In Praise of European Pharmacies
Plus, shout-out to Muesli, Toblerone, and fermented shark
On a cold, gray night last January I was crawling along the floor of my tiny Dublin hotel room, hoping to make it to the bathroom in time.
After nearly three isolating years of Covid, it had felt so good to be standing shoulder- to-shoulder with the patrons of the Cobblestone pub, listening to fiddlers, balaclava players, and singers performing traditional Irish tunes. The mood was ebullient, and not just because of the music. The Cobblestone had recently been saved from property developers who wanted to build a hotel in it place, destroying an iconic part of Dublin’s cultural heritage.
Yes, there was Guinness; yes there was Jameson. A friendly lady from Liverpool offered me a taste of her “tipple,” a mix of Jameson and ginger ale. I forgot about the years of masks and social distancing and took a sip. The man next to me at the bar accidentally drank from my glass instead of his. No big deal. We switched glasses back and I resumed drinking from mine.
The next day, my work colleagues and I planned to take the train to Killiney to hike along the wild Irish coast. S looked green around the gills that morning and vomited on the way to the station. But he was on a mission to find Bono’s house and maybe Bono himself, so he persevered. Other than a slight headache from lack of sleep, I felt fine.
Back in Dublin, we headed to our respective rooms for an early night before our 4 am departure for a work retreat in Munich. I was feeling a little under the weather, so managed to find enough space in my boutique hotel room to roll out my mat and do Adriene’s Yoga for When You Are Sick. My sun salutations were the last time I managed to stay upright.
Through sheer force of will, I made it through what turned out to be a bewildering awful night, managed to hold it together for the wee hours taxi ride to the airport, the flight to Munich, and the train ride to the hotel.
When word got out that I was ill, I was touched and amused that my colleagues from Turkey, Greece, Iceland, and England brought me their remedies for an upset stomach. Pills I had never heard of, some effervescents to be submerged in water, some chewable and meltable. My German colleague D took me under her wing and brought me to a pharmacy, where an efficient and official-looking pharmacist in a white coat prescribed herbal drops. So different from the chain drugstores at home, where you only get to see a pharmacist if you have a prescription to fill and the shelves are bare because of supply chain issues and corporate buyouts.
In the end, I’ll never know whether it was the awful tasting German herbal drops, or the less awful than expected hakarl, fermented Greenland shark that my Icelandic colleagues brought as their contribution to our international snack potluck, that cured me. My money is on the hakarl and aquavit, which immediately made me feel ready to stomach anything.
As the days went by and several of my colleagues who hadn’t been with me in Dublin got sick, I realized it wasn’t a hangover that got me, but norovirus. The price to pay for the joy of being with people again.
In Portugal, I sang the praises of European pharmacies to J, who was plagued by a nasty cold. Though dubious, he gamely took a number in the queue at the Sao Martinho do Porto pharmacy. When it was his turn, he accepted the array of remedies offered by the serious-faced pharmacist, who also looked skeptical about the need for medication, since everyone knows that colds usually get better in seven days if you take medicine and a week if you don’t.
On our first grocery store foray, I was reintroduced to Muesli, which I had first encountered at European youth hostels more than 40 years ago, and which we had almost every morning for breakfast during our month in Portugal (though Muesli seemed to be a catch-all phrase for fruit, nut, and cereal blends, some of which we would call granola). The shredded cardboard-like Muesli that I remember from those days was like a fuel injection for my fellow hostelers from Germany, who would eat, shit, and be ready for a day of adventure and a night of drinking.
Eating Muesli and drinking espresso while watching the day break over the Atlantic Ocean and the surfers emerge was a quiet and constant joy. So was having a drink and watching the sunset.
Though it is readily available in the US, we also rediscovered the joy of Toblerone, the triangle-shaped chocolate nougat confection, which sent me down a Proustian rabbit hole, remembering being a student in France, where I learned to love vegetables and chocolate in equal measure.
J admitted that when he was plagued by jet-lag, a triangle or two was the perfect sleep aid.
For me, the best part of travel is seeing how people live - what they eat, how they exercise, how they spend time together, the music they listen to, what they consider to be essential for health. At the end of every trip, I always vow to apply the best of these to my regular life, and for a time I do.
I’d like to think that his visit to the pharmacy in Foz do Arelho made a believer out of J. There, he received the perfect waterproof bandage setup for a toe that had been scraped up during his wingfoiling sessions on the Obidos lagoon. The bandages held up well. J requested that one of our last stops before beginning the long trek back to Seattle was a visit to the pharmacy to restock.
Now that we are home, I’ll be spending some time cleansing my body from a month of freely flowing wine, pastries, bread, ham, and cheese, and sugar in my espresso, but I plan to restrict myself in moderation.
Now that we are home, I’ll be spending some time taking the best of what I discovered during my period of Summering and figuring out what comes next.
Alison, I miss the pharmacies in Australia! You walk in, take a number, describe what the problem is to the pharmacist on duty, and events move on from there. The pharmacy in my neighborhood in Melbourne was in the same building as my GP's office, and sometimes I'd be told to "run up and see Dr. Gracie, love..."
Lol. It was presented on a plate, whole and glazed, and it looked very much like a rat. El Exelente would reject it on two counts: its rat-look demeanor, and the small portion. And btw, these days he favors Frosted Flakes over Muesli and other dry cereals. I hope you’re keeping a list.