Portugal is a Normal Country
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| Sugar, with her latest Fernando Botero piece, Maternidade (1999), Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon. |
Early in the morning, the day before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, we made our way in a taxi to Orly airport. The driver had to make several detours around barricades and fences to get out of our neighborhood, which had become virtually locked down to vehicle traffic in the days leading up to the games. Nonetheless, by mid-day we were seated outdoors at a restaurant in Lisbon, drinking Super Bock beer to try to beat the heat.
We'd known for months that we did not want to be in Paris for the Olympics--a decision that proved prescient as huge swaths of the city became cordoned-off Green Zones for the benefit of the executives and favored clients of the Games' corporate sponsors. I suppose for some regular ticket holders, as well. In our neighborhood it started slowly, month by month beginning around January when the lawns at the Champ de Mars failed to reopen. Then the gardens were fenced off, and over a course of weeks then days, the shabby little crêperie closed, followed by the carousel, playground, basketball courts, soccer pitch and guignol (puppet theater), until finally solid 3-meter tall walls went up around the entire park, cutting off the usual passageway to the Eiffel Tower and dividing the 15th and 7th arrondissements.
As a destination, Portugal was a bit of a deviation for us. There was no single site or place that had a particular pull. But Robyn's aunt and cousin were going to be wrapping up a trip in Lisbon for the first few days of the games, which gave us reason enough to check it out. We had decided to travel with the dog, which also gave us reason enough to get around Portugal by train rather than incur another flight to somewhere else before heading back to Paris.
To describe Lisbon's physical characteristics, and those of Portugal more generally, terms like unpretentious, modest, even "down at the heel" spring to mind. Remnants of its Moorish past persist in its architecture and decor, particularly in the colorful, intricate tilework that adorns so many buildings. And there is certainly no lack of plazas and statuary that harken from Portugal's great Age of Exploration, when it established vast colonial territories throughout Africa, Asia, and the Americas. But with the exception of some museums and significant churches, most of what you encountered showed its age and wear, rather than being meticulously maintained as you might see in other European capitals.
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| Tile adornments from Parque Eduardo VII, the National Tile Museum, and Nazaré. |
And it was exactly this lived-in, un-pristine quality that helped me realize after a few days that Portugal was a normal country in a way that I had never encountered. With only about 10 million people, it's a relatively small nation, dwarfed not just by its Iberian roommate, Spain (47 million), but also by several of its lusophone (i.e., Portuguese speaking) former colonies such as Brazil (220 million), Angola (37 million) and Mozambique (33 million). It's also relatively poor by western European standards; its GDP of $42,000 per capita places it among former Eastern bloc nations such as Estonia, Croatia, Hungary and Romania, rather than among nearer (politically and geographically) neighbors such as Spain ($46,000), Italy ($52,000) and France ($55,000) and nowhere near the US ($74,000).
And yet, the more we traveled around the city, and later, the rest of country as far north as the border of Spain, the more it was clear that Portugal was a pretty-well functioning place, where people seemed to enjoy a pretty decent quality of life overall. Certainly, poverty was a common sight. But nowhere did we seen vast zones of squalor and desperation that characterize parts of much wealthier places such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City ... or basically any metropolitan area in the US. We did see what might be called blight in the US; plenty of crumbling, boarded-up properties in nearly every place we visited. However the impression they left was that buildings were abandoned somewhat randomly in otherwise vibrant areas that were occupied by residences and businesses.
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| The beautiful decay of Porto (top) and Estoril. |
At the same time, new construction was on display everywhere, perhaps an indicator that some neglected properties were part of the global bust in housing valuations that occurred from 2007 and 2009. Perhaps more tellingly, everywhere we went, transportation infrastructure seemed to be in pretty good shape. In both Lisbon and Porto, subways, trams and buses were extensive, well-maintained, and ran frequently. Yet in no way did this crowd out privately owned vehicles on the roads. Highways were smooth and uncongested, with plentiful service areas and tolls taken electronically. There were times when seeing cars go by on Lisbon's wide, expressway-like roads, I could imagine I was in a South Bay Area suburb like Santa Clara. Unlike in the US, Portuguese cities, with a lot fewer resources, found a way to make transportation options co-exist.
Poverty also does not seem to drive a lot of criminality in Portugal, if OECD data are any indication. There was only one homicide per 125,000 Portuguese residents in 2019. In the US, there were seven times that many in the same year. Only 15% of Portuguese adults said that they did not feel safe at night, compared to about 25% of American adults. French citizens also seemed more fearful of venturing into the night (23%) than the Portuguese--despite or because of the massive, heavily-armed police presence on display everyday on the streets of Paris and other French cities. Policing in Portugal was light, often one cop by him or herself directing traffic (competently, also unlike Paris where platoons of traffic control gendarmes seem to create more gridlock than they prevent). Not once did we see a convoy of several police vans, escorted by half dozen two-man motorcycles, blowing through red lights at high speed with sirens blaring--something so common in Paris that from day to day you could be forgiven for imagining that the city was under a constant state of siege by ISIS, MS-13, the Organisation Armée Secrète, Hells Angels, Crips, Bloods, the Sicilian Mafia, the Medellin Cartel, the Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, Sydney Ducks, and the Gang Green Gang.
If quality of life in Portugal is good, people there can also expect it to last longer than their wealth levels would suggest, about 82 years of life expectancy, similar to France and longer than Americans can expect by about 5 years. According to the OECD, infant mortality rates are low, the quality of healthcare is high, and good health outcomes are achieved while spending only about a third of the the US spends per capita.
