A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

School Matters: Indiana vouchers cost nearly a quarter billion dollars; Up 44% over the previous year

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Vouchers were sold as a way to give poor kids in failing schools a chance for something better. We got swindled.

Steve Hinnefeld does a very good job of covering education in Indiana. In a post today, he goes over some numbers showing how vast the expansion of Indiana’s voucher program has been and how its advocates no longer even give lip service to the goals they pretended to have when starting the program. In the beginning, school privatization was sold as an opportunity for poor students at failing public schools to seek a better education. Now kids from wealthy families who never had any intent of going to public schools and who live in school districts that are doing well can divert public money to private schools that aren’t providing an education any better than what’s available at the traditional public school.

Steve gives me a nod by noting my assertion that the real goals of Indiana vouchers are to subsidize religious education, punish teacher’s unions, and divert public money to friends and well-wishers of lawmakers who favor school privatization. I really wish that I was getting a mention for how wrong I was because vouchers were proving so successful in providing better educational outcomes for students from poor families. But, of course, that’s not what is happening.

A few of the things Steve notes:

  • Indiana awarded $241.4 million in the 2021-22 school year to pay tuition and fees for students to attend private schools. That’s 44% more than the state spent on vouchers the previous year.
  • Some 20% of voucher households last year had an income of $100,000 or more.
  • In 2021-22, 70% of voucher students had no record of having attended a public school in the state.
  •  [A] family of five making $172,000 can receive vouchers worth over $5,400 on average per child.
  • [T]he number of voucher students exploded: 44,376 students had vouchers in 2021-22, up 24.3% from the previous year.
  • Nearly 60% of voucher students are white, an overrepresentation considering the program is most pervasive in urban areas, where there are many Black and Hispanic students. Only 10.5% of voucher students are Black, compared to 13.5% of Indiana public and charter school students.

And again, the studies that have been done reflect that the education kids are getting at these private schools isn’t any better than at traditional schools and it may be worse. Anyway, I urge you to go read the whole post.

Rights can and will be alienated

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Liberty

You can’t put a price on liberty. Except in Indiana, where it’s $225.

In a fit of irony, I rode Disney’s “Carousel of Progress” the day the Supreme Court decided that women didn’t have the reproductive rights we thought they did for the past few generations. Not to be outdone, Indiana will celebrate the Fourth of July by going into special session in order to alienate the rights of its women. The special session is ostensibly to authorize $225 payments from the money the state decided not to spend on roads, education, child services, and other areas where there are needs. But, I’ll bet that a lot of women in the state would spend $225 to keep their reproductive rights, if even for just six more months when the Indiana General Assembly will return to its regular session. But, Governor Holcomb and the Indiana legislature are in a headlong rush to make Indiana’s government small enough to fit into a uterus. Our legislators will make solemn proclamations about the value of life. But, as they loosen restrictions on gun regulations, tolerate Indiana having one of the worst infant mortality rates in the nation, fail to devote sufficient resources to neonatal care, and otherwise look the other way on quality of life issues across the board, it is evident that “life” isn’t nearly as much of a concern for many lawmakers as is unsanctioned sex.

This turn of events underscores that, despite the happy language of the Declaration of Independence and the musings of John Locke, rights are not unalienable. I assure you that the State House will happily alienate the shit out of reproductive rights within the month. Plenty of people would object that the right still technically exists and belongs to the women who previously enjoyed it. They argue that the right will still exist even though it will no longer be enforced and, in fact, women will be jailed if they insist on using it. I take a more utilitarian view of rights and would argue that a “right” which has no material impact on the real world is no right at all, but is rather an unrealized policy preference. I know more than a few people who took the view that warnings about the protections of Roe v. Wade being taken away was just so much fear mongering from the left. They were shocked when the decision came down. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas sent up the signal that protections for same sex marriage (Obergefell), sexual relations (Lawrence), and contraception (Griswold) are also on the hit list. Perhaps the people who were dismissive about the prospect of Roe going away will recognize the threat to these other rights.

I should note that I’m sensitive to the fact that many Americans have a religious belief that a sperm and an egg are endowed with a soul when they are combined. I don’t want to denigrate what is, for many individuals, a very heartfelt and devout belief. But such beliefs should not be the basis for government, state or federal, to dictate that a woman who may believe otherwise must devote the use of her uterus in a manner consistent with that belief, risking her health and well-being against her will.

We’re so rarely arguing about what we’re arguing about

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I was having a discussion on the WELL about the Indiana General Assembly’s latest veto override having to do with transgender women and girls participating in women’s sports. Before I got into the conversation, there had been a fair amount of discussion I regarded as being pretty deep in the weeds and/or a little too focused hypotheticals having to do with athletically gifted edge cases. Among other things, I wrote:

[R]eporting on the ground as someone with kids in Indiana’s schools: this is not an issue of practical importance for Hoosier athletes. It’s clearly a cultural proxy war. Focusing on the particulars of athletic competition is inevitably going to miss the mark because the argument is a pretext. The people voting for this legislation never showed anything like a burning concern
for women’s athletics in the past.

…
There are a couple of trans girls in my kids’ friend group. These kids are not what you’d call athletically gifted. They aren’t going to dominate any sport in any league, male or female. It’d be nice if they could just run around and have fun playing some sports without being turned into political footballs or abstract topics of debate.

The cultural proxy war aspect made me stop and think though. So often what we’re arguing about, with respect to all kinds of subjects, is a stand in for something else. Abortion often really isn’t about abortion, it has as much to do with gender roles and sexual morality. So, when you offer ways to reduce abortion, they often get ignored because they don’t reinforce old notions about gender roles and sexual morality. Gun control gets complicated because the weapon isn’t a tool for hunting or self-defense or whatever the stated purpose; rather it has become a cultural identifier – a shibboleth, I suppose – and, so, regulations that might enhance safety and might not, on a completely practical level, be objectionable become non-starters if they’re seen as impairing a person’s cultural identity or being imposed someone outside of the culture.

Deep thought: People often do not speak plainly

A lot of talk about racism and sexism are really about power and control, and so approaches that superficially confront the stated concerns about race or sex but don’t shift the balance on power or control will be seen as inadequately. On the flip side, requests for superficially inconsequential changes that do indicate a shift in power and control will generate outsize controversy. (Team and building names come to mind for this one.)

And it’s not just the big issues of the day where this happens. Complaints about how a spouse loads the dishwasher could be a stand-in for issues over unequal workloads around the house. Complaints about sex could be more about attention, respect, status, or a multitude of other things. Complaints about “kids these days” are really just nostalgia and unhappiness about aging.

