Quarterly Report

The First Quarter of 2024 started off with an extraordinary and unexpected event. A friend from the Western Garden club posted on WhatsApp that she had a box for a concert that weekend that could not be used due to a health issue. We quickly checked with friends who immediately agreed and within minutes we had acquired a box for that Friday at Teatro Nacional de São Carlos to hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Within a day, we booked rooms at the Hotel Fénix, booked the train to Lisbon, and made a dinner reservation at O Português Chiado.

We had a great meal at the restaurant, enjoying not only the food, but also the ambiance of the historic ceiling vaults, as well as a young woman singing folk songs in Portuguese and English.

None of us had been to a concert at this Teatro, reconstructed in 1793 after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. And none of us had ever heard Beethoven’s 9^th live and in-person. Neither disappointed. Our box was in the lowest circle, about a third of the way from the stage, and offered excellent acoustics and sight lines. The symphony was staged with a full slate of soloists and a 70+ person chorus.

As we left the hall with snippets of the Ode to Joy circulating through our minds, we decided to enjoy the clear and mild weather by walking through Chiado to the Praça Dom Pedro IV where we could easily grab an Uber. The Chiado neighborhood was filled with people enjoying meals and music clubs as well as the sidewalk buskers. We paused by one guy and joined in singing Radiohead’s I’m a Freak, for me one of the few songs for which I can remember most of the words.

In February, we attended the Orange Festival in Silves. Funny, but neither Soo nor I remember ever hearing about this festival, and so we drove up not expecting much. To our surprise the exhibition center was packed!

There were dozens of booths ranging from agriculture consultants and suppliers, bakeries, brewers, wineries, and more, all with orange and orange-adjacent products. Soo picked up a lot of growing tips and referrals to suppliers. A fun morning!

Q1 also provided a full slate of meetings from our western and central garden clubs and lunches from our west and central AFPOP social groups. Due to the season, most of the garden club meetings presented interesting slide-show lectures, followed by lunch and an afternoon garden visit. Our AFPOP lunches were all opportunities to visit with old friends as well as to make a few new ones. One funny example was meeting one couple for the first time at an AFPOP meal and seeing them again a few days later at the garden club.

The cymbidiums that started blooming in late fall continued through January. Maybe the blooming was a little more spread out this year than last which seemed to cluster right at Christmas. 

An Algarve garden never really goes dormant, but we did welcome the return of our early spring visitors such as bluebells, snowdrops, periwinkles, and freesias. We seemed to have more rain and wind than we remembered in recent winters. Our reservoirs really need the water, so no complaints whatsoever. Especially since the garden didn’t really suffer much damage other than some of the privacy hedges being uprooted. We had roses here and there all winter and right now many of the bushes are starting to bloom.

A couple weeks ago, we made our spring trek to Seville to visit the nurseries and Costco. The plant shopping was very targeted and mostly successful. But Costco provided one of the year’s high points: a gigantic bag of tater tots. I have been looking for tots since moving to Europe with no success. Because they are frozen, we never brought any back from our US visits. When I spotted the bag, I read the labeling several times before letting my brain truly believe I found my culinary nirvana. These aren’t the Ore-Ida tots (the gold standard of tots), but they are darn good!

Till next time…

Bob and Soo