Don't visit Portugal. Stay home! Please

David Sherman

Portugal’s western border is all coastline. Nothing but sand, water and cliffs of ancient stone, much of it from the Paleozoic era -- anywhere from 251 to 538 million years old, give or take a month or two. You can take a high dive or drive off it à la Thelma and Louise. Or go paragliding and fossilize yourself splattered against a Paleozoic mountain. Maybe slide down with the rocks into the ocean, join the barnacles.

If you miss that opportunity, the stones are so old it makes you feel as significant as a grain of sand. They also litter beaches, are slippery when wet, and … a rock is a rock is a rock. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. Ya got rocks at home. Stay home.

The ocean is everywhere. It roars, spits, creeps and rolls in and out, taking your sand castles with it, leaving cracked clam shells to puncture your feet. It has no respect for you. Won’t let you breathe. People in rubber suits on surf boards love it and if you’re a rubber fetishist, there is no shortage of beautiful bodies of any number of sexual preferences parading in tight wet suits. But their affections are reserved for the surf and their boards. The unclean thoughts fog your brain, fog fogs you completely. Ocean water is salty. Not a drop to drink. Gets in your ears. Coats car windows. Creates clouds and monsoon rain. And, how long can you watch waves? After a few months, it’s a bore. After all, they just keep coming. Along with sharks. Nothing like hockey. The water in an arena is frozen, painted with colourful ads and is useful for skating, cross-checking and body-crunching. Watch hockey. Stay home.

Electricity is expensive and almost all public washroom lights are connected to motion detectors. There’s nothing like doing what you have to do when the lights go out. This is embarrassing. You have to wave your hand up and down -- if you have a free hand when you’re doing what you’re doing. And you might need it to clean up the floor. Save your hand to twist open a bottle or pop open a can, hold a glass and a remote control. Hockey playoffs are coming but soccer is on every public TV here. Stay home.

Cars are inexpensive to rent. They’re little, low to the ground, made for the height-challenged with lubricated joints. Most have clutches to cripple arthritic knees. Worse, Portuguese drive like maniacs, worse than Quebecers. No matter how much you exceed the speed limit, someone will be on your tail waiting for you to move over. Sometimes right over a cliff. Remember those Paleozoic cliffs? It’s a long way down. Acrophobic nightmare-city. Unfortunately, the tiny cars are hi-tech nuisances with myriad warning lights and a symphony of beeps,  bongs and honks, their steering wheels resist you changing lanes on highways. You have to wrestle with them to teach them who’s boss. Better the cars and road warriors you know than those that speak incomprehensible Portuguese. Stay home.

The food is great but excessive. It’s a weight-loss killer, a diet-destroyer. You have fish pulled from the sea the same day or maybe the day before and tastes of the sea but sweeter with brilliant white meat. Beef is mostly from grass-fed cows who were not factory farmed and actually lived outdoors and enjoyed life before the inevitable. As did most pigs and chickens. Either way the protein is heavenly but excessive. They put fried egg on steak. Weird. But delicious. If you’re a vegetarian, forget about it. The national vegetable is a French fry. Protein is their raison d’être. Each night you will regret how much you ate and, like an addict, the next day you will again engage in vats of fish and rice or seafood and rice or chicken piri piri or a sweet, juicy steak that does melt in your mouth or a variety of traditional pork dishes, any plate of which can feed three or more. You will not be able to move after dinner so better to sit immobile in front of the TV at home and save a few thousand dollars. Rather than shovelling all this down your throat, you can stay home and shovel snow. Much better for your health, unless you shovel yourself into a heart attack. Best to find a kid to exploit, eat potato chips and swig beer, watch a game and stay home.

The service people in restaurants, if you treat them as human, learn their names, leave a decent tip, will treat you with uncommon kindness, suggest off-menu items, give you traditional foods to taste and not charge you, shake your hand when you come in or even hug you. The female staff will do the same. But, unlike home, they don’t trade cleavage or flash of thigh, for tips. They dress like the men, shirts, slacks and smiles. They are nice people. There is no transactional sexualized hospitality like some restaurants at home, where waitresses say, “I’ll show you mine, you show me your cash.” Enjoy the cleavage, the sexism. Stay home.

If you’re not addicted to your phone and leave your computer behind, you’ll be spared the aggravation of Herr Trump and Adolf Musk. Your blood pressure and heart rate will descend. You might relax and realize life can be lived without being in a constant state of aggravation. This is dangerous. Returning to the insanity of home will spike your vitals and send you into a spiral of depression and right to the medicine chest or government booze or weed shops to medicate yourself back to the peaceful feelings you had when away. Why play havoc with your mental health. Stay medicated at home. The world’s gone crazy so why shouldn’t you? You can also avoid airport shopping centres, overstuffed airplanes designed for the chronically short, bad food and the pleasure of flying a Boeing. Will a wing fall off? The landing gear? Did a worker leave his ham sandwich in a flight computer? Keep two feet on the ground. Stay home.

Worse, if you come to spots they have not yet turned into British and German enclaves lined with hotels, pubs, restaurants touting “British food with British ingredients,” a synonym for disgusting and full of fat, they will build more of same. There remain oases of unparalleled Portuguese beauty I will not mention. If tourists insist on making Portugal taste and look like home, they will add English staff and English menus and food like burgers and pizzas and chicken wings and ersatz caesar salads or other fusion concoctions. You won’t have to eat Portuguese food or learn how to read a Portuguese menu. The Algarve, Costa del Sol and large segments of Portugal already resemble Miami Beach or Daytona. Next thing you know, you’ll have Ron DeSantis holding court in Lisbon, telling you to speak English, which books you can read and who you can have sex with.

Best for these anonymous Portuguese enclaves if you went to Greenland or Siberia. That way, parts of Portugal will stay Portugal and we can continue puzzling over a Portuguese menu.

There’s no place like home. So, stay there.