Tuesday, August 10, 2004

All eleven of us, for reasons unknown to me, went into Portalegre for the morning so that a handful of us could run some errands. First, father had to go to the hospital for a routine blood test, then Maria and her mother walked over to the government building to get Maria's passport taken care of. Everybody else hung around at the little shopping mall by the hospital for what seemed like forever. A couple of hours later, everybody was bored, tired, hungry and grumpy, and there were still a number of errands to run. We decided to cut our losses, so we drove everybody but Isabel and mother back to Sao Salvador for lunch. Isabel and mother stayed behind to go back to the hospital to get the blood test results.

After we brought both cars full of people back to Sao Salvador, I immediately turned around and went back to Portalegre to wait for Isabel and mother. While I was waiting, I went into this little cafe and had the most disgusting hamburger I've ever eaten. Basically, it was a pre-cooked hamburger in a cellophane wrapper that was heated up in a toaster over. A hamburger in a bag. And it tasted like a hamburger in a bag. Isabel and mother showed up while I was eating, so they also had hamburgers in bags, then we went to the bank and the grocery store and returned home to Sao Salvador.

As soon as we got back, Maria and I headed back to Portalegre yet again with the boys (my third trip there that day) to go back to the government building to get her passport taken care of. They told us it should be ready by Friday.

When we got back to Sao Salvador, Vanessa and I went "dumpster diving" looking for Maria's missing jewelry. No luck. But we did find enough of our own trash from the past couple of days to rule out the possibility that the jewelry was thrown out accidentally. Our conclusion is that the jewelry is somewhere in the house. But as an added bonus of my dumpster diving adventure, I was treated to all sorts of interesting smells and odors. What a country!