I love cork! I hate cork!

I am finishing up a quick trip to Portugal, only eight days, on behalf of Friends of Portugal. Some years ago I spent an entire August here, and learned that it was a time when the word "ferias/vacation", was perhaps only rivaled by "obrigado/thanks"in usage and appearance. With most of their European counterparts, the Portuguese enjoy their extended holidays as much as anyone. And as one hailing from the agricultural towns of Central California, the heat that the Portuguese complain about in August is typically mild to my own senses.

                      

It has been a good visit with many exciting meetings and conversations, and progress made. In the past year, Friends of Portugal has helped start a thrift shop in the town of Massamá, rented a large warehouse for furniture restoration, small appliance repair, bicycle repairs, and clothing sorting and storage for the thrift shop and local bazaars that churches hold for their neighborhoods. Each of these projects has been encouraging and we are touching people's lives in new and exciting ways. We are now working on an even more ambitious plan and set of projects for 2015 and beyond.

For Friends of Portugal, even with local multi-national leadership, our tasks, responsibilities, and initiatives typically take much longer here to get going than I am accustomed to. Sometimes even getting people to return simple phone calls takes days or weeks, and progress can be agonizingly slow. Each time I am in this wonderful country, I can experience equal parts of opportunity and challenge, calm and anxiety, accomplishment and failure, love and hate.  Let me explain.

Last year, I had the good fortune to spend a day in Napa with some dear friends as a guest of some premiere Napa Valley wineries, and enjoyed an amazing lunch, private tours of the caves, and several winemakers shared their vast knowledge of the industry, product, and personalities. During one of the talks, I asked about the use of cork in winemaking, having visited the cork museum some years ago in the south of Portugal in Silves (regrettably, since closed), and at that time had a great conversation with an employee of the long closed factory. That day I learned a great deal of a lost manufacturing process, natural and green and sustainable hundreds of years before its current vogue status emerged. 

Without hesitating, the winemaker said "I love cork! I hate cork!" He went on to explain that as a natural product and technique as contrasted to the more modern screw cap, cork was susceptible to the processes of air, time, contamination, and the uniqueness of one natural product (cork) coming into prolonged contact with another natural product (wine). And he concluded, and it was confirmed by the other winemaker, that on average 2% of all corked bottles of wine failed. Clearly, this was a significant challenge and criticism of using cork, when screw cap wine had a far lower failure rate.

But he went on to explain that cork also had the capacity to provide subtle and almost imperceptible nuances, shadings, and variations to the wine, and that cork could on occasion assist an excellent wine to become a superb wine. Thus, the "love and hate" relationship of cork was created in his mind and experience.

This is an important lesson for all of us who work internationally. When one visits a country (I think I am up to 24 or 25 in my life, not counting Kansas), one sees and experiences things that can bring out the country and people's own particular charm and peculiarities. Inconveniences can be excused and even laughed about when one is on tourist trip, especially when it can be in a country as charming as Portugal. For example, while in the U.S. we are wholly accustomed to having a restaurant modify, substitute, or customize a dish to our own likes, such things are not done in Portugal. Getting bread daily is another. The deep cultural belief that air conditioning causes all sorts of ailments another. Every country has these idiosyncrasies, and as a tourist with great fondness for this country and others, I usually have a tendency to chuckle and actually enjoy these temporary inconveniences.

However, in Portugal when one attempts to obtain a particular license, or receive comparable prices on real estate, or clarity about a particular law or regulation, it is not so simple as going online or calling a private or public office. Many of the things I take for granted in San Diego one simply cannot do so easy here. There is a pace to life here that I love and I hate--and it forces me to have greater patience than I would typically have.

There are probably few Portuguese cultural concepts that are as well known as fado. It is certainly a wonderful and unique musical form, but it is much more than that, for it serves as a philosophy of life that is within the Portuguese of all walks of life. The music and the philosophical perspective is melancholic, reflective, maudlin, fatalistic, and intrinsic. Yet it can also be a weird combination of hopeful and hopeless, and is full of love and affection and yet this is often torn away or unrealized. It can answer some questions of Portugal and yet is silent on even greater ones. 

My observation is that fado underscores both the challenges and the opportunities for long term work in Portugal. It is something that one can both love and hate. It speaks of both the Portugal of the past and the Portugal that is.  And as I look out into the future, it makes me wonder what the Portugal of the future will be.