Market Day at Tabua

Several missions today, visit Tabua market for fresh produce, find somewhere to dispose of all our recycling collection, find drinking font to refill our 2 litre bottles so we don't have to buy bottled water, and a visit to Ecomarche for vittles and a drink of cold beer for our reward.

We found recycling facilities in the next village, ie Lourosa. We ditched bottles, cans, cardboard, plastic bottles and tetra packs (eg from cartons of milk, orange juice etc). We also found the village font, and refilled our water bottles for free.

The visit to the market and Ecomarche were also straightforward. At Ecomarche you can buy gallon containers of red wine (Capatz) for 6.45 euros. The wine is very drinkable and it's 13%. There is initially a deposit on the bottle of 1.25 euros, and then when you return the bottle they give you a ticket (bilhete) so you don't have to pay it on the next gallon container. All of this appeals to our greener side.

We bought a lettuce for 38 cents from the market that would have cost 1.49 in Lidl. The market is quite an experience at Tabua. On the inside market there are meat, fish, vegetable, bread stalls. Outside are the plant sales, and about once a month the market is larger, and there are clothes, hardware, shoe, curtain stalls etc. The sellers are very patient with us when we take an age to count out our cents to pay them.

Apart from that we've come back and Jon made some hummus for lunch but in the absence of our food processor, he had to make it using a mortar and pestle. We ate, as usual, outside on the patio in semi-shade from the sun. Chores done, there's nowt for it but for a sit inside in the cool, perhaps reading, or Suze doing a bit of sewing or silk painting.

There is Sky tv here, but the English channels we get are limited, like the usual BBC1, BBC2, ITV, More4 etc, so you can imagine we watch tv very occasionally, usually to watch the British weather forecast for a good laugh, though it seems to be a bit warmer over there at the moment. The Portugese children's programmes are cute - we thought watching these might help our Portugese but we can't understand what they're talking about. And when the little pigs keep just saying "Oink, Oink" there's not much to be learned from that. Still Suze likes the animation, that is quite sophisticated compared to some English kids tv programmes.

Anyway, that's it for today. Will be Skyping my mom later on today, so fingers crossed the internet connection stays stable and we don't get a thunderstorm.