August - Month for Families and Festas

In August Portugal is basically on holiday. The whole of the country gets into family mood and in towns and villages everyone gets ready to party!

Families who live inland go off to the coast and most beach areas are rammed with local and international holiday makers.

In the rural villages like ours, the sons and daughters of the local farmers who work abroad return to stay for the month with their families and to meet up with childhood friends. They are called Imigrantes, since they have left Portugal in search of more lucrative employment. The village population triples during this time and our lake beach is busy. Each village has three or four days of Festas, with music, family meals, dancing and live bands performing late into the night.

So we decided to go on holiday too this year and spent two weeks house-sitting for friends in the Algarve who were travelling to UK for weddings. They have a wonderful villa with swimming pool and so it was a real treat and opportunity for us to do very little.

Richard and Jo... and James and Adela...came to stay with us there for a week for our first whole-family holiday since Prague Christmas in 2000.

We all did very little except swim and read by the pool each day, cook lots of great food and enjoy each others company. I was in hog heaven!

We had two special nights of birthday dinners, since we had not been together for birthdays for the year. Boys´ night - when the boys selected the menu and girls cooked and Girls night when the men cooked the girls´choice of delights.

Lots of organised chaos and nervous preparation ensued but the food was amazing on both nights.So now I am busy working on the holiday video for the family archive! It was a wonderful week and I am now looking forward to the next opportunity to be together as a family. Our thanks to Steve and Jenny, Skaigh, Rimmer and Mittens for letting us use their home for our holiday.

We came back to the farm to discover that our friends José and Francisco, who had been house-sitting for us, had been rationing themselves with water since there was air in the system and the tank was almost empty. We did manage to resolve the problem but felt sorry that their stay had been marred by the lack of water!

Since then we have started painting again at last, since we got ourselves in the mood on holiday. Fraser is working on the veranda using oils...and I am doing water colours and pastels in the attic.It is great to be doing what we really want to do in our retirement and so we can´t wait for the barn to be finished so that we have time to do this other than at snatched moments and weekends.

A bonus this month was having a couple stay with us as volunteers to work on the land for accommodation and meals. Naama and Udi are also newly weds from Israel who are spending their honeymoon travelling in Spain and Portugal. They stayed with us for 5 days and helped us a great deal, in addition to being great company, wonderful cooks and helping us to become vegetarians for the week.

Patrticular thanks to Udi for getting my automatic irrigation going in the vegetable patch and to Naama for teaching me how to cook perfect stuffed vine leavesWe are so thankful for their enthusiasm about our life here and for helping us to remember how fortunate we are to have our own homestead. Udi called it our 'magical kingdom'.We wish them good luck and happiness in their life together in Jerusalem.