines and Bacalhau a braz and Vino Verde (green wine)

 
 
We roam the cities, we take in the beautiful south, we take in the local tastes and flavors, our senses are satisfied. I am often tired as we walk miles on the cobbled streets, but the sights and sounds and the friendliness of the locals, fills me up. We drive through olive and orange orchards and vineyards and take in the countryside. The famous Pasteis de Belen live up to their name, as do the famous pastries at Casa Piriquita in Sintra. We do a comparison of pastels de nata in different places – well, we mostly gobble them up without really coming to any conclusion.

 

 

A lot has gone wrong, terribly wrong. Each time, we’ve waded through it and stood back up. Wobbly and perhaps exhausted, but upright, nonetheless.

There’s really no knowing what the future holds, but we have today. And anticipating what can go wrong is more exhausting than the going-wrong-of-things. And with that in mind, I decide to eat (and drink) my way through Portugal.

Ginjinha (cherry liqueur) in chocolate cup

Pastel de nata liqueur in white chocolate cups