1) Before breakfast I went down the street to the pharmacy for sunblock. The pharmacist was a very nice lady, a native of Lisbon, and we had a nice conversation about her city and about Portimao. I gather I was wise to avoid August, when it is both hot and crowded.
2) Can a breakfast be both delicate and sumptuous? I went down almost as soon as the breakfast room opened, when it was just brisk enough that an indoor table was preferred. A little stand of pastries, a thin tray of three tiny cakes, a tiny bowl of berries and a tiny cup of yogurt, and an array of condiments were put before me. And then coffee with milk. (I sometimes forget that one must specifically order it with milk, but I still haven’t had a bad cup of coffee here.) Later a single small egg Benedict with a cloudlike hollandaise was served me. Lovely as it all was, I left the table feeling full.
3) But not so full that I would not circumnavigate the beach again. The hotel has two access points, and I chose the western one down a long flight of stairs (of course — Portugal) and through a gate to the boardwalk. The beach was already quite full of people of all shapes and descriptions engaged in all levels of activity, from jogging and games to sleep.
3a) Today I went all the way out to the jetty with its small lighthouse. The view of the beach from there is complete — a wide, broad beach surrounded by a tall ring of hotels, very like Waikiki.
3b) Oval temporary buildings appear here and there along the boardwalk at back, kind of like giant cannelloni. They house beach bars and restaurants and the occasional shop.
4) Feeling low energy (in a good way), I opted to rent a sun bed on the beach for the afternoon. The hotel staff said “Just sit down on one and whoever is in charge will approach you to pay.” I half expected some bullying termagent to come shouting at me for trespassing, but instead it was a polite young man who just asked “One or two [sunbeds]?” I paid my money, and that was that!
4a) I’d brought my towel, sunblock, journal, notebook, pen, two bottles of water, and A Very Short History of Portugal, which I am nearly through. But sometimes it was more interesting to observe the passing scene.
4a.1) In fact directly in front of me was a family group unwittingly forming some sort of religious allegory. Picture if you will a large rectangle of beach towels. In opposing corners, two young women sunbathing, one facing me, the other facing away. In the center, two male/female couples focusing most of their attention on the elevated figure in the center: a baby boy seated high in a navy blue stroller under a white umbrella. It could very easily have been the Holy Family with, for instance, Zacharias and Elizabeth, and flanked by two female saints. Paul Cadmus would have done it superbly.
4a.2) More prosaic was the German man two sunbeds over who sounded as though he was on a business call. Neither the time nor the place, honey. Take it inside.
4a.3) A few vendors promenaded back and forth, too, hawking T-shirts and beach throws, T-shirts and beads and other things. One of them just could not stop chanting the first two lines of a reggae song.
5) I did get in the water, of course. Brisk! Unwilling to leave my phone behind, I’d come prepared with a waterproof plastic sleeve on a lanyard. Yes, a bit awkward — but much more awkward for the phone to get stolen. Happily the sleeve is truly waterproof.
6) After about four hours I went back up to my room, pink but not too pink, for a soak in my very long bathtub.
7) From social media I learned that back at ye Instytytte it was the Big Annual Volunteer Conference, which was such an important part of my professional calendar once. That inspired me to look up one of my, um, more difficult volunteers. Turns out he died at midsummer, and parts of his obituary were a masterpiece of euphemism. (I can only hope people will be so kind at my death.) He was a holy terror, but we came to respect each other over time because we both had aspirations for a more elegant and polished style. Which I think he would be surprised to see that our successors have achieved, just not in quite the way he envisioned it. Rest in peace.
7a) No, this is not the Remarkably Vital Personality some of my may remember me mentioning several years ago.
How it started.
8) The hotel had recommended two restaurants, and the one I chose turned out to be in one of the cannelloni buildings at the far end of the beach. It was a good dinner: a savory fish soup, steak fried in butter and garlic, and then a bit of ice cream with chocolate sauce. The spectacular sunset commanded attention, especially near the end, when the darkening rust-orange tail of her train was fading away at the far end of the beach.
How it ended.