pleasure pain principal

All things enjoyable must end in pain?

Er. Um. Ok, so for some mysterious reason unbeknownst to me, my left knee has established a pattern of semi-constant pain, exacerbated, of course, by descending or climbing stairs and hills. You see my dilemma, of course.

While I have only a five minute walk to school, it is, quite literally, up hill both ways. Kristina, who is studying medicine, played doctor with me last night into the wee hours (no, no, nothing like that). As I hobbled about, injured from our excursion. There was a trip to the spectacularly preserved Roman ruins of Conímbriga (town which gave its name to Coimbra when systematically abandoned first by the Bishop and then by the townspeople with the encroaching Visigoth and Barbar invasions in their flight to AEMENIUM (now Coimbra). We traipsed about the baths and rescued mosaic floors, and surprsingly during said march, my body cooperated relatively well. Note to self: guided tours with knowledgeable guides, excellent idea. Much of the city (only 25% excavated) was knocked down by the inhabitants themselves in a desperate attempt to construct a fortified city wall with the stones, and yet, much remained. We watched a play by Aristófones: O Parlamento das Mulheres, a somewhat adulterated version of the classic theater, on a stage in the selfsame space of the Roman amphitheater, but with techno music and a song I recognized from I.´s children´s Putumayo collection as soundtrack. Strange but wonderful? Stage but sunderful?

Only complaints would be the attack of the killer mosquitoes, and the fact that when I tried speaking to a new student from Valencia, I was fully incapable of fending off the Portuguese. That is, of course I haven´t forgotten Spanish, but I have to consciously and deliberately think about my word choice to speak one language instead of the other, and what comes out is still a mix of Portuñol, leaning farther one way than the other depending on my intentionality, and sounding vaguely like Italian, especially when I start to say «mas» to mean «but» or «pero» which I know is also lexically available to me in Spanish, but not in common parlance and I am left saying «ma» as I catch the word halfway out of my mouth. When he suggested I speak in Portuguese I was actually relieved! Creepy.