Jungle in the Park

One of my best friends had her birthday and decided to celebrate the date in a Cinderella-restaurant, the new concept in which at midnight a place that serves meals is transformed, without fairies or “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, into a nightclub. From ten at night the music goes up in a not very subtle way and we are limited to talking only to our neighbors next door, those right next to us. That at ten, because at eleven we can only get them to hear us if we shout at them with our mouths inside our ears. It’s an interesting experience for a person as talkative as me, because I found myself for the first time thinking before I spoke: “Do I really have to share my opinion about iceberg lettuce?”.

When midnight came, they sang happy birthday to my friend and ten other people who had their birthdays on the same day, and brought us the bill, even as if to say “let’s hurry up because this is now a dance floor and you sitting take up much more space.” When I looked at the bill I realized that I would pay approximately 5€ for each berry of arborio rice in my lime risotto, but I didn’t comment to anyone; At that moment the only way to do so would be by text.

We paid, got up and started the dance part. Not being the most coordinated person in the world, I love to dance and it’s been a few years since I set foot in a disco (there are so many that you shouldn’t even say disco anymore, is it the equivalent of my parents saying boîte?). Well, the truth is that given the time I was absent from a place of such nature, I no longer remembered the jungle that comes to life throughout the night. It is a true “BBC wildlife”.

To begin with, we have Homo Habitualis. Not to be confused with Homo Sinistrus who, being also a regular visitor, stay just in a corner to observe their prey with the eyes of someone who was a vegetarian until that moment. Homo Habitualis, on the contrary, dominates the place as if he were one of the partners, not least because, with the times he goes there and the money he has already spent there, it would surely give him to acquire a share in the company. Homo Habitualis glides down the track deftly through a compact sea of people, when most of us feel like we’ve exchanged DNA with ten individuals just on the way to the bathroom. Homo Habitualis knows all the songs, knows the lyrics by heart even if they are in different languages and raises his arm a la fascist as soon as he hears the first chords, as if each song were the most awaited by itself. Homo Habitualis is an attentive and fearless predator, looks at prey without hesitation and does not let itself be discouraged when one of its forays does not prove fruitful.

Then we have Homo Pilaris, the one who approaches the group of females and sticks together more and more, eventually finding a place and gaining roots, just occupying space without ever dancing. Homo Furis uses the same technique of approximation as Homo Pilaris but when it gets close to the group it tries, at all costs, with more or less skill, more or less respect, to enter the closed circle.

During all these attacks, the prey that did nothing to be so (the opposite will say the Numeiros of this life), dance in an increasingly closed circle, ending up almost hugging only their eyes – a technique widely used in the animal kingdom to escape predators.

At half past one in the morning, after a sufficient dose of eye dancing and eardrum-piercing music, I went home, but the truth is that I left my Jungle in the Park night wanting to dance for real, with space, with good music and without feeling like I was being narrated by David Attenborough.

Florifeia (pre-municipal chronicle)

In the roundabout near my house, some “flowers” were “planted”. Yes, the use of quotation marks was deliberate, I didn’t just want to make it rain on the text, but the reality is that what is in the roundabout cannot be called a flower and, as such, it cannot be said to have been planted either.

The first time I saw them they gave me such a big laughing fit, that I had to go around the roundabout twice to take the exit that suited me.

I’ll end with the suspense right away because the higher your expectations, the greater the disappointment. Well, what they put in the roundabout is in the shape of a flower, but it is made of fabric and has a smiling face in the center. There are about ten of them and they are spaced out rigorously. They are plush flowers.

In the first weeks the “flowers” kept their colors and the wire that kept them stiff did its job. But the rains came, the seasons went by and today they are all saggy, dirty and dull. Unlike real flowers that rain feeds, in these make-believe flowers rain has a destructive effect. His face continues to smile despite the fact that, in most of them, it is covered by drooping petals. I can see in that action of covering the face a manifestation of shame, shame of a smile that endures without fading while the wire of the supposed foot gives of itself, leaving all the toy-flowers bent and surrounded by garbage.
As you may have noticed, I don’t live in Oeiras. The King of the Rotundas would never allow such an embarrassment. I live in Sintra, in Algueirão, an area with a lot of emigration and little money.

I never thought that a roundabout could cause me so much sadness, but the truth is that I can’t avoid this anguish that grows here in lost places between the stomach and the heart. Why don’t all people have the right to real flowers or just something beautiful?

