Sort of Surviving a Heat Wave in Portugal
Three days of not quite melting in Lisbon
CAVEAT EMPTOR: This piece, being about very recent events, is quite fresh. However, in this heat, it will probably spoil quickly, so it is safest to read it within the next couple of days. I should warn that the piece also contains pictures of melted cats and turtles, quite a lot of nudity (not pictured) and a certain amount of alcohol. Enjoy responsibly!
Toward the end of last week, those of us living in Portugal started to receive warnings, through all the usual channels (television, radio, social media, Mom, friends, neighbors, feral cats), that there was a heat wave coming. The predictive heat map of the Iberian Peninsula, in June normally sporting citric shades of yellow and orange, was suddenly purpling like a bruise.
“Shit”, I said with less-than-usual eloquence. “And I don’t have air conditioning.”
I could tell that this was not going to be easy.
I started to think about what I would do if, as predicted, it got to be over 40 degrees Celsius—104 Fahrenheit—in Lisbon. I was worried not just for myself, but also for my cold-blooded roommate.
Regular readers of Living Elsewhere will already know that my roommate is a turtle. Long-term readers (at least since last December) may also appreciate my current favorite joke: My turtle's name is spelled S-T-J-Ä-R-N-A and is pronounced “Elizabeth”.
Little Stjärna and I are partners in sloth. Our favorite thing in the world is to snuggle in a hammock in the sun. But now I realized that soon, this would become a way of roasting my poor little friend.
For one moment of panic, I considered that, Lisbon being essentially the big toe of Europe, there was nowhere within driving distance that was not going to be absurdly hot for the next few days. And checking into a hotel with my turtle seemed a bit over the top. So we would have to figure something out.
Friday was pretty warm, and Saturday was hot. Not too hot, but hot. I started preparing the apartment for the heat. Sadly, I took down my hammock, which was in the hottest room of the apartment, moved my plants around, and gave them lots of water. Strangely, my beloved begonia, which had traveled for so many thousands of miles with Liza and me two years ago, had just offered me its first flowers since the move. Poor little begonia would need some protection too.
My friend Mafalda called and said, “It’s hot! Let’s go to the beach.” I couldn’t think of a reason to argue. So we drove down to the “line”, as they say here, and staked a claim on a patch of sand. The heat was much less on the beach, probably because the water was freezing. Mafalda wimped out after two minutes, but I—having lived in Scandinavia, where fear of cold is punishable by a hefty fine (which, however, can be disputed through an ombudsman)—spent a good long while swimming in the frigid sea, until I could no longer feel my feet. Then we read on the beach.
Parking down there on the “line” was a bit trickier than one might have liked. There were some traffic lights that were quite hard to interpret, and the Portuguese drivers were being Portuguese drivers. I remember that we ended up in a parking garage where the ticket payment machine had a strange feature: You inserted your ticket, paid with a card, and then removed your ticket. Then, after a curiously long pause, the machine would print and spit out a receipt the size of a necktie. The problem is that nobody seemed to wait for their receipt, so the machine just sat alone shedding its autumnal receipts like a shipwrecked sailor with plenty of empty bottles.
After a lovely dinner of sushi and sangria (because it’s hot!), I dropped Mafalda off at home and retured to my palace.
Now when I say I returned to my palace, I know that that sounds like a romantic use of figurative language. But I really do live by a palace. This is the view from my bedroom window—I kid you not.
It was clear that the only way to survive the next few days was to engage in some very strategic opening and closing of windows and doors. In short, you keep the windows open all night, close them at 9 or 10 am, and keep them closed until the outdoor temperature approaches the indoor temperature.
So I lay there in bed, admiring my palace. And that was when the heavy metal started.
I live one kilometer away from a football stadium. Normally, I don’t hear the games much, probably because the local team isn’t very good. But this weekend, instead of football, someone had arranged “Lisbon’s loudest event”, a heavy metal festival called—I’m not making this up—EvilLive. This name felt apt as I lay there in bed, listening to the pounding drums, the thrumming bass, and the thrashing guitars, pondering the question of whether it is better to suffer indoor temperatures of 90 F during the day or to lose sleep all night because of sounds produced by bands with names like DeathCrank, Lepro-C, Sudden Angina, Municipal Waste, Kraaash!!!, Pandas of Evil, and FunGus. (I made all of those up except for Municipal Waste.) I assured myself that, even though this was Portugal, not Scandinavia, the concert wouldn’t be allowed to go all that late.