Another small-time example: our local school board politics seem to involve a lot of talk about “transparency” and the various mechanisms for board meetings lately. But the people making these arguments seem mostly not to like that particular decision-makers are in positions where they get to make the decisions. And this dislike very often seems to stem from specific grievances — e.g., someone didn’t keep a position of employment they like, someone else’s kid didn’t get the particular services they wanted, someone else didn’t get to control a school-related working group, a school board member was in the minority as to their preferred choice of a superintendent, etc.. But, these specific grievances wouldn’t have a lot of resonance in the larger community. So, you get these process oriented complaints that are largely divorced from the substance. Addressing the stated process complaints don’t really fix anything because the underlying grievances weren’t at their heart, about the process.

As a lawyer, I’ve come to understand that the law often just a big bundle of abstractions that we’re using as tools for managing conflict. The law itself is what one writer called “potential violence.” When we’re talking about a law, we’re really talking about if, when, where, why, and how the government will cause people with guns to come and use force against you. You hit me with a car. I complain to the government via its courts. I want money from you. If I’m successful in convincing the government that I ought to have your money, the court will enter a judgment to that effect. And, if you don’t turn over your money to me, as ordered, eventually we’ll get to the point where the people with guns extract it for me. But I never say, “Government, I want you to use your employees with guns to take his money and give it to me.” Instead, I’ll spend a lot of time talking about “negligence.”

There are probably a bunch of sociologists I’ve never heard of who have spilled a lot of ink discussing why we argue in this fashion. It’s likely easier to persuade a group when problems are abstracted because they might identify with concerns that are related but not quite as specific as what’s really motivating and individual. And direct appeals based on selfish motivations that highlight the precise winners and losers along with any force that might be necessary to maintain or alter the status quo are likely more off-putting than indirect appeals that obscure motivations that leave the uglier parts unstated.

Thank you for attending my TED talk.

Portugal Part VI: Last Day in Porto

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It was the last day. It was the best day.

Up the winding stairway.

We began the morning waiting in line for the Livraria Lello. This is a Porto bookstore that’s associated with J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. Rowling asserts that she had never heard of the place while she was in Porto. It’s easy enough to believe that the book store didn’t inspire anything about Harry Potter, but I’m skeptical of her claim that she’d never heard of it at all. In any case, it’s become enough of a tourist attraction that it charges admission. We wanted to get there early in hopes of avoiding a line. We weren’t successful in that, but it was a cool, sunny morning and the line moved pretty quickly. There were two different buskers on nearby corners competing for our attention and making the scene lively. The store itself is interesting and was packed. Its main feature is a sort of colorful, split spiral staircase. It’s a two floor book store with open space in the middle allowing you to look down on the ground floor from the upper floor. It has classic titles in a lot of different languages. Fairly small, very cramped.  I liked it well enough that I felt compelled to buy a book. For some reason, I was thinking of Orwell’s “1984,” but I couldn’t locate a copy in English. Eventually, I went with a copy of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It’s a colorful, hardbound copy with one of those little ribbons attached that serves as a bookmark.

Following the bookstore, we grabbed some snacks and a bathroom break at the Paderia Ribero which we’d been introduced to on our first night there. (Technically, I used the bathroom at the nearby Steak n’ Shake. The rest of our group avoided the chain restaurant!) I also got a beer, because vacation.

The Crew with a View

Properly fortified, we began to stroll Porto. We found ourselves headed generally downhill, toward the river,  by way of the Escaladas de Vitoria – the Stairs of Victory which, I must say, weren’t as imposing as the Escaladas de Verdades we faced on Friday. There’s something profound about Victory being easier than Truth, I suppose.  I was glad to find the statue of Prince Henry the Navigator at a little park called Jardim do Infante. Though, I will say that people at that park seemed to have trouble cleaning up after their dogs. There wasn’t much to it, but the statue was big and one of my favorite areas of history is the Age of Discovery, so it made me happy. Near there, we came across the Igrejas e Museu de Sao Francisco. Primarily, we were in it for the catacombs which Harper obviously loved.  As I mentioned with respect to a church on an earlier day, its style was very busy and I can see why the Puritan reaction was toward very simple, unadorned churches. The catacombs were, unsurprisingly, a little creepy. There was a transparent section with an archeological dig. And you were walking on a bunch of panels framed into a lattice work, kind of like being on top of a drop ceiling – where there were crypts underneath each panel.

Hole in the Wall

Escaping the crypts, we found our way to a literal hole in the wall for lunch. One of the things I loved about Porto and Lisbon were these small restaurants and stores crammed into twisting alleys. This one was close to the Douro River but not right on the riverfront which, I think, dialed down the tourist factor just a bit. Though the family at the table next to us was French – so clearly tourists are a big factor in the place’s existence. (When the owner got the French family to relocate so she could squeeze five of us into the same table – like I said, this place was tiny – I think the French father was trying to joke to me about buying their drinks; but the language barrier was a little too high for me to know for sure.) I had a daily special involving tripe which was pretty good, but it mostly tasted like a bean stew or maybe red beans and rice. Harper was the big winner with her order. I think the translation was shellfish and rice, and she got a pretty impressive variety of shellfish.

 

8 fruits!

After lunch, we crossed over to the south side of the Douro River, this time using the lower level of the Dom Luis I Bridge. We arrived ahead of the other crew and sat on the shore watching the boat traffic. There were some guys having a great time on jet skis. (Not that you often see people having a *bad* time on jet skis.) Our port tasting and tour was at the Calem winery. It started in a room with some screens and videos telling you about the Douro Valley, the soil, the process of wine making and whatnot. From there, we went into a cellar with huge barrels. There was a mark pretty high up on the wall showing where one particularly nasty flood had reached. The tour wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure any of us was particularly engaged in the lecture. Upstairs from the cellar was a nice tasting room with long tables where they’d set out small glasses of port for us to sample. Poor Harper got a juice box. According to the label, it had “8 fruits!” Port is just a little sweet for me, and I don’t love it. But I drank it! My college years kind of toughened up my palate. Cole drank his, and despite having 8 fruits, Harper sampled a bit of the port as well.

Waiting on the sunset

Not far from Calem was “World of Wine!” Great name, but we didn’t get any wine there. The places in Porto and Lisbon where we’d toured tended to be areas where space was at a premium. Like I said, lots of small shops and restaurants seemed to be the rule. So, the facility where “World of Wine” was located was a bit of an eye opener. It is a fairly sprawling commercial building with bars, restaurants, and places with several “experiences:” the Pink Palace Experience, Planet Cork, the Wine Experience, and so forth. I’m not sure what all these experiences entailed, but the general feel of the venue was “mall cinema.” As luck would have it, this facility had a COVID testing site which we needed to board our flights the next day. The testing was in some cramped office spaces tucked into a corner. There was one woman working the office at the end of her shift, and we hit her with eight people. She took us 2 and 3 at a time. Their tests were of the “brain probe” variety. The range of reactions among our crew went from “super easy, barely an inconvenience” to “you’ve given me a lobotomy” with violent sneezing and watering eyes. Good news. We were all negative.