This artificial beauty makes fun of those who look at it and not even it can maintain its artificiality: it gets tired of pretending and saddens, bends, grays, withers.
I wonder if there are more roundabouts in the country like this. I also wonder who came up with this brilliant idea and ordered such relics from Temu. Probably the same person who thought: “Leave it there, they don’t even know what is beautiful.”

The first attempt

My relationship with camping is the equivalent of a “I know by sight”. I remember setting up a tent with my cousins in our grandmother’s garden and the intention of spending the night there, I also remember that we invariably ended the night in her kitchen drinking milk with Suchard Express and eating cat tongues.

My friends were big attendees of summer camps (in the world of betos the summer camp is the big event of the year) and I even tried to join them, but I never entered. And so I grew up, without tasting the supposed wonders of sleeping on the floor, in contact with nature.

Later, as an adult, I went to climb a volcano in Indonesia for four days. From the thermal experience of sleeping in a tent, I only keep the memory of visiting Iceland at night and waking up in Dubai.

Already with children, I discovered glamping, a sport that we practiced a few times. It’s good for those who want to say they like to go camping, but don’t dispense sleeping in a bed. We have the status without the discomfort. Finally, I also indulged in the motorhome, a version of which I became a huge fan, so much a fan that after three years renting a motorhome, I got it into my head that the ideal would be to buy one. It was the shortest dream I had, it lasted the time to open the computer and research the prices.

Last week, on a visit to the basement with my children, I came across a tent that had been offered to me by my brother a few years ago. There it was, brand new, still in the bag. “Do you want to set up a tent in the garden?” she left me with the enthusiasm of mothers who give everything on vacation.

I remembered my brother telling me that that tent was one of the “easy to set up”. The problem is that an object that I consider easy to assemble is yet to be invented. Not even the dolls that come inside the Kinder eggs are simple for me.

As soon as I come across assembly instructions, my brain immediately gives up. I have chests of drawers that never had handles, drawers that never opened and shelves with screws pointed at me coming out of my back because I missed the wooden beam when hammering them.

I started by placing the stakes in the four corners, to soon realize that what I had hammered were not the stakes, but pickets. I took everything out and replaced it with real stakes. The tent was effectively easy and it was just a matter of filling it with a pump that came inside the bag. Another three hours looking at some sticks that stuck into each other, until I realized where to put them and another stick of the same nature, whose function I never got to unravel, and as such, returned to the bag. To finish, I put the pickets back in, this time in their proper place, since they were already crooked from the force that had been made to put them in place of the stakes. Our tent was ready! It was huge, a real T2 with a room in the middle. Something of that size in the center of Lisbon should yield a good 1500€ per month.

We prepared everything for my children’s big night at their house in the open. As my youngest son had a fever, I could not join the others (needless to say, my sadness was not great). We took mattresses, duvets and pillows. I made them dress as if they were going to spend the night in Alaska and read them a story with the flashlight. It was ten o’clock at night when I left them, ten and ten when the first returned home, ten eleven when I received the last survivor. My children’s experience with camping managed to be even shorter than mine.

The tent stayed there for a few days until the grass started to dry and it was time to go back to the bag. I dismantled it without realizing that the floor of the “living room” was wet and that the mattresses remained in the “bedrooms”. It was too late, I would not raise it again. While some stretched out their arms to hold the roof of the tent and I cleaned the water with the mop, another removed the mattresses and toys that had ended up there I don’t know when.

The time had come to fold the tent and return it to the bag. Herein lies for me perhaps the biggest problem of camping: nothing fits in the bag from which it came out. It’s as if things grow when in freedom. There were four attempts. Three times we folded the tent to unfold it again. With each fold we all dipped on top of the fabric to remove the air. But how much air can a tent have? I felt myself losing my breath along with the tent, as I sprawled and made little snow angels to make sure I reached everywhere and that not a molecule of oxygen survived in the middle of all that fabric and plastic. The fourth time the tent got into the bag, but the zipper was far from closing. The air, it could only be the air. I realize that the pump and the bags of the pickets and stakes are still on the grass. I give up, so it goes to the basement, like a Berlin Ball overflowing with cream. And there the bag was in a corner, with as much material inside as outside.

Three years from now we will remember it again and, who knows, we may not sleep there a whole night.