That’ll do pig. That’ll do.

It’s been a busy few days here in SMP. We’ve been trying to balance getting things sorted for our upcoming move with showing Stephanie around.

On Friday we went to Nazaré, both to show Stephanie the sights and to meet up with our new friends Jane and Steve. Turns out Jane and Steve are friends of our neighbor, Margie, in Austin and moved to Nazaré about a year ago. When Margie found out we were planning to move to Portugal this year she connected us with Jane and Steve.

Every beach town in Portugal has a “Marginal” (pronounced mar-gin-ALL) – that’s what the Portuguese call the road and artistically-cobbled walkway that front the beach. Here are Jill and Stephanie on Nazaré’s Marginal. You can see the funicular that goes from Nazaré to Sitio on the hillside to the right.

Jane alerted Jill to the fact that there is an expat brunch every Friday morning at Village Brunch and Coffee on the main the square in Nazaré so we made a point to be there at the appointed time to introduce ourselves.

We got to Village Brunch and Coffee a little before the appointed hour

The breakfast fare at Village is top shelf

For you nerds out there, I was very impressed to find out that our new Portuguese Vodafone mobile service yielded the above 5G Speedtest from our table at Village. 947Mbs down/140Mbs up is pretty impressive 5G performance for anywhere in the US and certainly noteworthy in a beach town in Portugal.

Once we’d finished our breakfast and introduced ourselves to the welcoming group of expats, we began the trek up to Sitio. The funicular is currently out of service while a public works project is underway to stabilize the cliff above the tracks – so we hoofed it to the top. The walking trail up to Sitio from Nazaré is fairly steep but mercifully short and offers great views.

Jill and Stephanie appropriately chuffed at having gained the summit

We had an hour or so to kill before we were to meet Jane and Steve, which gave us time to show Stephanie the surfing landmarks that appear in “100 Foot Wave”.

The girls with the Surf Minotaur (that’s my term – I have no idea what it’s really called)

The Nazaré lighthouse has been transformed into a surf museum

By the time we climbed back up from the lighthouse, it was time to meet Jane and Steve – who introduced us to a great seafood place overlooking Nazaré – Restaurante Sitio dos Petiscos.

After lunch we walked to Jane and Steve’s place and they spent an hour patiently answering questions about the good and bad of making the jump to Portugal. That’s a conversation we try to have with every new expat acquaintance we make. We generally hear the same things from each person we talk to, but periodically we get a new twist. For example, EVERYONE we talk to says: Never expect to accomplish anything “official” in Portugal on the first try – they’ll always find a form that you filled out wrong or some document you forgot to bring. And the corollary is – Scheduling more than one errand in a day is a rookie mistake.

Steve did his homework and purchased a late-model Renault Clio (underscoring the advice we’d already received from our Porto tour guide Bruno about what car to buy in Portugal). Steve also connected me with the Renault dealership where he bought his car. I’ve already lobbed in a message to João at Santogal Renault in Lisboa to see if he can track down a gently used Renault Austral with an automatic transmission for me. The Austral is roughly the same size as Jill’s current car and has room for us to pick up guests and luggage in LIS.

Another benefit of chatting with Jane and Steve is that they turned us onto Continente. Continente is another chain of large format grocery stores that are in the larger towns in Portugal. Nazaré is big enough to have a Continente, but SMP is not. Aldi and Lidl are also good large format options. We left Jane and Steve and went straight to Continente before heading back to SMP. One of the interesting things about Continente is that they appear to lease out part of their footprint to adjacent businesses. For example, the Nazaré Continente contains a Worten, which is an appliance/electronics store, where we bought a space heater for our rental. Unless we find something better, we are likely to make 20 minute drive to the Nazaré Continente for big shopping runs.

Another thing that happened at the Continente is, while we were looking for tortillas and refried beans (we found the former, but not the latter), we bumped into a lady with a whole armload of tortillas. She was clearly an American expat so Jill struck up a conversation with her and ended up getting the name and number of a person who grows their own jalapeños and makes pico de gallo. I mention this because one thing led to another and Jill left Continente with contact information for no fewer than 6 expats who are also in the store, some of whom had already heard about us when we bumped into them in the parking lot on the way out. All of that is to say, we are now much less worried than we once were about whether we will be able to find English-speaking people we have something in common with while we burnish our Portuguese.

Even though we’d already had a full day by the time we got back home, the day was not through with us. There’s a restaurant in SMP called Waves that’s owned by a very nice British expat named Mary. Friday nights at Waves are proper Fish ‘n’ Chips. Jill booked us into Waves for dinner where we had a fantastic meal and chatted with Mary as she was making her rounds of the patrons.