the salty coast

As you may have heard, last Saturday February 20th, there were devastating floods and mudslides on the island of Madeira.  Based on government estimations, there could be as many as 42 victims of this tragedy.  With at least 120 people injured. On Monday, the government declared three days of mourning.  On the left, is the cover of the recent edition of the national Portuguese newspaper, O Publico.  It is terribly sad what has happened to this island.  They need as much assistance as possible at this point. Cristiano Ronaldo, who is from Madeira, has paid tribute to the victims - during a recent match, after scoring a goal he lifted his shirt to reveal a white t-shirt with "Madeira" written on it.   He later offered his assistance.  Being that I'm living in Canada, I looked for a way to help, and I found a web site that is currently accepting donations to help - a disaster relief fund .     PLEASE DONATE!  Even $5 will go a long way if we all donate.  Another way

Danny had the unfortunate result of placing last in this year's 15 Cross-Country Skiing event (at the 2010 Winter Olympics).  Great effort, and keep it up - if you do what you love, that's all that matters.   It's been great to even be able to look for Portugal in the Winter Olympics (in Portugal, normally, you don't see much snow...although it hasn't been like that lately).  Perhaps, we can look forward to more athletes competing in the future.  For now, we can put all our hopes in the 2010 World Cup.

Back in 2006, during the Torino Winter Olympics, I had blogged about Danny Silva, the sole Portuguese athlete representing Portugal at the Winter Olympics.   It was great to have him visit the site & leave me some feedback.  It is something to be proud of - I can only hope that we have more Portuguese athletes competing in the coming years.  This year, in the 2010, Danny is back, and will be competing tomorrow, February 15th,  in the Men's 15 km Cross-Country Skiing event.   Good luck Danny!  Força!   Read this great article about him ( em portugues ). Danny's personal site - ( em portugues )

It's official! Portugal has picked a theme song for the 2010 World Cup - it's Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling". As a response, the Black Eyed Peas posted a video on YouTube congratulating and backing Portugal to win the World Cup. If only that were enough to win. I gotta feeling we're in for one of those 2002 type world cups...hopefully not...but like I said, it's a feeling:

The big thing of 2007 in Portugal, particularly on the TV channel RTP is the selection of the biggest Portuguese personality of all time of all things. They had a list of more than 100 people on their web site during December and now, in the past 2 days, they've revealed who are the 100 that were most voted on, and the 10 that received the most votes and that will be the 10 from which people will vote to be the top. Here is the link to the 90 most voted - unfortunately, they don't have them in order: http://www.rtp.pt/wportal/sites/tv/grandesportugueses/bio_resultados90.php Here is a link to the top 10: http://www.rtp.pt/wportal/sites/tv/grandesportugueses/finalistas.php Now, this is all voted on on people's own opinions, and that's fine, but me, having lived there for a little while, listened to my family, and just my own personal knowledge of Portuguese culture, I have a few comments of my own.... 1. How is it possible that a politician that ran a fascist government

The man known as Sá Carneiro (real name: Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de Sá Carneiro) was born July 19, 1934 and died December 4, 1980. He was Prime Minister of Portugal for 11 months in 1980. Short history from Wikipedia : A lawyer by training, he became a member of the puppet National Assembly , where he became one of the leaders of the "Liberal Wing", which attempted to work for the gradual transformation of António de Oliveira Salazar 's dictatorship into a normal Western European democracy. In May 1974 , a month after the Carnation Revolution , Sá Carneiro founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), together with Francisco Pinto Balsemão and José Magalhães Mota , and became its secretary-general. The PPD was soon renamed the Social Democratic Party (PSD); despite Sá Carneiro's original claims to be leading a left-of-centre party, he and the party soon drifted to the right. He was minister without portfolio in a number of provisional governments, and was elected

Christmas is always nice anywhere in the World. In Portugal, Santa is put to work driving the streetcar. Get going Santa! In other important events, December 1st is an important date around the world, but not as important as in Portugal, where in 1640 we regained back Portugal from the Spanish. To mark this holiday, 2 of the biggest soccer teams faced off - Sporting vs. Benfica with Benfica coming out the winner. Then today, Porto won... ..and that's about all the soccer news I can take. In other important events around the country... They've finally decided to hold another vote to decide whether abortion should be legal. Here are some women in parliament pushing their cause... Source Portugal's president has said the country's predominantly Roman Catholic population will vote on whether to legalise abortion on 11 February. Anibal Cavaco Silva said he agreed to the vote because the issue still dominated public debate in Portugal. The country will be asked if they wish t