Photo of me taken at Figueroa del Foz, our first stop in Portugal, 2008. Read more in my post, Beautiful Portugal.
We’re going back to Portugal! Grab your appetite and your curiosity, but you won’t need a passport or a suitcase, nor even a credit card. Along the way, I’ll show you how to find your way through the maze of posts in the archive so that you can travel without leaving home. And I’ll tell you a story or two (or, rather, I’ll point you to stories I’ve told before: do you remember the one about “the richest man in these parts” telling his sad story to us, traveling strangers, in a tiny bar in rural Portugal? It’s one of my favourites. Read on!)
If you missed my conversation with Carol about her and her husband’s big move from Los Angeles to Portugal, you should first go back and read that post. So good, I don’t mind saying; Carol’s such a good writer and her adventure is so inspiring. Also, she’s graciously responding to readers’ comments, and I’m enjoying the chat that’s building. In fact, it’s been making me even more keen to travel again, so that in the meantime, I’ve gone to the blog’s (metaphorically) dusty archives to revisit my own travels (with Paul) in Portugal.
May I share a few of those with you? In case your own appetites for vicarious travel have been whetted. . .
While I do so, I thought I could also answer a reader’s query (Nadia asked me, here,) about how to access the archives of my renovated blog. Here on WordPress, the 14+ years’ worth of posts don’t show up in a chronological pull-down menu as they did on Blogger, but there are a few paths to follow should you want to wend your way through my many words and images. Keeping in mind the caveat that I’m still working behind the scenes to organize and re-categorize. . .
First of all, if you’ve clicked through on a link (or from your subscription email) to a specific post, scroll down to the bottom of that post for arrows that will take you to the Previous or the Following posts (and titles of those posts show up just below the <See Previous Post). Above that line (Previous Post / Following Post), you will find a list of hashtags; clicking on any of these yields a series of posts with some connection to that topic.
Moreover, above the line(s) of hashtags, there will be a Heading, “You May Also Enjoy”: clicking on any of the four photos below, each with the title of a post underneath, will produce another path you could pursue, into the random.
Besides that plethora of possibilities, depending on how you’ve arrived here, you might already see, above the specific post, a row of four photos just below the header Materfamilias Writes. These photos denote four categories that, for now, I’ve chosen to feature, and clicking on any one of them will take you to other posts about, respectively, Travel or Making or Reading or Style and Fashion. (If you’re not seeing this, it will be because you’ve arrived directly at a specific post; if you now take your cursor up and click on that header, Materfamilias Writes, you should see those photos right away.)
But come with me to rural Portugal, and I’ll demonstrate more clearly how this works.
In this post from July 2010, we’d only been back a few weeks from our second (and last, so far) visit to Portugal, where we stayed a week at (self-catering) Quinta da Moenda in the province of Beira Alta (where we’d also spent a week in 2008). The photos I’d taken of communal laundry facilities in tiny rural villages had led me to thinking about my maternal grandmother, how she’d made the jump from hand-washing (by 1931, ten children’s and a husband’s worth of laundry, in a place where serious winter prevailed at least six months a year) to having her own washing machine. Still no dryer, of course. And she had to swallow her pride to own that machine. Pop over to that post and you’ll also get a glimpse of the local practical style. Slow Fashion, before it became a buzzword.
Now, to test what I’ve been explaining about how to explore the archives, scroll to the bottom of the post, locate the list of hashtags (Family, Memories, Portugal, Travel). . . . and click on “Portugal.” This should generate a page with excerpts from five posts that contain significant references to Portugal, top of which will be the two interviews with Carol, next will be the one I mentioned in the paragraph above, and the one at the bottom of the page — titled A Portuguese Village Bar — is your portal to one of my favourite travel stories ever.
If you’re not tired of traveling through Portugal yet (I hope not!), there are four more pages of post excerpts to scroll through. Among them you’ll find the post I went looking for when I read Carol’s mention of grilled sardines. Oh, I miss those sardines, and they’re only very, very rarely available here, and even then, frozen rather than fresh. So this stroll through my own blog archives has me waxing nostalgic and dreaming of . . . Eating Sardines in Lisbon This post has a link to an amusing, even charming, commercial — enjoy!
Let me know if you have any questions about the technical aspects I’ve tried to clarify here. As I say, I’m still working behind the curtains to fix old links and rationalize old categories and shrink the number of hashtags. I’m back to 2015 in this task so far, with eight years stretching out before those, so it will take a while. And I’m slowed down by stopping to read posts, surprised by what I’ve forgotten, sometimes really pleased to be reminded and often wanting to share a favourite or two with you. In fact, I think I’ll probably set up a new Category of Favourite Posts and, eventually, that may appear as one of the four categories featured at the top of the main page. Also working on a Once Upon an Island category, because I know some of you are interested in that chapter of my story.
But right now, I must say that reading about those sardines and looking at those photos has my tummy rumbling, and by happy coincidence, it sounds as if Paul has dinner almost ready.
So . . . gotta go,
Chat soon (you know I’d love to read any comments you choose to leave, below. Have you, for example, found yourself browsing your own archives throughout these months of spending more time at home? Re-organizing them? Or simply getting lost in memories. . . )
xo,
f
Thank you, Frances,for all your hard work on and behind the blog!
