"OS LUGARES DO AMOR" & "OS LUGARES DO AMOR-II"

In 1999 and 2001 I published two books with the above titles to celebrate the marriage of my daughters. Both have the same format, with a series of 10 short love stories, followed by some of my poems.
The titles may be translated in English as "Places of Love" and the stories are about dense and intense love situations in different locations. The stories are nonfactual, although they correspond to the realities of each place, but the locations are cities which I had indeed alreaby been on at the time.
Here are the 19 locations (10+10 makes 20, but - at one of the daughters request - one story in the first book was repeated in the second one: Johannesbourg, Helsinki, Mozambique Island, Chichén Itzá, Lofoten, Split, Malacca, Ischia, Nikko, Agra, Bora-Bora, Crete, Corfu, Big Sur, Pokkara, Berlin, Mont-Saint-Michel, Abu Simbel and Jerusalem.
I will be happy to forward any of those stories (in Portuguese only!) if requested by e-mail to my adress
jsm65@sapo.pt

A GENTLE CROCODILE

I really did not believe too much the guide when he announced that the tour would go to a locally sacred pound where a team of crocodiles was feed with fish alone and, because of this, were not dangerous to humans and did not attack them.
This was during our one week holiday in Gambia, thirteen years ago. Many people do not even know such country exists, less even where it stands!
Gambia is a geographycal non-sense, politically built straightforward from its colonial past. The river Gambia was first explored by the portuguese and later taken over by the british, mainly for getting access to slaves. When the french got the main grip on the area we know now as Senegal, they faced themselves unable to dislocate the british, which were in control of the two margins of the Gambia river and the adjacent areas. By the time of independences in Africa, the french-speaking senegalese elite was unwilling forced to accept that the english-speaking elite aroung the Gambia was not keen on a common country and the experience of Senegambia was short lived. So today Gambia is totally surrounded by Senegal.
Back to crododiles: yes, the guide was telling the truth: like others, my wife and me stood by the crocodiles, somewhat nervous anyway and moving very prudently. I was able to touch - I would say caress! - the tail of one of the beasts. The guide took the picture, as I told him lots of people out of Gambia were for sure unbelievers about the tourist-oriented crocodiles of one certain gambian pound.

I HAVE BEEN IN BAGHDAD

Yes, in 2007. But not the one you surely are thinking of: there are more Baghdads than the media tells you! The one I visited is a small village in Mauritania, poor, quite and peaceful.
My almost 4 weeks stay in Mauritania was for an election observation mission by the European Union, at the time of the 2007 Presidential election there, after some years of military rule. As a short term observer I was assigned to the region of Kiffa, some 600 kilometers east of Nouakchott, the capital. The EU observers work always in teams of two and this time my team mate was a hungarian diplomat, now posted in Saigon as he wrote me recently.We observed the first round in Barkéol, some 150 kilometers away from the nearest tarred road, a very dry area indeed, and the second one, two weeks later, in Guérou, which lies some 60 kilometers before Kiffa, when one comes from the capital along the only tarred road of the region.
Baghdad 2 (the "2" because there are more than one...) is a little bit outside Guérou, but may still be considered as a suburb of the town. We visited it twice: on our standard fact-finding and locations-finding activities before e-day (we drove hundreds of kilometers and as much polling stations as possible, in order to decide the route plan for e-day, only known to the two of us, not the interpreter nor the driver, both mauritanian citizens) and again on e-day as one of the polling stations we decide to observe.

TORUN

Copernicus, the one who found out that the Sun was not exactly turning around himself, was born here. Additionally still partially-walled Torun is classified a World Heritage town ( some more sites world-wide should be classified in a couple of days). Having witnessed the birth of the famous astronomer may have had some psycological effect on the minds of those who made the WH application and those who decided on it, but there was no need for such emotional element. The city fully deserves per se its WH status, although the Vistula river, passing by in an indolent fashion, does not seem to remark it.
But I did: by strolling twice around the walls, the gothic houses on the Rynek (old town market place), the ruins and the parks, the remnants of the Teutonic Knights castle, one during day light, another by night. After what I went fully and peacefully sleep in my hotel fifty meters from one of the walls gates.

AN OUT-OF-EXPECTATION "FEIJOADA À BRASILEIRA"

This Saturday evening my dinner was "feijoada à brasileira", brasilian style beans with meat. Was it in Rio de Janeiro? No, nor in S. Paulo, neither in Recife or Salvador. It was in Wroclaw (pronounce wrotsuav as well as you can), Poland. This "feijoada" was not gastronomically speaking a very memorable one, like that in S. Luiz do Maranhao, with sight-seeing of the beach included plus "caipirinha", if my memory does not betray me, but it was neither desappointing - particularly the out-of-expectation element: a brasilian restaurant some one hundred metters from the local fashionable and spendid "Rynek" of Wroclav, which was used to be called Breslau before Hitler commited suicide and nazism got fully 100% Kapput.
I toured parts of Poland during 6 days, from the Wroclaw airport back to it, using trains and buses. The main pourpose was to visit this town and Poznan, plus 4 World Heritage sites in the western part of the country, which I accomplished. I also had the idea of visiting another one in Cech Republic, but time proved short for it.
Hopefully there will be more travel to come.

BACK IN EUROPE!

I am now back in Brussels from my half-a-month aussie tour.
Tyred, bluntly said! Too many nights out of a bed, it seems at my age something does not happen to be as it was, or near to it.
Just let me count: one night in the outbound flights; one night in a coach from Adelaide to Alice Springs; two nights in the Indian Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide, immediately followed by another night in the coach from Adelaide to Melbourne; one night in the inbound flight from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi, followed by a new one in the flight from Abu Dhabi to Brussels( I planned that on pourpose, to allow mw a full day to see Abu Dhabi ).
Anyway, my selfish ego, please, do not complain: you did it not by necessity, but by some sort of sour pleasure you have in doing now things you did not when you were twenty years old! After all you spoiled more out-of-a-bed nights by taking a 3.15 hours plane from Alice Springs to Perth.
Towards the end of this travelling feast I rented a car for a 3 days tour around Melbourne area. So I visited Sorrento and Olinda and passed by Seville - although none of those you may imagine at first thought.