Daily Archives: July 31, 2008

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The wondrous world of Portuguese sanitation

Today I discovered something wondrous about Portuguese sanitation. The trash cans scattered around Cascais are not trash cans at all. They’re doorways to underground chambers that hold landfills of trash under the cobblestone streets. Today I saw dumpsters collecting the refuse by picking up large sections of the pavement with their dumpsters, raising the deep tombs of trash, and emptying them into trucks. So the trash bins are like toilets that only indicate a larger disposal system underground. Why is this so fascinating? Because if your purpose is burying a city’s worth of rubbish, why stop ten feet underground? Why not just keep going with the trash? Why not dig holes deep into the center of the earth and just let stuff decompose there?

I can’t help imagining how freaked out I would be if I visited a trash can with several bags worth of waste and the trash can never filled up no matter what I put inside and suddenly I realized I had discovered a portal to China. Then I’d stick my head inside, like “What?” and suddenly I’d be a pole vaulter in the Beijing Olympics and my parents would be so proud even though I smelled like garbage.

Blogging Olympics

It’s not exactly the blogging Olympics over here, but things happen occasionally.

I just discovered that the 10,000 Maniacs song “Because the Night” is actually a Patti Smith song. Thank you, VH1 Classics.

I felt pity for our neighborhood derelict who huffs paint in the sun all day wearing a black hooded parka. I almost gave him some food from my grocery bag when I walked by him today for the umpteenth time but I wasn’t feeling generous enough to give him ALL my deli ham and I doubted that he’d want just a handful of wet meat from the pack, so I skipped the charity and went home to make myself a sandwich.

Crossing the town hall square, I think I inadvertently stepped into the photos of at least five Japanese tourists. They must have just climbed off a luxury tour bus en masse. Made me wonder how many photo albums in Japan have featured my angelic visage over the years. Which made me remember my friend Yoshi in England in 1991 and how his mom fed me chocolate-dipped strawberries when I went over to his house for tea. I told you stuff has been happening here.

I lost my wireless connection for two days. Then I discovered the “Wireless On/Off” switch on the side of my borrowed laptop.

Met an Irish man last night who wants to study with Deepak Chopra and psycho-analyze people in bars for a living. This, of course, is right up my alley.

Ran out of novels last week so I’ve been borrowing mass market paperbacks from the English pub’s library. Yesterday I read The Exorcist and today I started The Once and Future King about the young King Arthur. Which would be great except that Disney already told me the whole story.

The girls of Billabong are surfing this weekend in nearby Guincho. I told my older brother and he said “Glad to know the sexualized surfing lifestyle advertising juggernaut that has so successfully sold clothes, sunglasses, and apathy to everyone at Virginia Beach under 25 is now rolling internationally.” We’re just psyched to see hot American babes. It’s so hard being the only one in town. They expect me to wear jean shorts and to order cheeseburgers and to know all the words to Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and to be familiar with all the characters in the Dukes of Hazzard. Oh, and to be hot.