Percy Update

Bad news about Percy the Palmeira I'm afraid.

He has succumbed and his mortal remains been removed. I don't know where they have been disposed of.

R.I.P.

Delia's Vocabulary Collection

Carol was looking for a recipe on Delia Smith's website earlier (for non-UK readers, Delia's a sort of British Martha Stewart without the criminal convictions. A certain sector of the population considers Delia - unlike Martha - to have an element of sex appeal. I'm not one of them but I believe it's something to do with cold fingertips and a buttoned-up schoolmarmy tone of voice. Judge for yourself.

I've digressed already. Where is this going, you're asking yourselves? Oh yes, Carol was looking at Delia-Online for a recipe and left the page open and when I saw it, it wasn't so much the recipe as the advert on the right which caught my eye.

An advert for something to do with testing your IQ, note the question Qual é a capital de Portugal? Goodness knows what an awareness of the capital of Portugal has to do with one's IQ but that's beside the point because the significance of the ad for me was that it at last cleared in my mind the difference between the Portuguese words qual and que. Qual is "what" (as in "What is the capital of Portugal?") and que is "which".

It is from little breakthroughs such as these, from sources as unlikely as Delia Smith, that I grope slowly towards an  understanding of Portuguese. Now all I've got to do before tomorrow when the TV repair man is coming is master the Portuguese for "I think it's either because my satellite dish is misaligned or because it's vibrating in the wind." Whose website am I going to find the answer to that on - Jamie Oliver's, the Duchy of Cornwall's, Dennis Compton's  ... ?

(PS - Dennis Compton doesn't have a website - it's a Fawlty gag.)

Linguiça

When I first saw these things ...

... in the shops in Santa Cruz, I thought they  must be crude representations of rowing boats or badly designed ashtrays. Or perhaps badly designed ashtrays in the form of crude representations of rowing boats but, whichever, they must have had some vital function to judge from the volume of them on sale.

Little did I realise they are in fact assadores do choriço which translates as "sausage griller" (choriço being the generic Portuguese word for a sausage and not necessarily what we Brits would characterise as a chorizo:  every chorizo is a choriço but not every choriço is a chorizo, if that helps. That's a syllogism. Or is it a Venn Diagram? And what's a salsiche? I digress.)

Anyway, assadores de choriço work on the beautifully simple principle that you pour about a quarter to a half inch (1-2cm) deep of cooking alcohol into it, bung the choriço on top and throw a match at it (in that order).

A top tip for the operation of assadores de choriço to avoid dripping molten nylon is not to place them directly under Balinese boat kites suspended from your kitchen ceiling:-

Once the alcohol has burnt off (and your Balinese boat kite has decayed to a glutinous blob - only joking), the choriço is done and looks like this:-

I know what you're thinking. And I'm thinking it too looking at that pic but, seriously, this sort of choriço is called linguiça. It was home made and given to us by a neighbour. It's not really a sausage as we Brits would understand it, it's more chunks of meat and fat stuffed into a sausage skin.

I used to make the mistake of attempting to eat linguiça like a British sausage, i.e. cutting in slices and eating whole. Doing that with linguiça involves chomping through the fat and is quite revolting. Instead, the trick (for me anyway) is to cut the skin open and eat the meat and leave the fat - approached that way, linguiça is one of the tastiest things on this planet. It's rich though - I can't manage much more than about 8 inches at a time (as the actress memorably remarked to the bishop). 

Advertising

I've spent quite a lot of time tonight devising strategies for advertising the Palheiro which is our self catering holiday apartment in the garden.

Apart from our own website ...

... we're also listed with the very excellent Archipelago Azores who I highly recommend for their personal service in putting together a tailor made itinerary round the islands and relieving you of the hassle of working out flights etc.

(How do they know we're lovely?)

We've also listed on a couple of the apartment rental websites which it's free to advertise on and these did produce a few bookings last year but we decided it was time to get serious and start - ulp! - paying for some advertising. I approached this by doing a Google search of "holiday accommodation azores" to see who came up tops and was fairly flabbergasted to find that our own website comes out on the first page!

                           

Be that as it may, I decided that an entry on top listed holiday-rentals.co.uk was the one to go for at £209 for a year's listing.

Now I've been through the mill of listing one's property on these holiday accommodation websites, the free ones, before. It's a riot of checking boxes to list the facilities available. But it has to be said that holiday-rentals.co.uk took this to an entirely new dimension. Apart from the fairly routine is there a hairdryer and tumble dryer etc., I was asked such esoterica as how many oars did my kayak have, did I have WiFi access - there wasn't a checkbox for "don't know" and I was beginning to feel like I was in the Not the Nine o' Clock News sketch "We don't sell gramophones here, grandad! Do you want woofers and tweeters? Do you want a bag over your head?"