By this time, it was getting near sunset, and we hadn’t caught one in Portugal yet. We’d been told that Portuguese love their sunsets. We were still at river level and we needed a good vantage point, so that meant there would be a lot of climbing. And climb we did (oddly passing our food tour guide from two days earlier en route). Up roads, alleys, and stairs to Jardim do Morro. This is a park on the south side of the river with a fairly steep hillside that looks out over a small road on its edge and, beyond that, a commanding view of the river flowing away to the west. It’s a great place to watch the sun go down. And everybody in town seems to know it. There were a pair of guitar players working together, providing entertainment to the folks on the hill, playing on a path just past the road. It was a festive atmosphere. The guy in front of us just had his own bottle of wine that he uncorked periodically to take a slug. The hillside was full of people lounging. There was a trailer selling beer and wine. Kenza managed to find cotton candy.

Sultans of Swing. Dancing. Sunset.

At one point, a young woman wearing a grape costume happened by the guitarists and started to dance. This prompted a little girl to join in. Eventually the grape woman was dancing with an older woman. As the sun set, the guitarists were playing an extended version of “Sultans of Swing.” I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this moment. The weather was clear, calm, and comfortable. I’m in a beautiful, far away place surrounded by happy people. Sharing the moment with Amy, Cole, and Harper. There’s music. Dancing. The moment was simple. Human. Joyful.

Kenza stayed with us, but the other crew headed for home. We savored the evening a little longer as sunset turned to dusk. Eventually, we got up and headed back to the north side of the river, crossing the Douro River on the top deck of the Dom Luis I Bridge. At that moment, from that vantage point, it was impossible to take a bad picture.

Impossible to take a bad picture

Realizing that our time was coming to an end, I hit a souvenir shop and picked up a “Super Bock” shirt. We walked to the Majestic. The Majestic is an ornate (art nouveau, I’m told) café on Rua Santa Catarina, an extremely walkable outdoor mall full of restaurants and shops. The Majestic is famous for its architecture as well as for being, historically, a place where writers frequented, J.K. Rowling among them. It was nice to see, but we made a mistake trying to eat there. Nothing looked all that appealing. It was wildly overpriced and mediocre.

In the Majestic

We got drinks and a basket of bread, paid out the nose, and got out of there. Amy and Kenza wanted francesinhas. The Majestic experience pushed the kids and I over the edge into wanting food that was cheap, fast, and unchallenging. “Mr. Pizza” was calling our name. The line at Café Santiago (where we’d eaten lunch the day before) was long. Amy and Kenza settled in. Cole, Harper, and I headed up the street to Mr. Pizza. In no time flat, we had 6 slices that they were practically giving away. We ate in the park where Amy had left her sweatshirt the day before. I’m not going to say the pizza was “good,” but it definitely scratched an itch. Greasy pizza-by-the-slice a few blocks from a college campus. You know the type. After we ate, Harper needed a bathroom, so we headed back to “Mr. Pizza.” Harper used the facilities, and Cole and I got more pizza. We headed back to the park to wait while Amy and Kenza worked their way through dinner. They gave up on Café Santiago and went to another francesinha restaurant in the area.

 

What we didn’t know when we sat down on the bench in the park is that our “Mr. Pizza” dinner was going to come with a show! We took to calling this guy “Il Borracho.” Total nonsense. We were butchering the words for “The Drunk” in Spanish. Not even close to that meaning in Portuguese. This guy was very active. He carried a portable barricade into the street, smashed a bottle, emptied trash, sat in the street in a swivel chair that he found god knows where. He generally rode the razor’s edge between being merely annoying and actually doing harm. He looked like he was going to pee in the streets several times. We joked that, in America, the cops would’ve shot him by now. Here, when the authorities actually showed, they were pretty tolerant. Eventually, Amy and Kenza came out and watched the show. After a while, we had to call it a night. We’d milked about as much as we could out of the day. We got gelato on the way home just to stretch it out a bit more. Fantastic day.

Il Borracho

The Trip Home

We woke up at 7 and packed. For the life of me, I couldn’t find where the Airbnb instructions were telling us to put the trash. So, we left it bagged up in the apartment. We called an Uber at 7:30. The first crew got theirs with no incident. Ours just didn’t show. Amy had used her app, so I summoned one on my app. We watched our phones and neither of them materialized. They were either sitting still or getting further away. Amy used a different cab app trying to call one of those. Nothing. We got anxious, then desperate, then resigned. We knew that there were two trains getting to Lisbon before our flight. We’d booked the early one because the late one would be cutting it close. We were hopeful that we could get new tickets on the second train. As we’d become pretty sure there was no way to make the train, the icons on our apps started moving. Two of the cars arrived at exactly the same time. We irritated one by sending him away. Apparently we picked the right one because he got us to the train station pretty quickly. Grabbed our bags without even closing the doors on the Uber. Apologized to our driver as we were literally running to the station. Matt had texted us the platform number so we didn’t have to look around. The doors to the train were closed. We got mildly scolded by the conductors, but they let us on without any time at all to spare. We hadn’t gotten to our seats or put our bags up before the train started pulling away.

That got our hearts racing in the morning! We had coffee and snacks to calm down. In Lisbon, we had some time to kill and contemplated storing our bags in a locker and doing some exploring. But, the weather had turned cold and gross, so we just took the metro from the train station to the airport. In the airport, we spent frivolously at the duty free shop to burn the spare Euros we had in our pockets. Then, because we have a fancy pants travel credit card, we get into a number of airport lounges around the world. Lisbon, it turns out, has a pretty nice one. Plenty of seating. TVs with soccer on. A buffet. And a fridge stocked with Super Bock mini-bottles. Score!

We killed time in the lounge and then headed through customs. Amy was impressed and mildly shocked by Kenza taking a beer through passport control. We ended up on a flight home packed with guys from the North Dakota State soccer team. Some guy a couple of seats back had a nasty cough that was pretty steady for the entire eight hour flight home. Getting out of Chicago went just about as smoothly as you could hope. The guy driving the shuttle to long term parking wasn’t all that good at his job. It was constant gas/brake/gas/brake. He dropped a couple of buddies or co-workers off at a spot that definitely wasn’t a stop. And, I’m pretty sure he scraped a car in the lot when he didn’t make a turn as sharply as he should have. But, we got into our car at around midnight and headed for West Lafayette without much in the way of traffic. The moon was amazing. We got home at about 2 a.m. The puppies were glad to see us, and we were happy to see them. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Portugal Part V: Porto, Francesinhas, Harry Potter, and a Birthday

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I woke up in a strange city on my wife’s birthday. I was alone. A chair was broken.

West Lafayette’s City Hall seems a little understated by comparison.

