Retirement
Honestly this is a pretty good time. Take yesterday. We have water leaking
into our bathroom from the floor above (great start, eh?), so we were up 
at 4:00 a.m. when it started dripping again. The sitch is that the upstairs
landlord has told the six people living up there to only use one of the two
bathrooms for now, because if they turn the water on in the second bathroom,
it immediately starts dripping in ours. So the upstairs people... take 
showers at midnight or 4:00 a.m., like we won't notice?

Anyway we were up and I looked out the window and saw thick fog, so when I
woke AGAIN at 6:00 a.m. instead of going back to bed I grabbed my camera
and headed out into the fog. Spent about two hours shooting, I'm still 
working on the photos. 

Then yesterday about noon Joy said she wanted to hit the beach, so that we 
did. Sat too close to the high tide and one wave actually washed into our
little umbrella-and-blanket area. It was pretty funny because it was about
ten minutes past high tide, and I thought we'd gotten away free and clear.
But when the water receded we looked to either side, and other folks just as
close to the water were fine - it was only us that a tongue of water had
come up to soak. 

After we got back from the beach we had a shower and a nap and a small 
supper, and then we got ready to go to the concert, which started on 
European time - 9:30 p.m. It was a choral rendition of a bunch of random 
movie themes with a few musical accompanyists. I'd initially gotten us 
tickets because I wanted an excuse to see the municipal auditorium, and
it's a pretty nice one. 

The concert was okay, we saw a lot of people from the local expat community
(despite the preponderance of whom all the spoken commentary was in 
Portuguese.) But then the ENDING, criminy, how interesting. First, much was 
made of handing flowers to almost everybody except the chorus (and a few of 
them got flowers too, if they soloed.) Individually! The conductor would
introduce someone, a woman from the choir would walk out from the wings
with a bouquet, two air-kisses on the cheeks, and repeat... and repeat...
and repeat... it went on forever.

When everybody had bouquets (except one woman from the choir who got hers
towards the very end?) then the tall woman host introduced some old bald
guy in a suit who, I suspect, was the President of the Auditorium or the
Grand Poobah of Choirs or something, and he talked. And talked... and talked...

I think the second HALF of the show was the closing. The final number
was "Ghostbusters," and the conductor was TRYING to get the audience into a
"Who ya gonna call?"/"Ghostbusters!" call-and-reponse with the choir, but
the elderly English-speaking audience was very slow to pick up their cues.
He even came back on stage for an encore and tried AGAIN, with only  
limited additional success. 

By the time we finally got out of the auditorium I was ravenous, but all
the cafes were closed, so we broke down and got McDonalds which was
a) open and b) directly across Luisa Todi from the auditorium. We wandered
over to Praca de Bocage (Bocage Plaza) to enjoy our food, which included a
small beer for me. Oddly enough the food was terrible.  I'm not trying to
be a snob here, usually I can enjoy a McChicken sandwich, but this one was 
like eating damp cardboard. Has the fresh food in Setubal already spoiled
my tongue this much?

So yesterday was, for me, an 18-hour day of photography, beach, nap, concert,
and midnight stroll through Setubal. 

Yeah, I can get into this.