You've absorbed some of the toughness of the Basques you visited. The Basques indirectly helped Portugal overthrow fascism through ETA's assassination of Franco's right hand man Carrero Blanco on December 21, 1973 in Madrid.
Nine years later one of the founders of ETA, Jose Luis Emparanza (Tzillardegui) was one of my 1st wife's classmates in the UCLA linguistics dept. In the summer of 1982 he took us on a tascas tour of San Sebastian's old town, where every barman knew him. There we learned this joke from the day after ETA's successful Operacion Ogro, in which Carrero Blanco's car was blown over the roof of the convent to its second story on the far side of its courtyard. The next day new price lists appeared in bars all over the Basque country:
“Precios de vino:
Rojo: Caro (Red: Expensive)
Blanco: Alto (White understood as Carrero Blanco: High, understood as airborne from being blown sky high)
Jose Luis had left ETA in 1967 and co-founded its post-Franquista civilian political party wing, Herri Batasuna in 1978. He was expelled in 1980 and later elected Senator on the left wing separatist Abertzale ticket in 1986 and 1989.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txillardegi#Labor_pol%C3%ADtica Txillardegi in 2007
In another case of not asking the right questions, I knew only about his ETA activity, but not his co-founding Herri Batasuna four years before we went out tasceando (pub-crawling) with the double entendre of vino blanco “alto”.
I first learned Portuguese in that carnation revolution summer of 1974.
Saudos cordiais da Avenida Boavista, Porto.
