Gill likes shopping so she was quite excited when I proposed today’s walk between the two biggest shopping centres in Madeira, it would be like walking from Brent Cross to Lakeside in London and a bit more upmarket than the Co-op to the Spar in Bishop’s Castle.
She perhaps was not expecting to be crawling through tunnels on the side of a cliff with a hundred foot drop on one side but it was an adventure.
Despite being in the suburbs of Funchal for most of the way the walk avoided built up areas and followed another Levada water course around and through the mountain. As well as grading the severity of the walks the book also grades the risk of vertigo from 1 (some risk) to 3 (high risk) this was a 3, not for the faint hearted but great fun.
The book also had one of its classic directions “continue alongside a hoarding (advertising apartments under construction)” as the book was written in 2014 the apartments have been built, sold and are probably quite shabby by now.
We did get lost a bit further on I suspect because new buildings had obscured a view of the football stadium which was our next waymarker but no matter it was a good walk and Gill did not spend any money in the shops so an excellent day.
As a keen custard eater you can probably understand my excitement when I learnt that this weekend the Madeira Farmers Association are holding the annual Custard Apple Exhibition, lots of entertainment, music and contests with a custard theme are promised. Not that custard apples are used to make custard, apparently the fruit is used for liqueurs, puddings, ice cream and milkshakes. After looking forward to an exciting day out I was very disappointed to discover that this year, due to covid, they were holding a virtual event. I need not have come all this way, I could have participated from home.
An excitement yesterday which I somehow forgot to mention in the blog was visiting a museum dedicated to printing. It was quite interesting, completely deserted (apart from three staff, goodness knows what they do) and must have cost a fortune. I asked why it was there and did not get an answer which I understood (i.e. a local business, collector or an inventor who lived here but nothing like that just – we wanted something to show people!).
They had lots of printing machines and examples of type setting both manual and semi-automatic and a huge printer used to print newspapers but the section we found most interesting was a collection of typewriters with examples from 1900 to 1980 at which point they became redundant. We are used to qwerty keyboards but of course each language has their own with the most common letters in the middle, hcesar is the Portuguese equivalent of qwerty.