I’m afraid that introduction over-promises, and I will certainly under deliver. This was our first morning in Porto and, as I mentioned in our last installment, I slept like a log. That meant that, while I slept, the other old people (and Kenza) had woken up and gone for coffee. (The chairs were poorly designed, and, while Amy was putting on her shoes, one of them had broken. Later we found a storage closet where two other broken chairs were stored. All of this made us suspicious of another one of the chairs, which was wobbly, which we put in the corner so no one tempted fate.)

After a time, the others returned with some eggs and bread, and the kids surfaced. After breakfast, my crew – Amy, Cole, Harper, and I – headed out to explore the city. Porto is somewhat less hilly than Lisbon, smaller, and somehow feels a bit more like an American city. Not entirely, obviously, but in comparison to Lisbon. It might have something to do with the place being a college town. Also, my Wikipedia-level understanding of the history is that the Moorish occupation was much shorter than with Lisbon, and Porto has historically maintained closer ties with England over the centuries. Or maybe I’m imagining things. After briefly strolling around Porto City Hall and enjoying the magnificent tiles in the São Bento train station, we fairly quickly found ourselves on the top deck of the Dom Luis I Bridge.  We spent more time with the bridge the following day, so I’ll hold off on saying much about it other than that it’s a beautiful double decked bridge spanning the Douro River build by a student of Gustave Eiffel.

Harper and the birthday girl at the cathedral.

After taking in some of the views from the bridge, we returned to the north side of the river and made our way back to the nearby Porto Cathedral. It’s a Romanesque structure with towers, crenellation, and flying buttresses. So, it looks a little like a castle. Despite it being her birthday and her general unease with heights, Amy gamely went up into one of the towers with us. The interior was gilded and busy. These old, European Catholic churches give me an appreciation for how and why the radical Protestant reformers came to insist on simplicity in their churches. If one assumes that a relationship with God is to be direct rather than mediated through the Church, I can see how the interior of these places would come to be seen as wasteful and expensive distractions. Still, they are something to see, and this was well worth the price of admission.

Following the tour of the cathedral, we made our way down to the bank of the Douro River. Porto has a really cool riverfront. Lots of outdoor dining, buskers, and energy in general. It being a sunny and warm Friday afternoon in early spring, it was hopping! In fact, this was the only time during the trip that I felt like it got positively hot out. The forecast before we left the U.S. called for it to be raining and in the 50s basically the entire week we were in Portugal. We never felt a drop, but the weather was generally in the 50s and sometimes cloudy or windy. But, for a period of time that afternoon, it was sunny, 70s, and not much wind. Our sweatshirts came off, and we were regretting the long pants.

Sometimes, sitting in the grass is the absolute perfect thing to do.

We’d planned on meeting the other crew for a late lunch and, so, began the climb uphill from the river front. It was warm, we were walking a lot, and we hadn’t had much to eat. We were starting to bonk. We stopped in to a store for some drinks and some sunscreen. The guy working the cash register didn’t speak much English and, near as we could tell, not much Portuguese either. But, we figured out the transaction and made our way to Café Santiago for some Francesinhas. The restaurant was not really set up to accommodate a table of eight, so we basically remained split up, 4 and 4. A francesinha is a local Porto dish that Amy had had her eye on since we saw them in a Rick Steves video. It was entirely appropriate that we be able to hit Café Santiago on her birthday. Per the Wikipedia description, it is “made with bread, wet-cured ham, linguica, fresh sausage, steak or roast meat, and covered with melted cheese and a hot and thick spiced tomato and beer sauce, served with a side of French fries.” Amy and Harper split one. I was, frankly, intimidated by the description, so I got something similar but just a bit lighter on the menu. Everyone was more than happy with their selection. It was a fantastic lunch.

Properly fueled, we resumed our wanderings. The next stop ended up being a chocolate shop where we got a selection of chocolates and a round of hot chocolates. The hot chocolate was incredibly thick. It was like drinking the inside of a lava cake. By and by, we ended up at Praça de Lisboa which is a really neat park and commercial area. We enjoyed it just for its green space, sitting on a nice hill where we could do some people watching while kicking off our shoes and letting our dogs bark a bit. But, further in, there is a bar with low tables on the lawn, people sitting around them in the grass, studying, drinking, chatting, whatever. And all of this is kind of elevated. You find, sort of recessed underneath is a bit of an alley with stores. We didn’t take advantage of any of the commercial stuff, just the soft grass. At one point, I needed a bathroom and found a sign saying “WC” which I’d come to recognize as “water closet.” That took me to a stairwell which listed the women at “-1” and the men at “-2.” I went down two flights of stairs which spit me out into a parking garage. The “WC” signs were a bit ambiguous and kept leading me ever onward. I’d done quite a bit of walking and was starting to wonder just where the hell I was when I finally found the bathroom. It was serviceable but fairly disgusting. I went up the first available flight of stairs and emerged well away from the park, across and down the street a fair bit. The underground parking structure was apparently massive.

On the Harry Potter tour of Porto.

We capped off our wanderings with a Harry Potter tour of Porto. We met our tour guide at the São Bento railway station. This place is just beautiful. Wikipedia tells me that the vestibule has 20,000 azulejo tiles. There are depictions of battles and saints, travel and daily life, work and romance. Not your average metro station. The tiles took a decade to complete. Our guide met us between platforms 3 and 4 (there being no 9 ¾ here). He told us the train station used to be a convent and that the powers that be wanted to start building earlier, but one nun refused to leave and they had to wait for her to pass before construction could begin.

J.K. Rowling wrote a bit of Harry Potter in Porto, and a Brazilian student named Vini was a big fan and created a tour which combines places associated with Rowling as well as Porto places he felt were analogous to themes in Harry Potter, and turned them into our tour. Vini is an outstanding guide, very engaging and friendly. The tour itself was mostly just walking outside places where Vini would explain to us how they related to Harry Potter either through the literal presence of Rowling, presumed influence on the books, or sometimes just metaphorical similarities. Amy was, of course, the best at Harry Potter and, so, when Vini asked Potter questions, she was usually the one able to answer. In the course of our tour, we stopped at Manteigaria for some pasteis de nata. This was the place we hit on our food tour the night before, but, like I said, they were *so* good. We didn’t complain.

After the tour, it was about 8:30 at night, and we were hungry. Our first effort was to get a table at the sushi place near the tour’s end that Vini had said was very good. With no reservation, we were out of luck. We ended up at a place called Casa Guedes for a meal that was easily the most disappointing on the trip. I had a pork sandwich that was pretty dry and our table split a plate of fries that were bland and chewy. On the upside, their large beers were very large, so it wasn’t all bad. It had been another 25,000 step day.

 

Super Bock

Portugal Part IV: Travel and Food Tour of Porto

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I love the outdoor breakfasts!

