CATEGORY: JURI
PHOTOS: 1) JEAN IN GUIMARAES
2) ELEPHANT BEETLE

In 1987 Juri took me on a trip to Portugal.  He had to go to Lisbon for an international nuclear physics conference.  He decided that afterwards we would tour the country.  

He did not spare any expense.  We stayed at the most historic and architecturally interesting places he could find.  Portugal has Pousadas: historic buildings which have been restored and turned into hotels by the government.  Most of them had been monasteries and convents.  In all of them they had left parts of the building or patches of wall unfinished so the guests could see a pre-restoration sample.  

At the pusada in Guimaraes, an unfinished part was the bottom of the bell tower between the pousada and the church.  When we explored it I found a hole in the wall between it and the church.  When I peeked through, there, crawling across the ancient tile floor was a beetle!  It was IMMENSE—I am sure it was 3 inches long!  It had “plates” on its head.  It looked like a pre-historic armored tank.  It was headed toward a protruding wall behind which I would not be able to see it.  I cried out to Juri to come and see.  I said, “Hurry, Hurry!”  Immediately Juri’s Estonian suspicion kicked in.   He did not hurry.  He did not even move.  I said, “PLEASE come!”  By the time he condescendingly came and looked through the hole, it was too late.  I told him it was a beetle.  He looked at me as if I were trying to show him Paul McCartney.  I ran around and tried to get into the church by its front door.  Most Catholic churches in Porgugal were left unlocked.  This one wasn’t.  I even went to the hotel office and told them about the beetle and asked if they would let me into the church.  They were obliging, but there was no beetle in sight.  I don’t think Juri ever believed me, although why I’ll never know.  I never lied to him.

Early in the morning, in Guimares, we heard music.  We rushed to the French doors that opened onto an iron railed balcony.  A wedding procession was going by.  One of the musical instruments was unique.  Its center was a five foot pole, the top two thirds of which was surrounded by pairs of boy and girl dolls about 6” high dressed in traditional costumes.  They had symbols on their stomachs.  A wooden ring around the pole was connected to the dolls by strings.  When the ring was pulled down, the central part of the doll couples anatomy came together and clanged their symbols.  A wedding seemed the appropriate time to be sexually suggestive.

One of the places we stayed was the Royal Palace Hotel near Bussaco: a five star hotel , once the Royal Hunting Lodge.  It was the ultimate in luxury.  At dinner in the opulent dining room, Juri took my hand and said, “You are the most beautiful woman in this room.”   Since we were eating early and the large room had only a few other guests, this was a bit anticlimactic, but I was touched by his generosity of spirit as well as his material generosity.  I looked at him lovingly.  I said, “And you are the handsomest man.”  We were up to our ears–totally besotted with living in a fairy tale.

Portugal is a beautiful country.  We saw all of it that one could see in two weeks.  We went from Sintra in the south to Viana do Castelo in the north.  Geraniums and split leaf philodendrons grew wild.  All possible land, including the rail road right-of-ways was utilized for vegetable gardens.  Most of the ground around private homes was also planted with food bearing crops, even in vertical space!  A tree, such as a Lombardy Poplar was planted and then all its branches pruned away except for a little tuft at the top–just enough to keep it alive.  Then a grape vine was planted at its base and trained to climb up the trunk.  We were there during harvest time.  All of the “grape trees” had ladders leaning against them.

There was a marked difference between Portugal and the Spain I remembered from eight years earlier.  In Spain I had seen whole families living in garbage dumps and under bridges.  I had seen seven year old children smoking cigarettes and drunk on the streets.  Portugal was very different.  The people seemed happy, healthy and prosperous.  They were friendly.  It helped that Juri could speak a language they understood: German.  I learned right away not to complement anyone on anything because the object of my admiration would be given to me.  At our first night’s dinner, I told the waiter that the bouquet of roses on the side board beside our table was lovely.  He immediately gave me one of the roses.  

It is going a little over the top to say that the most interesting thing I saw in Portugal was a beetle.  After I got back to Port Townsend, I looked up beetles in every reference I could find.  It must have been either an Elephant Beetle or a Rhinoceros Beetle, but it did not have the Elephant Beetle’s trunk or the Rhinoceros Beetle’s horn.  My source stated that the females did not have these appurtenances, so maybe my beetle was a female.  Still, my memory was not good enough to be able to definitely say which one it might be.