Faro

I left Lisbon yesterday and made it down to Faro, after just barely catching the train at Lisbon's Oriente Train Station.

The ride was easy and pleasant, as daytime trains in Europe tend to be. The cafe was clean and easily accesible, the conductors were kind, and my fellow travelers were quiet.

Faro is a nice place, a smallish town on the Southern coast of Portugal. It is a bit touristy, and packed with classy cafes and shops, but there is also a very real, very local scene here that is quite easy to find.

I am staying in a slightly less visited part of town, in a small pension run by an Armenian man who fled Lebanon at the onset of their civil war, in the 1970's. This man, Paul, seems to be always about to cry, tears crowding his eye sockets as he talks about everything that he has lost, his health, the death of loved ones. He tells me that when he goes to church, he asks God for luck, as for him this is the only thing that decides between the fate of one man and another. He, quite obviously, does not consider himself to be one of the lucky ones.

He tells me that he is not angry for the money he lost in Lebanon, but rather for the time. He has been over twenty years away from his home, and he says that still all he thinks about it so much lost time. And so he wiles away his time at the Pension, watching Casablanca over and over, paying bills and sipping coffee at the nearby Cafe do Se.

Outside my hotel, quite close, is one of the Cathedrals of Faro, and last night the church organization threw a big bash in front of the church. They set up small fair tents, plastic tables, and chairs. They set up a huge stage, packed with amplifiers, and hired one woman to play a keyboard and sing popular Portuguese songs. She seemed very small up there on the huge, empty stage.

The old people danced, the young ran wild, and everyone ate sausage and fish, drank beer and soda. The music went until late and the drunks screamed until later, waking me up at five with what seemed to be a game of aluminum can soccer in front of my hotel.

I made some friends yesterday, two local girls--one a crude, garishly dressed clown of a girl, the other an apologetic, meek girl with a bad limp. They called me over to them while I was walking in the neighborhood and asked me if I would like to join them for a beer. Ignoring the obvious advances of the clown, I accepted, willing to settle for any company rather than spend the whole evening alone.

I actually had a good time with the girls, and met some of their other friends--a hard core punk guy and his dyed-hair girlfriend, a goth girl and some other interesting types. They were all very friendly, and talked with me, though unsurprisingly, I had the great luck to be able to spend a few minutes playing American Ambassador throughout the evening.

And so, once again, as I have so many times, I found myself answering questions from cocksure Europeans, trying to explain to them that the world is not quite as black and white as many of them see it, that no, George Bush, terrible as he is, is not responsible for every single problem in the world, that yes, it is true that there are a lot of rednecks in the South.

Best of all, I got an earful about the "American ignorance of geography" from a girl who minutes before had asked me if there were beaches in the United States. After I responded in the affirmative, she exclaimed, "Ah yes! California!" I didn't mention the other thousands of miles of coastal territory possessed by the United States.

But this is Europe, and I guess that the occasional drop of Anti-Americanism, as long as it is not a personal thing (hey, they invited me to drink with them) is to be expected and considered somewhat normal. All that I can do is tell them (to quote the title of an unwritten book) that, "Hey, You're as bad as U.S."