Thursday was St. Patrick’s Day. So far as I could see, nobody in Portugal cared. The early risers decided to change things up for breakfast, and we went to Copenhagen Coffee Lab instead of our normal pastelaria. This was a chain restaurant, but not one we have at home, so we figured it was o.k. Amy, Cole, Kenza, and I made our way down (in Lisbon, you always remember whether the destination was up or down) to the restaurant. I had a double espresso along with some salmon and eggs. I am not used to espresso, and even though I know it’s strong, even a double seemed woefully insufficient given how little liquid was in the cup. After sipping the stuff, I realized it was plenty. It’s definitely potent.

We were headed to Porto that day and had to check out of our Lisbon apartment by 11, so we headed back and finished packing. There had been an incident with some wine and a chair the night before. Matt and Suzie were taking care of clean up. They indicated they were making progress. I was skeptical. I think we’re still kind of holding our breath to see if an extra charge materializes. We took an Uber to Oriente Station where we caught a train to Porto. There was a brief period of irritation as the girls disappeared into the train station just before it was time to head up to the platform. We had plenty of time as it turns out, but I get anxious about time when I am unfamiliar with the schedules and the terrain. The ride was reasonably comfortable and uneventful. I mostly spent my time reading “Drunk: How We Slipped, Danced, and Stumbled our Way to Civilization” by Edward Slingerland. (His theory is that inebriation, despite its obvious costs, has adaptive advantages for primates forced into close proximity with one another and facilitates creativity and collaboration.)

The Porto Steak n’ Shake looks just a *little* different from the ones in Indiana!

When we got to Porto, the station was under some construction, so for ground transportation, the signs had us exiting through featureless hallways and onto the sidewalk of a side street with no particular markings. We called another Uber that found us with no problem. But the second car for the rest of the crew was not so efficient. It took that group quite sometime to summon a car that could locate them. The Porto apartment made a good first impression. It looked clean, comfortable, and fairly modern. I think some of this was illusory. It wasn’t a bad apartment, but the furnishings made it look more comfortable than it actually was. And the layout kept confusing me. The door to the exterior hallway opened into a main living room with two side doors, one that led to an interior hallway going to the bedrooms and one that led to the kitchen. I think my confusion stemmed in part from the hallway to the bedrooms being between  the kitchen and the dining table. On some level, I think I kept expecting the door closest to the table to lead to the kitchen.

Cole and I immediately got the lay of the land by heading out on a quick beer run. There was a little store about two blocks away. (If we read the signs right, it was also next to a 24-hour marijuana dispensary). I grabbed a warm 15-pack of Super Bocks and two cold mini-bottles that we carried home. The cold mini bottles were a good idea, but the warm beers ended up being largely wasted because we just didn’t spend enough time in the apartment to drink them over the next couple of days. After unpacking and some beer, wine, and snacks, it was time to go on our food tour of Porto. We made our way down to the World War 1 memorial where we met our guide. I’ll call her “Julie,” but I’m not entirely sure I have that right. She was from France and married to someone local and was super nice. This tour was maybe heavier on the drinking than actual food when compared to our Porto tour. Whereas Irene in Lisbon was a chef, Julie was more of a drinking buddy. So, it was fun, but the cuisine was not quite as good.

A bottle shop with all kinds of wine and tinned sardines and mackerel. One of my favorite stops!

Our first stop was for salty snacks at Paderia Ribero. This ended up being a place central to our future journeys, and we got comfortable using their bathroom over the next couple of days. Also, it was next door to a Steak n’ Shake which was pretty amazing to me. I didn’t even really think they had those outside of Indiana, let alone in Portugal. Wikipedia tells me they opened a few in Europe starting in 2014. Our second stop was at the Patio d’as Maria Merceria.  I think this was more like a specialty grocery where they seated us and served us down in a basement where we had meats, cheeses and port. Port is just a bit sweet for my tastes, but the set up was great, and I certainly like meat and cheese! Third on the tour was Garrafeira which was a cool bottle shop. We were set up at a long table and served sardines, mackerel, and green wine. The kids were maybe a little too enamored of green wine! It’s sweet and a little fizzy, so I can see the appeal. Since he’s 18 and it was legal, we were kind of letting Cole set his own pace with beer and wine. Further research suggests that Harper was probably also legal to drink. Even though we thought the drinking age was higher, it was pretty clear nobody cared if a 16 year old with her parents was drinking wine. Still, we kept a closer eye on Harper’s consumption.

Enjoying pastéis de nata out on the street.

Stop 4 was Tasquinha dos Sabores. The bread was good, and there was some wine. But this stop was a little bit forgettable. That might not be the fault of the restaurant so much as its position in our tour. Unlike everywhere else, there was quite a bit of food left on peoples’ plates. Stop 5 was Manteigaria for some pasteis de nata. They were *so* good here. The pastries had just enough crunch and the custard was not at all gelatinous and was delicious. And, the final stop on the tour was Capela Incomum which is a chapel converted into a really cozy place to have some drinks. The layout gives it a kind of atmosphere that I don’t really see in bars and restaurants in the Midwest. We had some kind of dessert wine which, again, was a little sweet for my tastes. But, still I was happy to have been there.

On the walk home, we encountered an initiation of some kind. A fairly large crowd of young adults, chanting, singing, and clapping which attracted various onlookers – ourselves included. Kenza, curious and always happy to strike up a conversation with a stranger, started talking with a guy from Iran who was in Porto by way of Finland. He said that these were nursing students being initiated and that it had been going on every night for 10 days. Eventually, the routine was that they’d end up in the fountain. We didn’t stick around to see that. It had been a long day, and I slept like a log.

 

Last stop – a cozy table at Capela Incomum. There was even a mirror so I could get in the shot!

Prior installments for the Portugal trip:
Part I: Travel to Lisbon
Part II: Lisbon – Castelo de São Jorge, Belém, and Food Tour
Part III: Sintra and Roaming Lisbon

Portugal Part III: Sintra and Roaming Lisbon

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Waiting on a Train

The day began in the usual way with pastries and coffee at the local pastelaria, taking home piles of pastries for the kids. The plan for the day was a trip to Sintra, a town about 17 miles west of Lisbon. Only it was Europe, so they use kilometers and there are more of them. The good news is that it wasn’t raining. As recently as two days prior to us leaving on the trip, the weather apps were calling for rain basically the entire week. In reality, the only rain I experienced was during the five feet or so from an airport shuttle to the stairway up to the plane as we were departing. The bad news was that the day we were headed to Sintra, the winds out of the south were fierce and Saharan sand was in the air.

