Last month, early on the last morning of a two-day stay in Elvas, the UNESCO World Heritage walled town close to the Spanish border in eastern Portugal, I took walk around the city walls. The man in the tourist office had told me that you could walk right around the city on the walls.
However, I found there are a few of points where the footpath does not exist. I got about halfway and turned back as time was running out and I was feeling like some breakfast. I had not seen any photo opportunities on the walk but as I came close to the hotel I saw these three unlikely characters sitting by the road under the inner city wall. I have no idea what they were doing there. It was very quiet, It was early Sunday morning and it was not on a bus route. Taken with my Leica Q.
To John Shingleton
Thanks for your comments. I suppose I made it clear that I admire the English, and like England so much that I keep going there all the time. More than that, some of my best and closest friends are English. But sometimes I do think they miss a few things. I admit that I am over sixty, and probably read Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham more than I read the modern English writers. I admit that I sometimes miss the England I knew in the seventies, when the clerk of the Grosvenor Victoria Hotel – by the railway station – looked like a twin of David Niven, even if he looked down on us, a group of Portuguese teen-age boys and girls on their first trip abroad, after finishing high school. And maybe I have Dickens and Mary Poppins in my heart. But I go to Britain once a year, enough to have an idea about what the country is today. Nowadays, when I am in London, I get the feeling that my English is better than most of the people I speak to. Suffice to say, in Portugal I am often accused of being a blind anglophile!
I am sure you like to wander as much as I do. Elvas is not exactly a place where most tourists go, and that is why your picture immediately draw my attention.
I shall be looking for an old man with a Leica and a big worn hat with corks hanging down from the brim. I hope he feels free to contact me if he comes to Portugal again. I shall be only too pleased to meet him – and, if that is impossible, to give him a few hints about the country and its places.
Again, congratulations for your picture
A truly lovely image. I love the colours and the curious characters! Worthy subject for the Q – we’ll seen and captured.
If every walk, produces a single useable image that is as a good as this – then it was worthy of both the walk and having your camera with you – excellent shot John. And I enjoy knowing the circumstances in which it was shot.
Cheers
Dave
Thanks Dave. Years ago I would have been very dissatisfied with a walk which only yielded one photo but nowadays i am delighted when I take just one "keeper" in a couple of days.
Indeed my three weeks in Portugal only yielded a handful of photos worth keeping.
John, your walk was not entirely wasted when you find a picture which asks a question or two. That is one of the joys of meandering through places essentially unknown to you.
David , thank you. Wandering aimlessly around cities -with a camera in my hand has been one of the joys of my life and most of my best photos have been taken on such wanderings. The French have a word for such a wanderer-a Flaneur. I dread the day-which is fast approaching-when I will not be strong enough for prolonged aimless wandering.
You are absolutely right and I know that in most cases the English quickly retire because they don’t want to be a nuisance. Alas, they are often seen as rude and arrogant by most of us, who would like to have a chat with them! That, I believe, has a lot to do with the “do not talk to strangers” education, apart from an obsession with privacy. “Watching the English – the hidden rules of English behaviour”, by Kate Fox, is a book I enjoyed reading and have recommended to many people – both English and not-English.
My excuses to Mr Shingleton. I said I know how different the English are from the Scots or the Welsh – I have no doubts about the Aussies, although I was never to their beautiful island.
I am also conversant with three European languages, apart from my own (English is my third one), and I congratulate you for it. It is definitely uncommon in Britain. Speaking other languages has a lot of advantages. Apart from the mental exercise, it allows us to read literature in the original language (lots of things get lost in translations), and it allows us to read newspapers. Everyday I start by looking at the main news in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English newspapers. We worry about different things, we look at the same problems in different ways.
Congratulations for your site. As you have probably realized by now, I visit it every day.
Luis, I feel that i should respond to your, I am sure, well intentioned comments regarding the English and their appreciation of Portugese culture. Firstly as Mike points out and you noted in your second comment I am not English-I am Australian and I have lived here for nearly 50 years. Calling an Australian English is a bit like calling a Portugese Spanish or worst still a Canadian American. Easily done but not recommended.
Having said that whilst the English readers can stick up for themselves I should say that you do portray England as being like a set from a Merchant Ivory film-full of shy, retiring people living in little cottages when they are not in the village pub.
