Ver os costumes locais e comer na própria casa dos habitantes, num ambiente relaxado e de convívio: eis o turismo na sua forma mais pura.
"Three year-old Matilde, dressed in a pink sweatsuit that read “Fashion Beauty Girl,” wanted to take her princess doll to the pig slaughter. Her mom, whom I had met through my hosts in this small Portuguese town, objected. “The piggies are going to make the princess dirty,” she said.
Minus the doll we all walked up one of the two named roads in the village of Quintas do Vilar, Portugal, to watch four men drag a squealing 350-pound sow out of a wood enclosure. With great effort, they tied it to a wooden bench and held it down, as a woman poked a dull knife into its heart. As she twisted repeatedly, blood flowed into a bucket below; it would later become sausage.
When the pig had wheezed its last breath, one man singed off its hair with a blowtorch, another gave it what I can only describe as a post-mortem enema, and its owner, a middle-aged man with a thick mustache, began to butcher it. Neighbors looked on; a fluffy cat cute enough for YouTube gulped down an unidentified organ that had fallen to the ground, leaving its face speckled with blood.
My friend Luísa Pinto and I were invited to the post-butchering lunch, to be held in the former village schoolhouse, but we had plans to join her extended family for lunch at a restaurant called O Careto, nestled into the nearby Montesinho National Park. Their specialty was butelo — a local delicacy made with meat, cartilage and bones of a pig (no relation to the one we had seen dispatched, presumably), stuffed into pig intestine or stomach, then smoked and boiled.
“This is not food for city folk,” said Luísa’s dad, Aníbal Pinto Cabo. In other words, if I were ever to consider vegetarianism this would have been the time.
There was no danger of that. It was Christmas season in the stuck-in-time villages of Trás-os-Montes, Portugal’s far-northeast region, and I ate heartily and happily (though I confess to picking out some of the fattier parts).
You can keep your zip lines, private island resorts and Michelin-starred restaurants. For me, this was travel at its best. How did I end up here? Decades of practice in the science of mooching. Back in the mid-’90s, when I taught the third grade to Dominican immigrants in the Bronx, I readily accepted invitations to their relatives’ homes in the Dominican Republic, sometimes staying just for a meal or tour of the farm, sometimes bunking down for weeks at a time." (artigo completo aqui)
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