We made our way down hill to the Rossio train station where, following a delay owing to a bathroom search, we caught our train to Sintra. The train ride begins with a long tunnel which I found a little disorienting, but Wikipedia tells me is 2.9 km long and “is considered one of the most important works of engineering in Portugal.” We found ourselves in the Sintra town square and probably tackled the sightseeing in the least efficient possible way. The two main sites are the Moorish Castle and Pena Palace. Both places are cool, but less than authentic. The castle was built by the Moors in the 8th and 9th centuries after they conquered the Iberian peninsula. Its utility as a defensive site diminished over the years and, in the 19th century, Ferdinand II rebuilt the walls, replanted some trees, and manicured the grounds inside the walls. If I recall the plaques correctly, Ferdinand used the place for meditation and reflection. In the mid-19th century, the palace was on the site of a former monastery that was reduced to ruins by the 1755 earthquake.  The design is pure storybook which is a little odd considering it was built and used during a time period recent enough to include a telephone. Essentially the sites were play things for Portuguese nobility.

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view.

Even so, the first thing we wanted to see was the Moorish Castle. The thing about castles is that they work better when they are higher than the enemy. There are all kinds of options for having someone take you up to the top of the big hill – buses, cabs, tuktuks. But the area by the train station was crowded and we wanted to get away from the hordes. So, we just started walking and walking and walking, ever upward. It was actually a beautiful hike, but it did leave us with another 12 mile, 150 flight day.  The wind was strong, clocking in at 20 miles per hour, and as I mentioned, there was sand in the air from the Sahara. This phenomenon apparently affected a broad patch of Europe, including at least Spain and Germany as well.  For the most part, the hills surrounding the castle sheltered us from the wind, but occasionally you’d crest a hill or find yourself exposed to southerly winds and you could really feel it. You didn’t want to be wearing your hat when you climbed on top of one of the towers. Even with the dust limiting visibility, some of the views were pretty amazing. On a clear day, you must be able to see forever.

From the castle, we hiked down a bit, then took a bus from a lower parking lot up to the palace. By the time we got there, the dust was really obscuring any kind of view. The inside was kind of weird just because the furniture was recognizable – a lot of stuff that you could imagine maybe a rich grandparent having. It lives in an uncanny valley that’s not contemporary and is maybe historical, but only just barely. The colorful towers were pretty though.

Lunch at the Apeadeiro

By that time, it was probably 2 pm, we’d been working hard, and some of us were starting to bonk. It was a great time for lunch. Our food tour guide, Irene, had emailed us some potential recommendations, and we went with Apeadeiro. I had squid and chorizo. Harper had squid and shrimp. Both of them were good, but her fries were amazing. Sometimes it’s the simple things! After lunch, we broke up the band. Matt, Suzie, and Sydney headed back to Lisbon while Amy, Cole, Harper, Kenza, and I explored Sintra a bit more. Eventually it occurred to us that we didn’t know the train schedule. We got paranoid that the train that Google showed us might be the last one, so we rushed to catch it. I suspect it was not the last train, but better safe than sorry.

Once back in Lisbon, we still weren’t ready to be done, so we wandered. It seems to me that Lisbon would be a challenging place to live – although I’m sure you get used to it. But it is a remarkable place to be a tourist who is willing to walk but with no particular destination. The streets, alleys, stairs, and walkways twist and turn up and down, and it seems that there is always an unexpected and interesting shop or restaurant or bar crammed into every nook and cranny. In our wanderings, we came across a place purporting to be the world’s oldest book store, the Livraria Bertrand.

I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie
To the hip hip hop-a you don’t stop the rock.

At that point, Harper was fading but Amy, Cole, and Kenza wanted to keep exploring. Harper and I started making our way back to the apartment. However, we hadn’t made it too far before we found a little record store that we had to check out. Harper has a turntable and is a budding fan of vinyl. This place had bins full of random 45s they were selling for 1 euro apiece. Harper picked up “Amanda” by Boston and “Come on Eileen” by Dexie’s Midnight Runners. I passed on but probably should’ve bought a copy of “Rapper’s Delight” by “Chagrill’s Gang.” When I got home, the Internet told me that this is an obscure Portuguese knock-off of the famous version by the Sugarhill Gang.  As we were leaving, what appeared to be the owner’s buddy came in with an armload of cold Super Bocks and was popping the tops. Tough to say whether they were making any money, but listening to music and drinking beers doesn’t seem like a bad way to spend a Wednesday night in Lisbon.

From the record store, the rest of the walk was surreal. We were following the path given to us by Google Maps. There was an outdoor escalator. There was an impossibly narrow alley. Then we passed a staircase that Harper said she was glad we didn’t have to take. But I’d navigated too far. The map was taking us up the stairs.

We have since named it the Stairway to Heaven. Just a never-ending staircase that went between buildings in some cases and between barren, graffiti-filled walls in others. We passed a guy talking on the phone about an increase in income which he planned to use to get a garden. Harper is convinced this was about drugs somehow. About 2/3 of the way up the stairway (though, at this point, we didn’t know how long we had left to climb), Harper was absolutely gassed. But, she heard some voices behind us and was paranoid, so she soldiered on. (To be clear, we never caught a whiff of trouble or danger from anyone the entire time we were in Portugal. But, it was dark and the environment was strange, so the mind plays tricks.) At long last, we made it to the top and, much to our surprise, we recognized the place. The point where the stairs ended were only about 1.5 blocks from our apartment. Home at last.

I’m certain that those stairs weren’t anywhere near as long as what they seemed at the time. And they will just grow longer, steeper, and weirder as we tell this story in years to come. And that’s what I love about these vacations. One day, Harper will probably be telling her kids about that walk home. It won’t be a big deal. Nothing life changing. Just a fun, peculiar moment with her Dad. And, even if we didn’t do anything else on this trip, that memory would’ve been worth all the price of admission.

Streets of Lisbon

Braun, State’s Rights, Miscegenation, and Contraception

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Reporter Dan Carden: “So you would be o.k. with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the States?”

Indiana Senator Mike Braun: “Yes.”

This wasn’t a “gotcha” question and Senator Braun didn’t misunderstand it. He just said the quiet part out loud. And, by this, I’m not saying that Sen. Braun disapproves of interracial marriages. If I had to guess, they probably don’t bother him at all. What he did was forthrightly acknowledge all of the other rights that are impaired when one tries to attack the legal underpinnings of Roe v. Wade and to embrace “state’s rights.” The fact of the matter is that you can’t embrace “state’s rights” without getting all kinds of nasty stuff all over yourself. And ignoring Roe’s acknowledgment that the Constitution protects a right to privacy even though that right is not explicitly articulated in the text of the Constitution means that one’s right to marry someone of a different race (Loving v. Virginia) or use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut) or marry someone of the same sex (Obergefell v. Hodges) are rights that are subject to the whims and popular prejudices of the voters in your state. As Hodges characterized the decision in Griswold, the fundamental rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause “extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.” The identification and protection of these fundamental rights has not been reduced to any formula.