Anyway "retiring" is not an epiphet applicable to most Australians and as I am sure those who know me will testify it certainly does not apply to me. Also as an Australian and after this year’s summer I am sure that I know as much about living in a hot country as any Portugese. Two weeks ago it was cooler in Lisbon than it was in my home of Terrigal in NSW where it was supposedly winter.
My wife and I love Portugal and have spent nearly seven weeks there in two trips in the last 18 months. We do not travel in a coach tour or arrive by cruiseliner. We come on a big plane via Dubai, hire a car and drive around the countryside exploring the country and staying in little out of the way places. I wander around on foot with my camera a lot, I engage with people and I reckon we now know as much about Portugal as most tourists. If you take a look at some of my other posts on Macfilos you will see that I invairably engage with people before I photograph them even in a country like Myanmar where we have no common language. This photo in Elvas was an exception and I took for the overall composition -not the people. In fact I tried cropping it to just the people and it lost all its impact.
Anyway thank you for taking the time to look at Macfilos and my photo and maybe our paths will cross in some small Portugese town on my visit next year. I’ll be easy to recognise. I’m the old man with a Leica and a big worn hat with corks hanging down from the brim.
If you care to walk on any of our towns, you will see lots of people sitting by the road – for hours. There are numerous jokes about it. One of them goes like this: a car races past a group of men, sitting by the road. After an hour, a man says "I saw a Ferrari". After two hours, a second one answers, "it was not a Ferrari, it was a Porsche". And an hour later, a third one stands up and decides to go home, because "I do not like hot discussions". This has to do with several things, some of which are probably hard to understand for a Northern European, brought up under a protestant-puritan ethics: (1) you do not have to be doing something all the time (i.e., you enjoy, or even prefer, being idle; work is punishment, not virtue); (2) we love being outside, watching other people (the English much prefer to be at home, and to watch birds instead of people – both things puzzle us). Different climates are just one of the reasons for the difference: you moved to stay warm in cold climates, and you absolutely refrained from moving in hot climates. Still another reason is education. In the seventies, there was still a minor but significant part of the population that was illiterate, and only a part of the population ever went to secondary school. The part of the population that went to university was not very significant. You do not often see this later part idling by the road.
You only understand a country if you care to talk with its inhabitants. The English, as a rule, do not do it – partly because they are taught not to talk to strangers, partly because they do not care to learn other languages. I have often tried to help English people in Portugal because I happen to speak English. Although they are always polite, they often go away as fast as they can, back to their closed group. They will quickly retire to an English pub here, if they see one – a place where the Portuguese are not welcome. And they will make all sorts of weird comments about the Portuguese, whom they do not understand. If I am abroad, I will jump at any opportunity to talk to the locals, and try avoid my countrymen because I can have them at home. In other words, if I went to Bièvres, I would definitely look for the hotel where the French stay.
I am very fond of England, so much that as a rule I go there once a year. I have been – many times – in London. Another cultural difference: we usually go abroad to go to capital cities, not small towns, and we do not care for gardening. Yet I have been to other places in England (Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, The Cotswolds …). And yes, I have been often in Wales, and once in Scotland, and contrary to most Portuguese, I know the difference. I like, and in most aspects admire, the English. But the trouble they have in understanding foreigners still eludes me.
Hello and thanks for the background information. You are treading on dangerous ground here….. Mr Shingleton is Australian and, even though he was born in Britain, probably objects to being called an Englishman! he has also probably shed at least some of his British reserve.
There is some truth in what you say, although your mention of Bièvres is obviously based on my comment about the social side and all being in the same hotel. You imply that we can’t exist unless we are surrounded by our own countrymen. As it happens, the regular Bièvres group includes not only British but Germans, Belgians, French, Austrians, a Japanese and three Americans. We even occasionally speak foreign languages, perish the thought. I am conversant with three European languages, for instance, but sadly not Portuguese so I would certainly welcome your ability to translate were I to visit the country.
I think the main problem with us British is that we are rather reserved and, while we enjoy chatting with people, we retire soon because we don’t want to be a nuisance. Perhaps the ones who run off back to their group are just trying to be polite and don’t want to trouble you.
But we could discuss this for hours. Your point about roadside loiterers is well taken, by the way.