It’s just a tiny, backwoods festival, but the village does manage to hold it every year. And we’ve gone to it the last few years with some friends.
I say “participated,” but everyone just files in once night falls, chomps on some good ol’ Portuguese bifana (boiled pork sandwiches) at the bar counter, throws back a few beers, and goes home. In other words, the “festival” is basically just an excuse to drink.
You can order ten 1.30-euro beers for 10.5 euros—but instead of ordering “ten beers,” you order “a meter”. At which point a long, narrow board comes out with ten beers sitting in it. We just keep sucking up the cold beer while ordering these “meters” again and again, vaguely listening to the band play on the stage and half-watching the old couples dance in front of it.
What I’m trying to get at is that there’s literally nothing special going on other than the massive quantities of beer. So why do we keep going year after year? Because we can give the kids a little pocket money and leave them on their own to the trampoline and the prize drawings and the can knockdown game in an area filled with other kids. It’s not that crowded and some booths are even run by other kids. It’s a true country experience that’s safe and peaceful.
It’s annoying to have the kids bring all their worthless prizes home from the drawings and their games after the festival, though this year they actually brought back good things like bottles of wine and succulents. Maybe the people running the booths couldn’t get a hold of the usual prizes this time.
Snails are another summer staple in Portugal. I don’t know if it’s because the chefs at the festival weren’t any good or what, but the ones we had there were sour and a lot of them were withdrawn into their shells (preparing the snails requires seasoning them in lukewarm water to get them out of their shells).
Speaking of, snails recently made the news when the Portuguese Ministry of Health confiscated six tons of live ones from the northern part of the country, since they were apparently imported from another country without labels certifying them as safe for human consumption.
Before I go, I’ll tell you about the signature game of the village festival, O Jogo dos Pregos, or “the game of nails”.
A group gathers around a big tree stump, with one nail slightly hammered into it for each player, positioned so that it’s standing straight up. The players each get one chance to hit their nail with a hammer before passing it on to the next person. Everyone keeps taking their turn in order, and the first person to hammer their nail in all the way in wins. Sometimes the nails just won’t go into the stump, sometimes people miss the head of the nail, and it’s always fun to see the guys trying to outdo each other in their macho contest. I can’t wait for the day when my boy outdoes his father and gets his nail in first!
