Otaki Hideji

Everybody may have likes and dislikes. I'm not exception. I have, for example, distaste places. Usually the likes and dislikes is caused on trivial things. You could be disgusted with a country from just one bad experience. However if I wrote about my distaste country and the reason here, it wouldn't have any merit for you. It meant I should not talk about it.

Besides likes or dislikes, there are also the places where aren't impressive at all. They have something in common. And I found it. It's a bad weather.
Photo needs a light. Too much rain and short daytime takes off the shutter chances from me. No photo means no impression. My memory and camera is synchronized, I guess.
So where was the exact place such unimpressive for instance? Well, maybe Portugal is one of them. Quite unimpressive to me. And Portugal in winter had bad weather.

In the Winter, I went down to Portugal from Galicia region in Spain. I took RENFE (national rail way of Spain) train and got off near the border. To go to Portugal I had to change the train at the station. I remember it's called "Redondera"
I had a bunch of extra time for the next train. So I spent a time at bar. When I came back to the platform, many people were already waiting for the train. I asked an old man next to me if there was some border post between two countries. He simply answered. "No there isn't such a border post. All you have to do for entering Portugal is just keep going with the next train. That's it" The bald head, big lobe ... I thought he looked like the Japanese veteran actor Otaki Hideji.

The train was full of passengers, and I could not find a seat. So I was standing on the deck and watching the landscape through the window.
"It's rain, rain and rain everyday,uh?" When I looked back, I saw the Otaki Hideji. He also didn't have a seat and stood next to the door. He looked up the gray sky.
As he had said there was nothing at the border, neither post nor station. Under the gray sky, the river named Minho ran. The river became muddy because of heavy rain. The river surface rose up and was almost touching the bottom of the bridge. When the train crossed over the bridge, Otaki Hideji looked at me and shrugged his shoulders as if he wanted to say crossing borders was not big deal.
Then he said to me in hoarse voice "Portugal ... "

In the evening when I got to the city of Porto, the weather turned into almost storm. Since then, the bad weather had no sign to recover. I remember the movie theater I visited like everyday rather than anything in "Lisboa".
I think talking about unimpressive place was useful for nobody too.