It ended at five in the morning. Mafalda, who lives a kilometer and a half on the other side of the stadium, confirmed this. Let’s just say that it wasn’t the best way to start a heat wave.
I wrote a piece recently with a very different tone in which I tried to celebrate the small details of life that we often overlook. One small thing that people probably don’t appreciate enough is when their bathroom doesn’t smell like sewage. I had been having a problem in mine, so just a couple of days prior to the heatwave, I got my landlady to send over her man, Senhor Marques, to fix the problem.
One thing I find charming about the Portuguese is how frank they can be. Sure, they will bullshit you at certain moments, but they can also exhibit a refreshing forthrightness that I don’t think I have seen as much in, say, Americans. Senhor Marques showed up at my door half an hour late, shook my hand, apologized for his tardiness (here I was thinking that in Portugal, thirty minutes isn’t bad at all), and said, “If I’m honest, I fell asleep. I had a nice lunch and then I lay down, and suddenly I woke up and it was late.” I have trouble imagining an American contractor being this candid.
Senhor Marques had resealed my toilet, which meant that I could close my windows without asphyxiating myself. So now, on Sunday, I went into action. I calibrated my collection of thermometers (including the one outside that reports to an app on my phone). I tidied, vacuumed and mopped, so that the apartment would at least be a pleasant prison.
And then I realized that I didn’t have enough food. I made a dash to one of the local “hypermarkets” (what will come next, I wonder—“galactic markets”?) to stock up on things that would not spoil easily and didn’t need much cooking.
Arriving at the shopping mall, I realized that there was a car wash there—the kind where they wash your car by hand, inside and out. Given that my car currently looks like a muddy river bank that has somehow broken free, I stopped by the car wash to inquire about getting a time.
No dice; they were fully booked for the next five hours. This seemed reasonable to me. What did not, however, seem so reasonable was the board behind the counter—nay, actually beside the counter, close to the customers—where they apparently hung the keys of the cars to be washed. When I arrived, there was nobody in the office, just a bunch of keys there, ready to be snagged by a car thief.
This made me unsure about whether I really wanted to use the service. But it does highlight a curious thing about Portugal: While the people here will tell you that there is a lot of crime (and many will blame it on immigrants, sadly), they don’t seem that worried. There just isn’t the baseline level of fear, suspicion and mistrust that now characterizes so much of the USA.
(I do hope the company will read this and put the keys in a cabinet, though.)
I went into the shopping center and found myself at a Starbucks. This is a less frequent occurrence in Lisbon than you might imagine, and I hadn’t been to one since my conversation with a Venezuelan friend several months ago. I decided that coffee before shopping would help me get through the experience, so I ordered an espresso. I was one of three people in the place. The miserable-looking young man at the counter asked me what my name was. I wanted to say, “My name is R. U. Kidding.” But instead I said Gregorio. He made my espresso and handed it to me, with me standing there the whole time. He never had to say Gregorio.
Sufficiently fueled, I ventured into hyperspace, piloting my trusty Millennium Cart through the aisles. I admired the brilliance of the fresh produce and laughed upon seeing Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake mix shelved in the Flavors of Brazil section.
Two hours later, I had filled my cart to overflowing, with enough food and wine to see me and Stjärna through the next week. (Interesting note: This cost under $170, including some pretty fancy products.) I had also purchased, on impulse, a gadget that was advertised in French as a “refraichisseur d’aire”—translated to “air cooler”. The reptilian part of my brain saw this and said, “I can have air conditioning!” The mammalian part said nothing, but just whipped out the credit card. This was a stupid mistake.
Back home, I tended to my actual reptile. She seemed to be doing fine in the mounting heat. In the absence of the hammock, she spent some of her time sitting on my lap, and most of her time sleeping. I wish I had her life.
I took on the challenge of cooking things without cooking them. I developed various heat-free meals, including Avocado No-toast. It was actually quite fun. Tip: the last photo below shows most of the ingredients for the green bean dish at Café Dunkerque in Paris, which I have been a bit obsessed with recreating lately.
And of course, with nowhere to go, I had to spend my evenings at home, keeping myself cool on the inside with the refreshing white wines of Douro, Alentejo, and Tejo—this last made mostly with the arinto grape, a particular favorite.
