jslabovitz

Waiting for the train

Posted by jslabovitz | 19th December 2008

This afternoon I arrived at the train station in Vila Real de Santo António assuming a short wait. Instead I found the online schedule had been wrong, and I had just missed my train, and would wait another hour and a half for the next one to Tavira.

In the same situation was Domingos, a young man from Guinea-Bissau. He offered me swigs from his one-liter Super Bock beer, which he tilted carefully above his mouth to avoid mouth contact. It was a polite action I'd seen before in my travels -- perhaps in Morocco or Romania? I offered him apricots, bought this morning in the mercado where fish merchants sold still-writhing eels.

Domingos & I commiserated about the long wait ahead of us, he in a patois of Portuguese, French, and Spanish, and me monolingual at best, scattering simple, pan-Latin words when I could.

But we got along nonetheless, as strangers usually do. I had to pee, and Domingos suggested the nearby supermercato where he'd bought his beer. As I relieved myself

Continued | On the Road

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