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.
Finally a program that that enables me to see tv outside ireland!