Sunday was hot. As the temperature indoors gradually increased, I looked for ways to mitigate the heat. I filled the boiler of my espresso maker only halfway, to avoid having a heat sink of a liter of boiling water on the counter. I filled a tupperware with ice and put it atop the box in Stjärna’s terrarium where she likes to hide. Voilà: a turtle fridge!
And I tried my new gadget, the impulse purchase from the hypermarket, which turned out to be essentially a fan with a fountain built in. In “natural” mode, it would blow at varying speeds while making a sound like someone taking an endless tinkle. It quickly sent the humidity of my apartment through the roof. I did some research and learned that these devices, known by some as “swamp coolers”, are only useful in desert climates. Great. Why they sell them here in Lisbon where the humidity is high, I don’t understand. I put it back in the box.
I decided that the key to surviving a heat wave is this: relative humility.
I stayed indoors, trying to get work done, and practicing my French. It occurred to me that learning French is like childbirth—you have to deal with an awful lot of contractions.
I worked on tidying my apartment and sorting my papers. I found bizarre things, like a scrawled note about some dream in which, apparently, I had been talking to a journalist who was complaining about running out of Coke McNuggets. In the muted light of the shuttered day, everything was becoming dreamlike.
I did venture out into my neighborhood once per day. There were few people about—but not none. Even when the temperature was over 32 C (i.e. in the nineties), there were still clumps of people seated in long trousers around outdoor café tables, drinking dainty glasses of cold beer.
Some enterprising individuals had started selling things to tourists, like bottles of cold water. Or as this sign puts it, fresh water bottles. Was this a candidate for Language Chaos? It was too hot to think about it.
I would make my rounds quickly, duck into the supermarket for some ice, and snatch a few moments of beauty on the way home, enjoying things like the shadows of wires in the afternoon sun.
The sky, for its part, was hung with marvelous clouds that made it look like a new world was coming. But a world without refreshing rainfall.
At home, Stjärna was out of her icebox and looked melted. The feral cats of the neighborhood looked the same. The one positive thing about this heat wave was that they had stopped their perpetual yowling under my window.
The pigeons, however, were out in force. I took my recycling to the igloos, and a band of them accosted me, asking for money, or at least some bread. I told them I was sorry, I had nothing but plastic.
On Monday, the heat was still bad, but I was feeling restless. I decided to go out for a hot meal, and to do some shopping. So I went to the place I know with the best air-conditioning and the cheapest food: IKEA.
I was able to have a plate of meatballs for under five euros (including coffee). And it was gloriously cool inside, so I gallivanted around in half-hearted shopping mode, laughing at the product names, which I am fairly unique in this country in being able to interpret. For example, this product has a ridiculous name: Undvika, which means “avoid”. I didn’t buy it.
I went to a nearby store to see if I could get something that was better than a swamp cooler. The fan aisle had the look of a Covid-era toilet paper aisle.
I noticed, to my surprise, that while my car was parked overnight, someone had attached a pair of panties to my mirror. I only detected them when I was on the road, flying them like a pennant. I was not sure what emotion to feel. Anger isn’t much like me. I considered embarrassment, but dismissed it, as they were not my panties, after all. I decided on worry—lest I should inadvertently start a trend, and soon everyone would be driving around flying underpants.
I noticed something else during the drive home that amused me greatly. Someone had apparently had a bucket of white paint spill in the back of their truck. This drizzled a line down the road for several kilometers. I followed it through several twists and turns and a couple of roundabouts. Amazingly, it went all the way to my house, stopping at the door of a warehouse right next door. I felt like Hansel, and wondered whether perhaps the panties were Gretel’s. But that didn’t seem like a good direction to go in.
On Tuesday, the temperature started to come down. It was incredible to be able to open the windows and feel a reasonably cool breeze blow through. I realized that—for now, at least—we had made it through the worst of the heat wave. I looked at Stjärna and said, “We did it!” She said nothing, because she was asleep, of course.
If you enjoyed this ridiculously long piece, here are some slightly shorter ones that you might also like:
Do you like Arinto? My wife worked several years doing Arinto wine tastings in Bucelas, 30 minutos from Lisbon. If you like snails we can go to Snails Festival in Loures. Great combination snails and Arinto.
PS: The heat was not that bad, only 2 days above 40 without east winds.
It wasn’t quite that hot here in The Hague but it was brutal—our first summer without air conditioning in many years. I made pasta before the heat set in, and we had a variety of cold bean or bulgar salads until the rain finally broke the heat. Survivors!