Is there a post about your grandmother and washing machine or not-I can’t find it clicking on the link….
I adore “srdele” (as we call them when they are fresh from the grill or,more often,from a pan at home-although we clean/ prepare srdele before the grilling :)- . When they are canned in oil,they are called sardines). When they are fresh,they are the best indeed,better than posh,more expensive fish-we eat them at home very often . I don’t understand why is it so difficult to find a restaurant that has them on the menu…..
Nevertheless,there is a very small fish- gavuni-(Atherina hespetus-I don’t know the english name),they are fryed as they are,without cleaning
Dottoressa
Author
Oh, you’re very welcome, Dottoressa — I fixed the link (the first one in the paragraph worked, but not the last one) that takes you to a post titled Laundry Day and a bit of Portuguese Style — there are several paragraphs in that post in which I remember my grandmother’s laundry history.
I loved the sardines I ate in Croatia! We had so much good seafood in your beautiful country. Interesting to know that you have a different name for them depending on whether they’re fresh or canned — that makes good sense, actually.
I think those small fish would be called Smelt in English. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them on the menu here, and I’ll have to check with Paul to see whether there are any fisheries for them here.
Thank you for the opportunity to read beautiful,endearing and poignant story about your GM and washing machine. How brave and hard working our ancestors were….I can see your point of view as well as your GM’s
Im my country, the soap was made from lard and ashes and, near the coast, from olive oil…pretty environment friendly
I must admitt that I love to hand wash my silks and cashmeres and,when my son was a baby,I’ve enjoyed to hand wash his little plush trouses and sweaters -they looked so beautiful and were so tiny. I was a working mom ( both at home and in my med office) and this was lovely with one child…..but with ten…..
Nevertheless,my washing machine is out of order from yesterday and I’m pretty out of order as well (although ,2 floors under, I could use my mother’s)…..
Dottoressa
Author
My grandma made her own soap as well, almost ’til the end of her life. She rendered the fat she’d save from any meat she cooked, and I would imagine at one time she might even have used ash, but by the time I was paying attention, she used lye. I loved the smell of her sheets — washed in that soap and dried on the line.
I’m sorry your machine is out of order — another handyman you’ll have to wait for! Washing clothes by hand by choice (especially beautiful silks and cashmeres and cute little baby clothes) is much different from having to do so because the machine is broken!
I’ve really enjoyed dipping into your Portuguese travels & I shall make time to explore more of your site . I’ve forgotten such a lot about our holiday trips . It’s a good job I filled in my notebooks every night which meant we could do some recapping last winter during lockdown . What strikes me now is how much energy we had ! We’d struggle to cover the same ground now . When we were first married I had to use the laundromat & found it very sociable but I wouldn’t go back . I think those village communal wash places would have been a great chance to meet up with neighbours but I don’t think they’d want to turn back the clock either . My washing is always line dried if at all possible & it puzzles me that you would gobble up electricity if you had sunshine available . I like the smell too .
Author
I’m pleased you enjoyed those forays to Portugal. . .
Like you, I’m surprised at what I’ve forgotten, and grateful I made a few notes at the time. Paul and I have had fun reliving some of those occasions — once the memory is revived they come back so clearly.
I’m like you, very comfortable now with the convenience of laundry facilities right here. . . although I think this is a convenience that is costing our environment dearly. Perhaps we’ll find a way to re-set the clocks, not necessarily turn them back. More use of free solar/wind power for drying clothes would be the minimum!
Frances, I loved going back and reading about your Portugal trips (and learning that we share a love of those simple grilled sardines with a Sagres).
One of the adjustments I didn’t talk about was the switch to hanging *everything* to dry (we’ve always hung our cotton and linen clothes – that lint in your dryer filter is your clothes disintegrating). Our washer is one of those combo units that supposedly dries, but it’s not very efficient at it, and the spin cycle is very efficient, so we hang everything up and let it dry in the sunroom. It will not surprise you that things dry pretty quickly!
Author
Glad you enjoyed those posts, Carol. They definitely rekindled my affection for Portugal, and I hope one day we’ll mosey over from Italy, through France, take in a bit of Spain, and visit your new country again.
Completely with you and Wendy on the clothes dryer — and I always think that about the lint we empty from the dryer filter. I use mine as little as possible — during those Vancouver months of rain when I don’t want to trip over drying racks in the living room. But I was dismayed to note hot air coming from dryer vents in our complex during the heat wave and drought this summer.
When we were in Lisbon in 2008, we stayed at a charming (budget) hotel, Hotel De Sao Mamede, where I was surprised and so pleased to see that sheets and towels were dried on a large terrace, enough of them that I assumed that was the laundry service for the hotel beds — certainly, all the linens/towels in our room had that wonderful sun-dried scent. (Plus sun bleaches and sanitizes as well as any chemical without the harsher scent.)
Thanks for re-sharing some of your Portugal posts. You have an amazing archive of your life these past few decades (at least, the parts you choose to share–as it should be). I stand in awe of your archivist work in switching platforms. A monumental task.
Author
It’s surprising the way it’s accumulated. . . if I were really a good archivist, I’d probably make sure I had some kind of hard copy. . . 😉