Namma Chennai Diary | Life Lessons Learnt in Portugal and Spain

Portugal may not figure high on too many holiday itineraries of Indian tourists, but its people make the country well worth visiting as they are very high up on the global happiness index. And the Spanish people are not far behind either though the ones working in high street shops in big cities like Madrid might be a bit waspish.

For a slower pace of life and contemplating on the sheer beauty of the Atlantic Coast, Portugal should be a top tourist destination. There was so much to learn about the attitude to life from the Portuguese. They never seem to be in a hurry and are so enormously patient on the roads that there wasn’t even a suggestion of an incident on the road in a week of nirvana-like idyll.

Spain has more of the urban energy to it, including in its night life, but the Spaniards are also exemplary in following road rules. I travelled to many places in the last 46 years but nowhere have I seen road discipline as in Spain and Portugal. It is simply amazing for an Indian to see the primacy of the pedestrian being upheld. A pedestrian only must so much as place a foot on the road and the traffic on either side would stop for a few hundred metres.

Barely one vehicle clears the cobbled streets of Lisbon’s older sections; the same for much of Seville and Granada in Spain. If a taxi so much as stops to let out passengers, the entire line of cars would stay at a silent standstill while the taxi disgorges its passengers who then pay the driver while overcoming the restrictions on usage of certain American branded cards in Portugal.

Not a honk can be heard unless a rude or careless driver is being admonished by a colleague on the exemplary roads. A delivery truck would occupy the entire street as the driver waves a cheery ‘sorry’ to those forced to wait in line behind his truck. He then he goes on to complete his delivery as speedily as possible before resuming his journey and allowing those of scores of other drivers on the road.

Walk into a café and the barista, handsome enough to be a movie star if fate had so ordained, is all ears about the order and is so polite as to say don’t worry about card payment problems but first have your coffee. It is not just the sense of being in the hospitality business that engenders this love for a life in service of others. The Portuguese just love life as one enormously worth living.

A few days in Portugal are sufficient to give anyone the impetus to reset their lives. The agonising restlessness of Indian queues and the sharp comments reserved for the several who try to jump them with a VIP sense of entitlement can wait. The days in Portugal and Spain teach you that life can be lived at the pace you want to and not be dictated to by the needs or neediness of fellow Indians.

The sheer joy of living we experienced at a vineyard in the Duoro Valley of Portugal where we were made to feel like honoured guests not only because there were social media influencers in the family. Picking grapes off the vine and putting them in buckets for a transfer into small crates seemed to bring a unique kind of joy. Dancing inside the tanks while stamping on the grapes was a near celestial experience.

It may not have been a meal fit for kings – that was reserved for an epicurean dinner with four types of wines including the famous Portuguese port wine – as the buffet was spread out on a table in The Godfather style in the garden of the Qunita Das Pacheca. Each guest was made to feel he deserved it for working the whole morning in the vineyard, picking and then stamping on grapes.

The amazing thing about the experience of dining with tourists from around the world was how much everyone – young and old - valued life. And what the days as a tourist taught was that life may be worth living even more if we were to imbibe the sunny disposition of the Portuguese and the Spanish.

(R. Mohan is Resident Editor of Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle.)