“State’s rights,” of course, is the fig leaf thrown over a preference for slavery when coming out and saying that the “peculiar institution” was an outright good became an abominable thing to say in polite society. Despite the fact that the declarations of the Confederate states said explicitly that they were purporting to leave the U.S. because they wanted to keep enslaving other humans; after the North proved itself stronger than the Confederate insurrectionists, Southern apologists pivoted to claims that the South was only fighting for “state’s rights.” This was also the term used to whitewash a popular preference for Jim Crow laws in many of those same states. It’s no accident that southern white conservatives tend to be the demographic most fond of the concept. It’s a principle that seems to become most prominent when used in service of state laws that impose burdens on less politically powerful demographics. It’s not a principle that seems to come up very much when determining whether, for example, the federal government ought to continue criminalizing marijuana despite state level legalization.

One complaint I saw on social media was that the question about interracial marriage was a “gotcha” question. The rationale was that interracial marriage has been widely accepted for a long time. Probably the same feelings hold for contraception. No state is going to go back to banning interracial marriage or contraception. Though the recent conservative attacks on transgender people don’t inspire a bunch of confidence along these lines, I suspect that this sentiment is probably right. Society has moved on and, while contraception was taboo in the 60s and mixed marriages were still shocking in the 70s, people are by and large very comfortable with these things, and only fringe types get worked up by them. Gay marriage might even fit into the no-big-deal-anymore category even though this blog is old enough to have documented a time when the Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives counted a state-level ban on the practice as being of supreme importance to the state. But we’ve moved along precisely because the Supreme Court recognized Constitutional protections for these individual choices even where popular prejudices resulted in such choices being illegal. When society didn’t crumble, we mostly got on with our lives and forgot why anyone got so worked up over such things.

Abortion is the thing that folks like Braun want to focus on. And, when the issue is considered in good faith, it’s a thornier issue. It comes down to a moral question about when and why life should be entitled to legal protection. Specifically, what is it about human life that merits greater protection than other kinds of life? And when does a human egg and human sperm or combination thereof reach the point when the law ought to diminish the rights of a woman in order to protect that emerging life? In Roe, the Supreme Court grappled with that question, trying to balance things with its trimester tests. Opinions can and do differ on whether the Supreme Court struck the correct balance, but the bigger problem is that many of the arguments that are ostensibly about the sanctity of fetal life are, in reality, stalking horses for other questions about gender relations, sexual morality, and the primacy of religion in our society. That’s why efforts to reduce abortions through increased access to birth control or sexual education don’t cut much ice with the anti-abortion crusaders despite evidence that they work. That’s why a focus on protecting and improving life after it has been born seems to fall on deaf ears. Fred Clark and others have done a good job over the years documenting when and why the anti-abortion movement came into being. He says that, among non-Catholics anyway, concern about abortion is “younger than the Happy Meal.”  The reality is that the anti-abortion movement owes more to conservative operatives like Paul Weyrich and evangelical leaders who seized on abortion as a rallying cry that was more socially palatable than protecting segregated schools which had been more of an animating principle for that group prior to 1979.

So, you have a movement that is framed as being about abortion but designed in a way that will, not accidentally, favor the status quo on issues of race, sex, and religion. When someone like Braun is talking about judicial philosophy on abortion, it’s not a “gotcha” to ask him about related questions dealing with race, sex, and religion. When he can’t manage to thread the needle or even forthrightly acknowledges that they’re all tied together, it’s not because he’s misunderstood the question. It’s because all of these things are a package deal.

Portugal Part II: Lisbon – Castelo de São Jorge, Belém, and Food Tour

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Matt and Suzie getting the morning started.

The adults were up and about at 8 a.m. and went foraging. Up the hill was Pastelaria Baga Baga, a little pastry shop that we went to a few times. The coffee was good and the pastries were cheap. So, we ate pasteis de nata (a type of custard tart) and drank coffee at a table on the sidewalk, then took breakfast back for the kids. Then it was time to get walking. The first stop was Castelo de São Jorge, a place that has probably been fortified for a couple thousand years. The Moors built fortifications in the 900s and the Portuguese took it back during the Second Crusade. It was a pleasant place to stroll around as a tourist. Storming it as a hostile soldier must’ve been a nightmare. For most of the crowd, the peacocks on the grounds seemed to be the central attraction. I was partial to the views, the concession stand selling Sagres, and the sign next to a statute of Manuel I imploring visitors, “please do not lean on the foot.”

A note on the beers in Portugal: primarily they sell two kinds, Sagres and Super Bock. Most places will have one or the other but not both. With the huge selections we tend to have in U.S. establishments, there was something refreshing about being able to order “a beer” and getting whichever of the two they have on tap. Both are pleasant, if unremarkable. They put me in mind of Mexican beers, “Dos Equis” kept jumping to mind. As between the two, I’m on Team Super Bock.

That Pink Street sure is Pink!

Once we were finished with the castle, it was time for our first trolley ride. Amy had acquired 72 hour Lisboa passes for us which got us on and off the public transportation for no extra charge. The trolleys are very useful in a town as hilly as Lisbon. You need to have good balance and not mind crowds because they can get pretty full, and you’ll have to stand. I can’t imagine what Lisbon is like for folks who aren’t able to walk very well. Still, for us, the trolley rides were fun. We headed down to “Pink Street” which, true to its name, is a street painted pink. That stop was fairly underwhelming. I think it’s more of a night life type area, and there wasn’t a ton for a family of four to see on an early Tuesday afternoon.

From Pink Street, we took a tram to the Belém area where we saw Belém Tower, Padrãodos Descobrimentos, and Jerónimos Monastery. Of these, Jerónimos was the most interesting. The architecture is just stunning, and it contains the tomb of Vasco de Gama. The Monument of the Discoveries is a giant slab that takes the shape of the prow of a Portuguese caravel. It features Prince Henry the Navigator at the point, flanked by Portuguese discoverers. It was erected in the 1950s and 60s to commemorate 500 years since the death of Prince Henry and celebrate the Portuguese accomplishments during the Age of Discovery. Doing anything to commemorate that era is bound to generate mixed feelings, and this was no exception. Its importance to the Portuguese and the course of human history can hardly be overstated. Those voyages of discovery connected the civilizations of the world. That said, the impact of slavery, spread of disease, and misery that followed in the wake of those voyages can also hardly be overstated. A monument that is purely celebratory is going to miss the mark. At least it did for me, even as I was glad to see it. In particular, the limestone square adjacent to the monument, depicting a compass rose and a map of the world was stunning.

 

I would have liked to visit the Maritime Museum which is also in that area, but time simply did not permit. We had scheduled a food tour for that evening. We met our guide, Irene, at the Rua Augusta Arch. The arch and that whole area of Lisbon were constructed after the 1755 earthquake. I’m sure students of architecture will flinch at my characterization, but the layout is on the Enlightenment model – all straight lines and symmetry. I had forgotten about the earthquake until this trip, but the first time I learned about it was reading Candide where the fact of the earthquake and the destruction it caused were some of the challenges to Candide’s Panglossian worldview.

