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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Azores Postcard.3: Views From Your Table

Best meal of trip, and worst meal
Cha Goreanna tea plantation

That’s inside at the tea tasting room. The old-timey factory smells sweetly of drying tea leaves. Here’ what it looks like from outside:

And here are their gorgeous fields:

The natural beauty of this island, São Miguel. is breathtaking. We also went today to the top of Lagoa do Fogo, so high up you can see the island’s north coast on one side, and the south coast on the other. Here is me there, looking not at all dependent on a major painkiller to get that bad back moving:

We went to lunch at the restaurant of the Agricultural Association, where it is said the steak is among the best on the island. I can believe it. They brought us some of the best cheese I’ve had here, then took our orders. I don’t know the metric system, so I ordered a 400gr steak, medium rare. This is what came out:

That’s not ketchup; that’s a grilled pepper. And garlic cloves, and a fried egg. I couldn’t finish it, but oh man, was it good.

We visited a small ceramics shop where you could watch artisans made the things for sale. This is on the wall behind the potters. It contains a theology of creation:

Here the woman are at work:

Later, after a cocktail at the hotel pool, we decided to get take-out pizza for everybody. We chose the worst pizza parlor on the entire island. Surely it must be. It took us 90 minutes to get our simple order. I won’t tell you the place’s name, out of sheer mercy. By the time we got the pizza back to the room, people were ravenous. I had half a piece, but could continue no more. It tasted like the kind of pizza you would get if you had ordered it from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, or if you had given Bisquick, cheese, and tomato sauce to a traumatized elderly woman, and told her to cook pizza in an Easy Bake Oven,

It was horrible, horrible pizza:

Tomorrow morning we catch the ferry to the island of Terceira.

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