I had such a lovely dinner with my friends and friends of hers here in Lisbon last night. Such laughter - much needed to digest all the food. I had the most gorgeous Pork and Clams curry - yes in the same dish! Mind blown. Need to try at combination back in India - I wonder whether it will find many takers though.
During the dinner, one of them said Ouro Sobre Azul and then translated it to me as meaning :gold over blue (pronunciation here). That is the literal translation. What the expression actually mean is something good has happened or more like icing on the cake/feather on the cap. My friend said that expression has its origins in the colonial prowess of the Portuguese. Portugal is famous for it's blue and white ceramic tiles (azulejos) and these were used as decorative art in churches and other important places. Every tile would painted and fired and would be a piece of a much bigger puzzle, which in this case was a gorgeous painting. Sometimes these were encased and framed in wooden panels. When they annexed Brazil, they found a lot of Gold deposits and then started to paint these wood frames with gold just - basically gild it.
So, gold over blue comes from that time, which meant everything was good and perfect - the high point of the Portuguese empire.
It's such a lovely expression and can be put to use in so many situations in life, I had to share it here. Icing on the cake, as lovely as it is, pales in front of gold over blue!
Interestingly, there is a phrase for icing on the cake in Hindi which also includes Gold. It's "Sone pe suhaga" [सोने पे सुहागा ]. This comes from the beauty of a woman - sona means gold, suhaga denotes the sign of a married woman - the vermillion on her forehead. A woman dressed in gold is beautiful, but when she is every more so with that mark of red on her head. I have my reservations about this one, because typical to Indian attitudes, everything about a woman boils down to marital status or the number of sons she bears. But well, expressions are expressions and you can't be judging them for stuff like this.
I will talk about another expression that i learnt through another friend of mine in London. This one is Dutch - Eet Smakelijk, here's the pronunciation. This is the Dutch bon appetite, but it means "eat deliciously". I fell in love with it when i heard it. What a lovely thing to say to someone at the start of their meal - to eat deliciously!
I shall head on to eat more egg tarts today - I wanted to write about a few more things, but have suddenly developed a writer's block and the tea is not helping.
May we all find things strewn in the day that make us say - ouro sobre azul and may you always dine with friends & family and use eet smakelijk !
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