Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 04

I’m getting rather annoyed at the huge negligence of this series. Sure, this definitely isn’t the first time that I blogged a series that almost nobody watches, but it’s really getting extreme here: this afternoon, when I checked up on my google-keywords this afternoon, I found out that eighty-four people came to this site, searching for the “Porfy sucks”. I mean, what!?

Okay, rambling aside, this was another excellent episode, as it continues to develop the characters. The episode starts with Porfy, waking up, and heading downstairs without waking up Mina. It’s here where he starts working on Mina’s birthday-present. It’s going to be something, carved out of wood, but he still refuses to show it to anyone. We also see him, borrowing a piece of string from his mother.

Mina then wakes up, and climbs downstairs. There, her mother (whose name is Anek, by the way) and father (whose name is Christopher, by the way), congratulate her on her eleventh birthday. Mina then rushes over to Porfy, though he acts like nothing happened (obviously, because the present isn’t done yet ^^;). Let’s just say that Mina isn’t happy. In any case, since this day it seems to be weekend as well, so Porfy and Mina are off from school. Therefore, Christopher offers to give the whole family a ride.

For that, however, a car is needed. It then turns out that Christopher is a car mechanic, and he can use the car of one of his clients (Corrina’s father, to be exactly), as long as he fixes it. And suddenly a lot of things become clear; most importantly Porfy’s obsession for cars. Of course, if your father is a car mechanic, you get to see a lot of cars. Now that I mention it, Mina must have become interested in Ancient Greece because of her mother. She came from a wealthy family, so she obviously has been schooled in these subjects, and she must have told Mina a lot of wonderful stories of those days.

Christopher indeed teaches Porfy a few things about cars as he works, after which Corrina drops by, looking for Zaimis. Once she left and the job is done, he takes the car along with Porfy to Mina and Anek. What’s also interesting is that he didn’t ask for a fee at all, as long as he could use the car for one day to go out with his family.

On the way home, Christopher and Porfy pass Zaimis and his father, who are just painting their stone hedges. Porfy wants to use the paint a bit to decorate his present for Mina (which we still didn’t get to see, by the way). After this, Anek and Mina are picked up, and Christopher heads to the ruins of an ancient Greek city, along with its own ancient theatre; something which Mina loves; you can really see that as she tries to imagine how that might have been. She even starts singing in Greek at one point. I must say that her voice-actress does a decent job. It definitely beats Les Miserables’ attempts at speaking French. 😛

While the foursome has lunch together, Porfy finally gives his present to Mina: it’s the wood-carved Apollo that you can see in the OP. This will probably have a huge symbolic value, later on in the series. When Christopher and the others return, a guy named Nicholas arrives at his house as well, delivering various materials that are used to build a house with, along with a very young tree, which gets to be planted in the back-yard of the house. It seems to be a “minen”-tree, though I’m not sure what that translates to. I did find a tree called a “minesakura”, which means a Japanese alpine cherry, though I wonder whether those exist in Greece. In any case, because the name of the tree sounds like Mina, the tree is called “Mina’s tree”, and the episode ends. I’m not sure what kind of house Christopher intends to build, but I’d guess it’s some kind of inn.

On a side-note: I’m still surprised at how detailed, yet simple the dialogue for this series is. For every episode, there’s usually just two or three line that I just can’t understand. Apart from that, I’m having no trouble at all to figure out what the characters are saying. Ever since I started watching raws, there hasn’t been any series that I was able understand as well as this series. That’s also why it’s such a shame that no subs have come out: it’s the perfect series for beginning translators to practice their skills.