St Dave, Patron Saint of Flies

---

We sleep in and miss breakfast. The channels that our TV's been tuned into suggest that our hosts think we're Dutch. We settle in to watch a few minutes of "How I Met Your Mother". All the dialogue's been overdubbed, but the canned laughter seems to be the original. We've got very little idea what's going on, but we get the giggles watching familiar faces speaking a very unfamiliar language in equally unfamiliar voices.

We wander through the hotel and try to get down onto the beach. Security's intense; all the doors and gates are locked. It feels like we're in jail, only with lots of swimming pools, bars and restaurants. Actually I suspect this is not really how it feels like to be in jail. It seems that we need to use our room key card to unlock the prison standard steel gate on the path leading down to the very pleasant long, wide golden sandy expanse of Santa Eulalia Beach. The tide's out, which reminds us that we're not in the Mediterranean any more. The sand's hard below the high watermark, and it looks like an excellent spot to launch into a game of beach cricket. There are no real tides in the Mediterranean, which gets me wondering if this might be the reason that they don't play a lot of cricket in southern Europe. The beach here's backed by golden sandstone cliffs, and there are signs everywhere warning to stay well clear of them because they might collapse without warning. The sand's packed with sunbathers, but not too many swimmers, and a quick check of the water confirms why; it's very cold. We climb some wooden stairs up the cliff at one end of the beach. They're on a decided lean, the timber looks a bit dodgy, and the hand rail wobbles a lot more than it should when we grab hold of it in our attempts to stay upright. I think we might have been safer sunbathing at the base of the cliff .....

We have lunch at a restaurant overlooking the beach. Issy orders a hot chocolate. A fly lands on the rim of her cup, and when we try shoo it away it always comes straight back. Issy goes to take a sip, but it seems this poor creature has fallen off the rim and is now lying lifelessly on the surface of her drink. She fishes it out with a spoon and leaves it on the saucer. We ask the waiter for a replacement, but as he goes to take the original away the fly suddenly bursts miraculously back into life. It struggles across the table and then crawls up onto the back of my hand, and I watch on in wonder as it goes about the serious business of removing hot chocolate from its wings. I hope it doesn't have brain damage. My beloved's clearly got no appreciation for the wonders of nature; she tries to kill it. Just as well I'm here to protect it. She says that I've now become St Dave, Patron Saint of Flies. I didn't know that flies had patron saints. If they didn't before they do now.

We spend the afternoon by the pool, and I use my iPad to try to learn a few basic words of Portuguese. Some of them seem to be a bit similar to Spanish, but others are completely different. The word for thank you is "obrigado" if a man says it, but "obrigada" for a woman. If a mixed gender group all want to say thank you in unison then they must use the masculine form. Presumably if you were in mixed gender group you'd need to work out well in advance exactly who was going to do the thanking, which sounds like it could get a bit time consuming, not to mention confusing. Fortunately Spanish doesn't have this same complexity with "gracias", or if it does I've failed to pick it up after three years of learning, which would be a bit concerning. When we arrived at the airport yesterday we thought that virtually everyone there was Russian; Portuguese sounds very similar to Russian to our untrained ears.

The ever reliable Wikipedia tells us that the population of Portugal went down substantially between the 2011 and 2016 censuses, which seems a bit unusual. The Google machine explains that this is due to both the low birth rate - the lowest of any European country - and the struggling economy which has forced many young people to emigrate in search of jobs. The birth rate's plummeted over the past fifty or so years from three children per woman of child bearing age in 1970 to only 1.21 now.

We catch a bus into the centre of Albufeira, and head down through through Fishermans Square and on along the wide golden sands of the main beach - Praia do Peneco. We climb up to a viewing point at the beach's western end as the sun's setting. Someone's set up a cat colony up here, and the whole place is crawling with very cute tame felines. The main part of the town's frantically busy; it's very attractive and seems not to be short on atmosphere. Almost everyone here seems to be English, and perhaps unsurprisingly televisions in every bar and restaurant seem to be tuned into English Premier League soccer matches. We want to eat Portuguese food, but the only things that seem to be on offer are fish and chips, and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If we'd wanted that lot we would have gone to Manchester. We settle in at a restaurant on the waterfront, and order a large jug of sangria followed quickly by another.

We head back to the hotel in a tuk tuk, which is a three wheeled buggy with a soft top and plastic windows. We get chatting to the driver who introduces himself as Nuno. He says he can tell we're from Australia, which it seems is a good thing. He says that a lot of the English people who come here drink way too much and then get into trouble with the police, but he says that they bring in a lot of money so Albufeira can't do without them. He tells us that it's very dry here at this time of the year and that there hasn't been even a single drop of rain for the last four months. Apparently even that isn't the record; last year it didn't rain at all for five months straight. We get out and Issy says "gracias". Nuno tells her very politely that you must never say "gracias" to a Portuguese person as they find it very offensive to be confused with Spaniards. Oops. I think we've probably inadvertently offended half the country by now and we've only been here a day and a half ....

---