Harper at the Padrãodos Descobrimentos

Our food tour guide, Irene, was a chef native to Italy who had lived in Lisbon for several years. (In fact, for whatever reason, all of the people who showed us around Portugal ended up being foreign to the country. Fabiola who drove us from the airport was Brazilian, Irene was from Italy, our food tour guide in Porto was French, and our Harry Potter tour guide in Porto was Brazilian.) The Lisbon food tour and the restaurants that Irene picked for us were fantastic. We had eight people in our crew, so we hogged most of the tour slots, but along with us were Nicole from Philly and Nathan from D.C. The first stop was Mantegeria Salva where we had meat, cheese, bread, and port wine. I’m certainly doing the food a disservice by failing to be more specific with my descriptions, but those details escape me. All I can say is that it was a great start. (I will mention that they had a cod refrigerator out on the sidewalk with the front wheels sitting on blocks. It was not the most stable design choice! No harm done, but there was a scare when those wheels came off the blocks.) The second stop was my favorite, Cantinho do Aziz, featuring cuisine from Mozambique. We had two kinds of samosas, one with meat and one without. Despite my carnivorous ways, the vegetarian option was easily my preference. There was also a curry dish that was pretty amazing.

I neglected to record the names of stop three, but it featured cod and potatoes. The potatoes were a kind of chip that struck exactly the right balance between crisp and soft. Irene said she was still trying to figure out how they did it. The last place was Amuralhas Tapas e Vinhos where, as the name would suggest we had wine and a number of tapas dishes. In particular, I recall the flamed sausages were good. We also had shot glasses of ginjinha, a sweet cherry drink (that you sip and do not shoot). I’m glad we had it because it’s a distinctive drink in Portugal, but it was a little sweet for my tastes (as was the port – which is why, even though I like wine, I ended up primarily drinking beer.) The guided food tours (we did another one in Porto) were Amy’s idea. She’s right that these are a great way to get introduced to a new place.

According to the data from my watch, we finished the day having climbed the equivalent of 146 floors and having walked about 12 miles.

On the food tour: our crew plus Nathan from D.C. and Nicole from Philly.

Portugal Part I: Travel to Lisbon

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Packed in the back. On the Road to Chicago!

This was a trip that was supposed to happen almost two years ago. I think a lot of people are having trips like that. We started making the plans in the latter part of 2019. As originally contemplated, it was going to be longer and take place in June 2020. Amy and her sister, Suzie, were going to attend an international WordPress conference in Porto, Portugal, and we were going to extend the itinerary to include Lisbon, Madrid, and Barcelona. And then the world shut down.

Fast forward to 2022, and – after an impressive Omicron jag – COVID cases were low, vaccinations were easily available, and the world was more or less open again. Also, our Air Portugal credits from 2020 were set to expire, so we booked a trip for Spring Break. We banked on the fact that Cole was going to make the Indiana All-State band and scheduled our departure to be during Spring Break but after his performance. Suzie’s daughter, Kenza, drove up from Tennessee, we caught Cole’s performance on Sunday the 13th, and headed up to O’Hare that evening where we also met up with Sydney, Kenza’s step-sister. I suppose a dramatis personae is probably in order at this point: Myself, 50 year old Midwestern ne’er do-well. Amy, my long suffering wife and chief architect of this expedition. Cole, my son, age 18. Harper, my daughter, age 16. Amy’s sister and web-design business partner, Suzie. Suzie’s husband Matt. Suzie’s daughter, Kenza. And Matt’s daughter, Sydney.

OHare snacks

Amy & Kenza saved the day with cart booze and snacks!

When we got to the terminal, all of the restaurants and bars were closing down, which seems like a money-losing proposition. Even though it was a Sunday night, there were clearly still a lot of people in the terminal willing to spend money. But, Amy & Kenza saved the evening, bringing back an armload of booze and snacks from a cart that was just about to close. We set up shop at an empty section of the closed food-court and waited for our flight. Eventually, we made our way to the gate. The number of people getting turned away at the gate because they’d neglected the airline’s instructions to get a negative COVID test was, frankly, stunning. We must have counted at least 10 when while we were sitting there. O’Hare has a place where you can get the test if you wait until the last couple of hours. But waiting until the last hour on a Sunday night made it impossible for them to get back to the facility, get tested, clear security, and get back to the gate before the flight departed. The next flight out wasn’t until Wednesday. I can’t imagine spending that kind of money on international travel and then ignoring the travel requirements. Amy had us scheduled for a regular test on Friday and then a back up, rapid test for Sunday afternoon, just in case. (The regular test worked out fine, no problem.)

The flight was uneventful. Took off at around 11:15 (Central Daylight) and landed at about noon Lisbon time. Customs seemed like it was moving along fairly rapidly but at one point turned glacial. I think it was a shift change. We arranged for a driver to pick us up from the airport since we didn’t know our way around town yet. Fabiola was from Brazil and was terrific. She is originally from Brazil and is learning English. While I would always recommend learning as much of the local language as possible, I have to say, our almost total ignorance of Portuguese didn’t hurt us much. Seemed that most folks knew at least some English, and usually quite a bit. I know a fair amount of Spanish, so signs and other written material was usually pretty easy to follow. But understanding spoken Portuguese is well beyond me.

Alley luggage

Through the alley, across the cobblestones, to the right, then up, up, up, and up a little more.

We met up with Matt & Suzie who had been in Lisbon for a couple of days. We had Fabiola drop us off at the little two-person studio they had rented because the four bedroom Airbnb we had booked wouldn’t be available for a couple of hours. In retrospect, with the delay in clearing customs, we probably could have just been delivered straight to our apartment. It was not that far from Matt & Suzie’s location, but that part of Lisbon is either in or very near the Alfama neighborhood and very hilly. So, we found ourselves dragging luggage across cobble stones and stairs, mostly going straight up. It was quite the workout!

We hit a grocery store for some necessities (chief among them, beer and wine). Cole, being 18 and legal to drink in Portugal, had his first (to our knowledge, and probably in reality) beer and wine samplings and hated them both. However, throughout the rest of the trip he would take well enough to the beer. Properly fortified, we headed back out into Lisbon to look for some dinner. Monday nights seem to be a slow night for restaurant operations. Matt had scoped out some likely locations in the previous few days, but they were closed. We ended up at a place called Grehaldor de Alfama.  The restaurant was at a location that seemed to be catering to tourists, but it was a cozy place that seemed to have a husband and wife running it. It could have been a function of a long day traveling, but for me, everything I ate there was fantastic. The lady taking our orders told me I didn’t want the sardines when I tried to order them, so I ended up having salmon and then variously eating the bass, steak, and cod that others didn’t quite finish. There was also some kind of sausage appetizer to which flame was applied at our table. It was also very good. We then climbed the hills back to our apartment and promptly crashed. I slept for about 11 hours. No problem with jet lag!

All together for a fantastic dinner in Lisbon!