Portuguese is really hard; even they think so. It is also, and you better remember this, NOT just another kind of Spanish. They’d rather have you “mangle the Portuguese than try to use Spanish and think we’ll understand.” There’s a strong national pride here and “Spain is our only neighbor so sometimes we have to hate them.” It’s Spain and the ocean, actually – one on one side, one on the other.
In between language lessons today, as we wandered the Medieval town of Guimarães we learned even more about local feelings toward the Euro and the EU. Here are some of the opinions/facts (?) offered in the past two days:
- The Euro doubled all the prices but salaries didn’t go up.
- The EU has made it difficult to impossible to rescue old buildings because no one can afford to do it privately and neither can the government.
- Portugal’s membership in the EU has been a disaster. They have a huge debt which is not their fault and Europe and the rest of the world calls them spendthrift when the (aforementioned) inflation has made it tough for this small country to operate financially.*
- The EU also governs what countries control what industry. Larger nations forced Portugal to destroy the ships that sustained their centuries-old fishing industry because the big guys already controlled fishing.**
- The EU tells countries what they are going to grow and produce and many agricultural traditions are being lost.
- The EU has banned copper pans for cooking and the traditional Portuguese egg custard has always been made in copper pans and it just doesn’t taste the same in any other vessel.
Look again at this poster. It says “We Are Not the Debt” and complains that all Portuguese are being blamed for their country’s debt to the EU when, they say, it has largely been the EU’s policies that made the borrowing necessary in the first place.
Nobody will ever accuse this lovely, colorful country, with its passionate politics, of being a simple place; part of its charm is the passion with which their views are held. Our visit here as been a happy, enlightening surprise.
* NOTE: a couple of knowledgeable people on this trip have taken exception to this, claiming that it was not the Euro but the huge amount of public spending that has caused their debt.
**NOTE: These same knowledgeable people, one a CEO and the other an active environmentalist, maintain that the ban on fishing was instituted because the waters off Portugal have been massively over-fished and the only way to preserve the fish population was to cut off fishing and allow them to replenish. Yet another person, Chilean, told me he thought it was just that Portugal could not compete and so was encouraged to try other industries. Clearly, if I get that many opinions in one day, this country’s relationship with its economic future, and with the EU, is complicated.
