The Blork Blog

I was in the small and ancient city of Évora, about 150 km from Lisbon, with a car, a couple of books by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, and a roughly plotted course towards the Algarve town of Tavira. The books were English translations (from the original Portuguese) of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist. Both are tales of travel and spiritual quest–perfect reading for this little solo odyssey I was on.

On my first night in Évora, I returned after dinner to my room in the small modest inn where I was staying. (Évora doesn’t have much night life.) I opened the small window for some fresh air, and heard voices coming from the hotel’s terrace–voices speaking English.

I went to investigate and found four people seated around a table sipping beer and chatting–a couple who appeared to be in their early 40s, and two women in their early 20s. I introduced myself and was invited to join them.

As it turns out, the couple were a pair of Francophone Quebecers who were not only from Montreal, but from my neighbourhood! The two girls were from Belgium, and the four had just met a while earlier. Oddly, the Belgian girls couldn’t understand the Montrealer’s Quebecois French, so they had found common ground in English.

I was rather impressed with this coincidence–that the couple were my neighbours back home–and began looking for meaning, or at least more coincidence. I was heading for the coastal town of Tavira in a day or two, and so too were my neighbours. Later that night, however, I was flipping through my travel guide looking for diversions, and I found a town along the way called Beja that had a hotel on the town square called Residencial Coelho. Given that I was up to my eyeballs in Paulo Coelho and his spiritual omen-laden journeys, how could I not follow up on that?

A couple of days later I gave my neighbours a lift as far as Beja. They continued on to Tavira, and I went to the Residence Coelho in search of a room. Fortunately, one was available, with a view on the modest square, but I had to wait until the maid cleaned it. It was around noon then, so I figured it wouldn’t take long. I walked around the town, returning to the hotel every 45 minutes or so to see if the room was ready. Finally, sometime after 3 pm, I could move in, which was quite interesting given that the hotel only had about 15 rooms, and by the look of it, only three or four were due to be cleaned.

Whatever. I was in the small and so far very uninteresting town of Beja, where I was convinced I would have some kind of epiphany, or at least another clue as to what to do next. I also had to move my car, which was badly parked. So I drove around the small square looking for a better spot. Although the streets were small, with only a lane or two of circulation–all in the same direction–I managed to wedge my small Volkswagen Pony into a situation where I had a big yellow truck on my left and another car on my right. When the truck moved, it brushed against the front left flank of my car with an awful scraping sound. It appeared to be just the mirror that had gotten whacked, so when the driver got out to look, and my inspection of the mirror showed it was unharmed, I waved him off.

A couple of minutes later I found a parking spot, got out of the car, and noticed the long and ragged yellow scrape on the car’s otherwise dark metallic grey fender.

Ouch. Although I had insurance on the car, there was a $500 deductible, plus I would have to front the repair cost and try to recuperate the balance from American Express, who were covering the extended insurance because I used their card to rent the vehicle. I have been around car repairs enough to know that a paint scrape can cost $1500 or more to repair if you are unconstrained–as are repair shops doing insurance jobs for car rental companies.

So far, my omen wasn’t doing me much good at all. I decided to put it out of my mind and go see more of the town. I regret to inform you that Beja, despite its impressive history, is a pretty dull town. It was pleasant enough for about an hour, and had I gone to a few musuems instead of worrying about getting into my room I might have had a better time, but past 5 pm there was almost nothing. A couple of biggish restaurants, no cafes worth considering, not a single public Internet connection, and even the one geezer bar I found just… didn’t seem right.

It was worse after dark. Just about everything was shut. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating solo in one of those big family-oriented restaurants, and could find nothing else except a small no-name burger joint. You should have seen me sitting on that red plastic chair eating a wax paper-wrapped burger and fries–the only customer in the restaurant–while the two bored kids behind the counter stared at me whispering É americano? to each other.

I spent the rest of the night in my room with a cheap bottle of red wine, a bag of greasy potato chips, and the X Files playing (in English with Portuguese subtitles) on a small TV that was hanging from the ceiling, way over there in the corner.

Next day I left Beja, which I had taken to calling fucking Beja and went to Tavira. Things immediately improved, although I didn’t bump into my neighbours again. I spent the rest of the trip devising ways to hide the paint scrape. Fortunately, there was no structural damage. Doubly fortunate, the painters at Volkswagen are better than whomever painted that damn truck, because it was mostly a matter of yellow paint on top of the VW’s paint.

What finally did the job was a mix of beach sand and laundry detergent. Placed on a wet towel, this abrasive formula wore down the yellow paint and finally removed all traces. Unfortunately it also wore off a lot of the Polo’s grey paint, and left an un-waxed and scratchy smudge over a large part of the fender.

Phase 2 of the plan was to drive through a whole lot of mud puddles before I had to return the car in Lisbon, and that’s exactly what I did. I almost lost that little urban zippy car near Villa Nova de Milfontes, when I drove it along a cow path that lead down to the sea, my passenger–an Australian named Phyllis–in search of an ocean view and me in search of mud puddles. A couple of days later I delivered a very dirty Volkswagen Polo to the rental agency in Lisbon, and the sleepy attendant didn’t look too closely. I got their “OK” in writing and left, quickly. No doubt they spent about $10 on a bit of touch-up paint and some wax, and had the thing looking as good as new, as opposed to the $1500 or so they would have charged me for a complete restoration of the fender.

My lesson? Omens may come easily, but their meanings do not. And beware of false signs! After I returned to Montreal I found out that Coelho is simply the Portuguese word for “rabbit,” and in the rural Alentejo region of Portugal, rabbits are a dime a dozen.