Local Fruit and Vegetables

I haven’t eaten this much meat since…well, since the last time I visited here probably. It seems very strange that there’s a lack of vegetables here. Meanwhile, there is a dearth of local fruit. Perhaps it’s the season, but people seem to be more interested in fruit than vegetables when it comes to food that actually grows.

My parents and grandma have a substantial garden to grow food compared to us urbanites. They have potatoes, taro root, an assortment of beans and collard greens (of the infamous caldo verde soup). Then there’s the fruit. They have orange trees and Brazilian guavas. In their yard!

Other local fruit include the baby bananas that I’ve been eating with breakfast everyday and the local pineapple, which is sweeter and more orange in colour than the pineapples you see from Hawaii. My mom’s friend also recently gave us some lemons from her yard. They’re strange little lemons. The look like tiny oranges and their juice looks orange. But they’re sour like lemons.

So yes, back to the meat. Perhaps it’s just my family, but god, there’s a lot of meat in their diet. My mom or grandma will make chicken, and in the pot there’s the chicken and then the local sausage and potatoes. If my mom is the cook, she’ll add carrots, but it doesn’t cross my grandma’s mind to put any carrots in! She says that she’s no rabbit.

TV in the Azores

I just saw An Officer and a Gentleman on TV in the Azores. I was going to write about the movie and how it introduced us all to what soon became the most over used wedding song ever (…okay, maybe not ever, but certainly if you went to any weddings in the ‘80s, there’s a good chance that the bride and groom’s first dance was to “Up Where We Belong.”), but instead, I thought I’d introduce you all to Azorean TV.

When I first started coming here as a child, my grandparents only had two channels—the local, Azorean channel, RTP, and another one from the mainland. Lucky for me, my grandpa recorded all the English movies he came across (hence my introduction to one of my all time favourites, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Today my parents have cable with 36 channels—one of which is still the local RTP.

A good portion of channels are in English with Portuguese subtitles and are recognizable to us at home. There’s the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the History Channel, the Turner Movie Classics Channel, and oddly, something called Fox Life. Fox Life showcases a lot of dramas and sitcoms including Desperate Housewives, the Ghost Whisperer, and How I Met Your Mother. I don’t mind having so many English channels to rely on. I don’t have cable at home, so it’s practically all new to me and the Portuguese channels are hard to follow since my language skills aren’t up to par.

The odd thing is that most of the shows that are in Portuguese are telenovelas. These are over the top soap operas with a story arc that lasts a season. They are on all the time. There are two that my parents like to watch at lunchtime. One has something to do with Brazilians in Italy and the mafia. A car blew up in one episode that was full of children. In the other, it’s olden times, the 1800’s I would guess. I have no idea what’s going on in it, but there were some courtroom scenes. I do like seeing the costumes they arrange. Then there's the one this images comes from. There are wolves, I guess. I kind of wish they had English subtitles so I could catch more.

Then there are other ones on at dinner time and late into the evening. The one my grandma likes to watch is on then and takes place in Lisbon with someone who’s got amnesia or something. Like I said, it’s hard for me to follow—but I’m sure you can throw your own plot line together. Just make sure there’s lots of intrigue and meaningful looks and embraces. Oh and throw some eavesdropping in.

The Weather

Before leaving home, everyone said they were so jealous that I’d get some warm Portuguese weather. Little did they know that the Azores has winter too. Even I, despite visiting the islands many times, was a little dismayed by what welcomed me.

I checked weather reports before I left home and was expecting a balmy 16 degrees Celsius. It may very well be 16 degrees, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. The humidity here is intense, making it seem much, much colder. “It reaches the bones,” as my grandmother likes to say.

At night I’ve been sleeping with a hot water bottle along with a sheet, a wool blanket, a fuzzy blanket, and two afghan blankets. Not to mention sweatpants, a long sleeved top, and socks. And I still feel cold.

Other weather weirdness here includes windstorms. Last night it took me ages to get to sleep because the wind and rain kept beating down on the roof (I sleep in the attic bedroom). Just minutes ago, there was a sudden thunder and lightening storm. It only lasted about ten minutes, but the rainwater poured down the outdoor balcony steps like a river and a small lake appeared on the patio. The electricity even flickered in and out.

Then it stopped. There are now puddles everywhere and it’s still misty outside, but otherwise it’s hard to tell that anything out of the ordinary happened. But that’s just it. This is ordinary. It’s February on these little islands in the Atlantic.