Even more astonishingly was whether we were a "low allergen environment"? That would surely depend on what you were allergic to, wouldn't it? And perhaps most bizarrely of all was, does the property have a fish cleaning table? I kid you not.

It does as it happens.

                       

Not recommended if you're allergic to cats, though. Or fish.

Caldo de Marisco

It's Portuguese for "seafood stock cube" and I'm feeling a bit smug because we get it in Portugal - indeed even out here on Flores - but you don't get it in Britain. This was pointed out by a friend who eyed our Caldo de Marisco enviously when she was out here visiting a while back and took a few packets home with her. The subject came up again when we were staying with her during our recent sojourn in Scotland and she spotted the cubic metre of ham stock cubes which we were taking back because - smugness wearing off now - we don't get them in Portugal.

Perhaps we could start a "Stock Cube Swap Shop" and could we extend it out to other provisions as well because another thing we don't get here is corned beef? And brown sauce. And noodles and cous-cous while I think about it. Coleman's mustard as well. Blocks of parmesan cheese. Pine nuts. Horseradish sauce. How about a couple of frozen octopuses for a hamper of the above items?

                          

Is that Cheggers on the left?

Travel chaos (Part 5)

Day 5 and another early start to get to Ponta Delgada airport for a flight to Horta (via Terceira - nice to see that airport again) whence we will get another flight to Flores. We hope.

We arrive at Horta in good order but it's becoming clear that the Azores have been affected by their own variety of travel chaos in the shape of very strong winds. I've mentioned before that the runway at Flores is vulnerable to adverse cross-winds and a number of flights seem to have been cancelled in recent days. So much so that this morning there's an extra flight to Flores to clear the backlog of stranded passengers.

Half an hour before departure of the flight from Horta to Flores, there's an announcement on the tannoy - both flights to Flores delayed due to weather at destination, more information in half an hour. A night in a hotel in Horta beckons (now armed with clean socks and pants at BA's expense, I could begin to get used to hotel life) but the next announcement was boarding now through Gate A.

The approach to Flores was, er, "lively". Carol reported it as being worse than the approach to Flores which she had hitherto described as her worst ever landing on an aeroplane (I was watching that one from the ground and the plane was certainly bouncing about quite dramatically). My reaction to this approach was that, if I were a trainee pilot on my first outing with fare paying passengers, I'd have been turning to the grizzled old captain saying "We're not actually going to go through with this and try to land are we?"

But land we did and our luggage even turned up three days later as well! Game over at last!

Travel chaos (Part 4)

Day 4 and another early start in which we decided to get an early cab to the airport at our own expense rather than wait for the courtesy buses with a view to beating the check-in queue.

Being first at check-in (yes!) had the disadvantage that we were the guinea pigs for the "computer says no" syndrome which in this context was due to the fact that yesterday's flights were on TAP Portugal whereas today's will be on SATA Air Acores. The earnest young man behind the counter explained it all to us in his faultless English but did he think I looked like I cared whether I was going on a blue and white plane or a green, red and white one?. Anyway, after about half an hour's hammering away on his keyboard and a sprint across the concourse to both the TAP (green, red and white) and SATA (blue and white) ticket desks, we were eventually issued with boarding passes to a blue and white plane. By this time a satisfactorily large queue from the buses from the hotel had built up behind us.

All this only got us to Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel where we hot-footed it to the SATA (blue and white) desk to be told there were no more flights to Flores that day but that we were "on the waiting list" for a flight tomorrow. Uh huh - do I not like the sound of being "on a waiting list" for a flight.  However, after some chat about whether we were clients of TAP or SATA and half an hour's typing on her keyboard (probably trying to unscramble everything the earnest young man at Lisbon had done earlier), the lady behind the counter eventually produced a confirmed place on a flight the following day to Flores and a voucher for the Hotel Avenida (including lunch and dinner) and taxi thereto.

So, after lunch at SATA's expense (or was it TAP's?), we wandered up to the Parque Atlantico shopping centre in PD to hit Modelo (Portuguese equivalent of Tesco) for emergency supplies of socks and cuecas (pants) at British Airways' expense. Remember BA? The airline we handed our luggage over to in a far off land a long time ago (Glasgow, 4 days earlier. - actually, BA losing our luggage is a massive result because it means we're not paying the €100 or so excess baggage to check it in on SATA (TAP?) due to the fact we always return from the UK with a lot more than we took - vital supplies of ham stock cubes, pine nuts and other essentials not procurable on Flores.)

Will we get home to Flores tomorrow? Tune in to find out.