Snails are much more active here than the snails in Extremadura who just used to hang round in clumps waiting to be harvested. Snails were also a very common meal there, and I don’t think so much here. We’d see snails in bars as tapas, frozen in shops, people collecting them in fields… Here, they just seem intent on heading into the house, by which ever means they can.
It’s certainly not uncommon to find one or two looking through the window at us, or coming along attached to the car for a ride.
And talking of unwanted guests – we saw some Portugese man of wars (or men of war), washed up on the beach. This is the first I’ve seen, but there are often warnings on the beach if they are seen – and sometimes the beach is shut if they are seen close to the beach, until they are collected. There is even a special flag which gets put up if they are seen around.
I have seen videos though, as there was an education campaign earlier in the summer teaching people the difference between Portugese Man of war (which is not, I have learned a jelly fish) and some other forms of sea life which aren’t poisonous.
The PMoWs have massively long tenticles which the ones on the beach didn’t have any more, which is one of the reasons they are so problematic as they can sting from a long way away.
In other news…
We have neighbours!
One of the houses in our little cluster has a family who moved in last week, which is nice. They are in the house the other side of the house on the other side of the road. So behind the house in this photo:
Car News
Our car failed it’s annual inspection and we have quite a shopping list of things that needed to be done, so Ian took the car to a garage the other side of San Cibrao, which is at the top of a hill. When we went to pick it up, we were early, so we took a wander around and got quite a different view of the town and the port – and mermaid island!
The car needs one more thing done before it can be retested, which is proving a little problematic at the moment as the two garages we’ve been to, don’t have the right equipment. I guess there’s not much call for repairing 30 year old vehicles!