Big plane, shuttle, little plane, bus, train, car! The kids and I sat on the train to my parent’s house in São Teotonio listing the different forms of transport we would have to use to get to our destination. After being awake for almost 20 hours and extremely sleep deprived, I’m actually surprised I was still capable of coherent thought.
The beauty about being near the end of a voyage is that you get to appreciate the personalities that entered into it to make it unique. For example, the Spanish male air host who berated an older man who wasn’t stowing his carry-on luggage quickly enough, blocking the aisle. OK that in itself may not be interesting, but he did it in Spanish, and I understood what he said, that gave me a little thrill. Add Spanish to my linguistic repertoire.
Hubby will never let me forget that I, in my single-minded ideal to get us to my parents home, almost left him with all the bags, no money, without a passport and of course not able to speak Portuguese at the Entre-Campos Train Station in Lisbon. When the train arrived it went past us stopping about 100 metres away from where were waiting, I grabbed a child in each hand and ran for it. I’m sure that at some point during my sprint I did turn back and check that he was following, dragging three bags with him, I love my husband after all. OK, so maybe I only checked once I had already boarded, sometimes I have serious tunnel vision. We all got on safely and found our allotted seats without much difficulty, except for some fellow passengers who had luggage battered knees or elbows (in a country of short men he looked like a behemoth. One day I overheard a little girl point out to her mom how big his legs were). I was teased for the next two hours on the train, then ratted out to my Dad for being a negligent wife.
When we are children we have certain characters that appear in our lives that scare the hell out of us till we become teenagers and hopefully outgrow them. Thanks go to the unremembered adult who took me and my siblings to see a drive-in movie called ‘Scanners’ where the baddy makes peoples heads explode, very intelligent, not! I saw it on E-TV recently, very, very cheesy in a late 70’s kind of way but I digress.
While being teased by hubby, who should board the train but a witch! When I was little my mom would buy me books of fairy tales, I don’t know where she got them but they all had that lurid brightness that we now associate with the 1980’s. The illustrations were harsh and didn’t hold back, when the wolfs stomach got cut open for Granny to come out in Little Red Riding Hood, blood and guts were everywhere. The witch that Hansel pushed into the oven was covered in warts, had those crooked arthritic fingers that tested poor cage-bound Gretel for weight gain and was clad from Kappie covered head to toe in black. Still gives me the shivers. Well that’s who got on the train, you can ask Hubby I almost had a coughing fit trying to point her out to him. She dragged two engorged black bin bags along with her, probably filled with dismembered Gretel look-alikes! When she couldn’t find space in the tiny bag storage section she harassed the teenagers nearest the door for being so insensitive and using it all. Then she dragged her bags down the aisle and sat in the seat behind me. I felt those beady malevolent eyes on my back till I disembarked. Maybe she was just someone’s Gran who’d had a bad day but I prefer to remember it my way, as the witch who got on the train to Funcheira, my childhood fears revisited.
Overall, it was a wonderful start to our trip and only the beginning of our Portuguese adventure.
