British Cemetery

 Right around the corner from my little apartment in Estrela was the British Cemetery, which makes sense because it's also close to the British Embassy. Mainly I went there because it housed the grave of Henry Fielding (who went to Lisbon for his health, and then died about a month later - which is a very Portuguese thing to do) and also because I figured it would be lovely and shaded (which it was, much appreciated on another hot day). While there I met a very nice British lady who was the de facto boss of the cemetery (we discussed the impossibility of learning Portuguese), which shows the strange lives that we carve off for ourselves. I need a similarly constructed off overseas life.

Henry Fielding's tomb. I'm thinking of giving each of my students a little punch card that would require them to head out across the city in small groups in search of objects, which they would have to capture on film to prove that they had accomplished their mission. One of them would be Fielding's tomb, and I would just write Tom Jones on the punch card and leave it up to them to do the detective work.

Miguel happily took a break from his pruning to give me a tour of the cemetery.

Clearly, Miguel has more work to do.

There were so many lovely little spots in the cemetery.

For some reason I found it very moving that the graves of this family were held together by a little chain. I'd never seen that before in a cemetery.