Kettles and cakes and such.

Our hotel room comes with its own kitchen/dining room. Well, I say kitchen; it has a fridge and a microwave as well as a selection of crockery and cutlery but precious little else. However, there are refugees and women escaping from violent husbands living with their children in spaces smaller than this. Why, it’s not much smaller than our flat in Vigo. 

If this were an English hotel, even one with much smaller rooms, there would be a kettle. But this is Portugal and although they may have tea rooms, salaõ de cha, tea-making facilities in rooms do not come as standard. So, out and about, we have been looking for a small kettle, ideally one of the travel variety. To that end yesterday we walked up the hill to Buarcos. 

Quite probably in the past Buarcos was a separate community but now the spaces between it and Figueira have been filled and it's all one. There's an Aldi supermarket up there, next door to the cemetery. It's one of those little walled-in cemeteries, with some fancy tombs and lots of niches in the wall. Presumably it used to be on the edge of town but now it's back to back with a cheap supermarket. 

We bought the makings of snacks and sandwiches there but no kettle was to be had. Nor did we find one in any of the "lojas chinas", the Chinese shops. So when we got back to the hotel we cobbled together enough Portuguese to ask if we could borrow something to heat up water, the word for kettle being outside our vocabulary, so that we could make "cha". And shortly after that a kettle was delivered to our room. Success! 

Walking back from Buarcos we spotted a cake shop, a "pastelaria". All those Spanish words that end in ...ería become ...aria in Portuguese. Some are abbreviated. Thus "panadería", breadshop, is "padaria" and "salida", exit, is "saida". Even "caliente", hot, becomes "quente". Fascinating! 

 Anyway, the cake shop is called "New Cake". Would it sell many cakes (or "queiques" as I have seen it in the airport at Porto) if it were called "Old Cake". Of course, to be truly modern it should be "All New Cake". We have noticed that nowadays in English usage things are no longer new but "all new", especially in advertising. And people no longer just die; they "sadly die". Can this be true? Are they all regretted to such an extent? 

Also in Buarcos, we went in search of the Aquario restaurant, scene of Phil's mishap with a fish bone last time we were here. He sadly got a fishbone stuck in his throat and sadly had to go to hospital, thus sadly missing a chess game. Apart from the fish bone, the food was excellent. We found O Aquario. It was sadly closed, up for sale or rent. So we sadly went elsewhere. 

 That's enough sadness. 

We went to Caçarola I, where Phil had Sopa do Campo, vegetable soup, and I had Caldo verde, just like Galician Caldo gallego, full of turnip tops. Good stuff! Yesterday being Monday we followed the Galician rule that you shouldn't order fish because it might not be fresh. Fishermen in Galicia don't go to sea on Sunday, or so we are told, and we guessed that Portuguese fishermen might be the same. Judging by the televised mass on Sunday morning and the number of religious icons on tiles above house doors, this is quite a religious place. So we opted for chicken - frango à milanesa to be exact, tender chicken pieces served in a tasty pasta mixture. This time we avoided the NOT free starter. A good meal for two, followed by coffee, for under 20€. Pretty good. 

Oh yes, and the chess player won his evening game!