Alice asks: could you live without a refrigerator?

Think you can make me smile? Think again.

My cousin Alice has always marched to the beat of a different drummer. As an adorable rosy-cheeked little girl, she requested that we call her  "John" and wore shorts and no shirt to the beach. After all, if her older brother could do it, why couldn't she? I've always admired her courage to be her own person. After college, she moved to Portugal to spend a summer working on a farm. That was two years ago! Since then, she has become fluent in Portuguese as well as farming. Alice possesses the unique talent of being able to make us think about what we take for granted in our lives as being necessary and part of decorum (see frowny-face photo), which is why I jumped at the chance to share her story of living for the past year without a refrigerator in Portugal.

Before I let her get started with her tale, I should mention I'm rather attached to my refrigerator. While I follow several bloggers in their attempts to go "off grid," I have no plans to do so myself in the future. However, like Alice is about to explain, I have had the benefit of seeing differences in other cultures' views of what MUST BE refrigerated. For example, my first time shopping in a British grocery store, I spent thirty minutes wandering around in search of the eggs. I stubbornly persisted, assuming I must be blind to some other method of storing eggs in the fridge besides cardboard crates. Only after an embarrassing moment in which I asked a befuddled store clerk did I finally discover the location of the eggs, midway down an aisle with NO REFRIGERATION. Then there was the British refrigerator in our home, which was the size of a trash compactor and was stored under the counter. I also remember that on my study abroad in Kenya, the yogurt in our sack lunches came European-style with more active cultures and was stored in unrefrigerated bags.