bus station charcuterie
My cousin and I were provisioning on the move. Purchasing food, water and booze an item or two at a time. We would forage through the shelves of little shops or markets that looked inviting while waiting for a connection to another train or bus. Modern dirtbag hunter/gatherers.
We were headed to a small mountain village in Portugal that locals had said was off the beaten path and worth visiting.
We were keeping our traveling expenses low by exploiting confusion and bureaucracy in the European Union rail and bus system. The Eurail passes that we had purchased a week or so prior were good for 10 days of travel during a month long window of time. However, we quickly discovered that individual ticket agents didn’t know this. They would flip through the little pass booklets in a manner that looked official and then hand them back without marking off any of the days. We covered a lot of ground that month.
This would work in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, we figured. There was no way the Germans, Austrians, and Swiss would keep letting us fly under the radar.
To our surprise, it was finally in Croatia, after passing through all the aforementioned countries and more, that this gambit finally caught up with us in an anticlimax not worth recording.
We were changing from a train to a bus in the town of Braga and had a few hours to wait. Most of the supplies we needed were already purchased. Bread, cheese, cured meats, a bottle of port we had picked up in Porto. We had also unwisely procured hot dogs canned in chicken fat. These turned out to be so unappetizing that we discarded most of them.
We had paired down the gear we were bringing too fit in carry-on sized packs. So, we had left a pocket knife off our packing list. Figuring we could buy one in Europe once we weren’t having to pass through airport security. And now this was the last item on our shopping list.
To this end, having checked a few shops that had seemed promising with no success, we cast our net wider. We wandered into a stall in Braga’s open air bus station. It was one of those places that seemed to carry a little of everything. Snacks, suitcases, newspapers, children's toys, alcohol, basic hardware.
We didn’t see knives so we inquired with the owner of the shop. We spoke no Portuguese and he spoke no english so we began to pantomime a chef using a cooking knife.
The stall owner’s eyes lit up and he nodded in understanding and disappeared into the back room of his store. A few minutes later he returned glancing around and presented a switchblade. The spring loaded knife darting open at the push of a button.
We shook our heads, no, and attempted to convey that we wanted a knife for cooking, not banditry. Again he nodded knowingly and vanished into the back room. More time passed and then he returned. Checking that the coast was clear with a furtive glance around he produced a telescoping baton. The kind used by police around the world to club people into submission. He deployed it with a snap of his wrist in demonstration.
We thanked him as best we could through the language barrier and moved on. Concerned about what he might produce if we attempted to clarify a third time.