But the main sense of normality in Portugal came from the Portuguese people, and the ways in which they seemed to make their surroundings and their society work for themselves. Parks and plazas were plentiful, well-kept and accessible, typically with welcoming shade trees and benches, and sometimes with a bar-café and playground combo. That's right: parents can enjoy a beer or wine from a shaded table while in eyesight of their kids on the monkeybars. Sanity and equanimity seem to prevail.
The people we interacted with were friendly and outgoing; waiters liked to chat, and they would not just ask about you, but tell you about themselves and their place. It's easy to think "well, of course they are friendly, they want your money." But then you remind your self that tips are generally included in the service charge, and then you recall all the times in American restaurants when people working ostensibly for tips still gave you indifferent or even rude service.
Portugal also had some of the best cooking I've had anywhere. If you were raised to believe that food = love, this means something. We tried plenty of "traditional" Portuguese fare, such as pasteis de nata (baked custard tarts, known unimaginatively as "Portuguese tarts" in San Francisco's Chinatown and Parkside), bacalhau, (salt cod, usually in dumplings), and chouriço assado (cured chorizo sausage dowsed in grain alcohol, which was then set aflame at your table to give the skin a charred, crispy texture). I loved each and every one, not to mention the port wines, Douro Valley reds, and white vinho verdes. In both the big cities and some of their smaller, surrounding towns, Portugal also seems to be nurturing a lot of creative and adventurous chefs who put their spin on both international and traditional cuisine. We had excellent wagyu beef (twice) in the beach town of Estoril, and some of the best empanadas outside of Buenos Aires in both Porto and Arcozelo. We ate roasted vegetables and sausages at a Lisbon biergarten, and drooled over (but did not get to try) a passing plate of osso buco with creamy polenta. Every beach had at least one restaurant/bar/café, serving mostly full and well-prepared (if unpretentious) meals. We had very good Bar-B-Q brisket and pulled pork along a quiet street of flat-topped houses tucked among a tidal basin where oyster farmers were hauling in the day's harvest. Only once did we eat anything that came close to the low-quality, snack-shack fare you're inclined to get along beach boardwalks in the the US.
The locals also showed their kindness through their enthusiasm for animals. Unlike in places like Lyon, dogs were generally not allowed in restaurants. Unlike in places like Paris, dogs were certainly allowed in city parks. We were able to take Sugar to a few beaches (wherever there were no cabanas set up) and basically had the run of every restaurant patio and paved or boarded beach strand. The Portuguese seem pretty crazy about dogs, in fact. It was at least twice a day, every day, that we had to explain to someone that they should not try to pet Sugar, even though she might appear calm and well-mannered. It seemed easier to just tell people that she bites, when what she really does is make a sudden, noisy warning lunge at strangers who try to touch her. It is startling and does pose some risk--flashing teeth have a way of drawing blood, and once earned her some stitches in kind.
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| Playing it safe with some dog-loving locals in Estoril. |
But most Portuguese people seemed unconvinced, and could only be dissuaded with great effort. And some times not even then. No one seemed offended when, as duly warned, she suddenly bared her teeth and yelped as they tried to pat her head. Instead, they treated it like a skeleton popping out at a carnival haunted house, a momentary frisson of surprise giving way to the gleeful ridiculousness of the whole thing. One night I had to scoop Sugar out of the path of an undeterrable toddler, who had run from across the street upon seeing her. Another time I was carrying Sugar through a produce market when a tiny grandma, maybe five feet tall, shot out a hand, fast like a cobra strike, to get in a little scratch. She walked away giggling and kept right on with her shopping.
Portuguese animal lovers don't limit their kindness to dogs. The winding streets of Porto's Centro Historico neighborhood were dotted with makeshift cat shelters constructed from large plastic bins. Bowls of water and dried food were also scattered around. A couple of Lisbon's parks had more skillfully constructed cat enclosures, with signage indicating that they were part of a "catch, sterilize, and rerelease" program. There were plenty of kittens around in Porto, though, and all the cats seemed pretty much at ease with the crowds, cars, and general tumult. In true Portuguese style, one kitty was completely captivated by Sugar's incessant, frantic barking, and followed us down the street for at least a block until someone more intelligible caught its interest.
So is Portugal a normal country? Sure. Maybe. Why not? I was there for less than a month, and as a tourist, not as someone trying to have a day-to-day existence. It's taken me two years to recognize France's particular weirdness in treating every period of its past as glorious, and making preservation of that glorious memory part of its official national character. Who knows how future French generations will revere its present, with its endless anxieties about national identity and immigration, and apparently with a need for police forces on a scale so robust that basically every large city has its own army.
More to the point, being in both Portugal and France really underscores the abnormalities of the United States. That Portugal, with very little relative wealth, can manage to house nearly all of its citizens and maintain modern public and private transportation systems simultaneously, and enjoys security from crime is telling--whereas the US can't seem to manage any of these goals, and fails by almost all other social measures as well. True, Portugal's small population has to make some things easier. But it's still larger than every US city, and all but ten states--none of which seem to be doing as well for their residents in terms of infrastructure, crime, or material wealth. And it's not that Portugal is some kind of paradise where everyone shares equally in its relative prosperity. By one measure of the distribution of family incomes in a society, Portugal has just about as much inequality as the US, and a bit more than France.
In the end though, this is just how I feel, and there really can be no satisfactory explanation for that. There are, at last count, about a million monkeys banging out dissertations every year on why the US is so different from everywhere else on any number of dimensions--all of them good, I'm sure, and some which will even get finished. And there still won't ever be any satisfactory answer in the big scheme of things.
But if you want to go somewhere with friendly people, great food, nice beaches, a relaxed family atmosphere, where you can get around easily without being too appalled by squalor, terrified by the threat of crime, or shocked by the sight of battlefield weaponry in the streets, you could do worse than Portugal. I have.
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