Getting Established

Tomorrow marks a fortnight since we made landfall in Portugal. I thought I’d devote this post to all of the settling in activities that we’ve done in the first two weeks.

Under the heading of food, water, and shelter we’ve done a good job of exploring the grocery store options both in SMP and in the next few towns over.

• Here in SMP we have a family run supermarket called Mundo Verde, we try to shop there when we are on foot in town. One downside to Mundo Verde in off peak season is that the family that owns it sometimes goes on vacation and you find out upon arrival that the store is closed until they get back, which they communicate with a note on the door. We haven’t been here during peak tourist season yet, but it is our understanding that everything is open all the time during peak season because that’s when the merchants make the lion’s share of their revenue – so we don’t begrudge them taking time off when they can.
• The local chain supermarket in SMP is an Intermarché, a French chain, which we thought was the bees knees until we experienced a couple of the other options below. Our particular Intermarché is a little bit on the small side compared to the one that we first experienced in Carvoeiro, but it has all of the essentials. Rumor has it that our local Intermarché may be in the process of being phased out in favor of a Continente, which we would welcome.
• There’s a big Continente in Nazaré, about 15 minutes north of us, and another even larger one in Caldas da Rainha about 15 minutes south of us . Continente is a Portuguese grocery chain and we are big fans. Continente is very competitive in terms of overall selection and good prices.
• The other native Portuguese chain option is Pingo Doce. Pingo Doce has a fantastic loyalty program and they happen to have the creamer that Jill likes in her coffee and our new favorite cinnamon biscuits that we have with evening tea.
• We’ve also been to LIDL about 25 minutes away in Alcobaça, a town we visited when we were getting our toll tag (more on that shortly). LIDL, a Germain chain, is solid but has less variety than Continente.
• ALDI is another German chain that has a couple of staples – the primary being good mature English cheddar cheese.
• E. Leclerc is another French chain that has pickled jalapeños and Skippy peanut butter.

It’s early yet, but think it will turn out that there will be a general purpose set of things we buy wherever we happen to be shopping and there will be a set of specific things that we can only get at one of the above outlets (e.g. peanut butter at Leclerc or cheddar cheese at ALDI).

We have also managed to get ourselves set up for Portugal’s system of toll roads. We now have a Via Verde toll tag mounted proudly on our windshield. Via Verde is the primary tolling authority in Portugal (and we’ve been assured that our toll tag will also work in Spain). One thing we now know that probably wouldn’t have changed our vehicle choice is that our Renault Austral is a CLASS 2 vehicle. What makes the Renault Austral a CLASS 2 vehicle you might ask? Well, it has to do with the height of the car directly above the front axle. Any two axle vehicle that is under 1.1 meters high at the front axle is a CLASS 1 vehicle. A two axle vehicle that is taller than 1.1 meters at the front axle is a CLASS 2 vehicle. CLASS 3 vehicles have three axles and CLASS 4 vehicles have more than 3 axles. Because we have decent ground clearance, our car is slightly taller than 1.1 meters above the front wheel, thus CLASS 2. Effectively, CLASS 2 covers everything from mid-sized SUVs like ours all the way up to Sprinter vans. The tolls go up as the class of vehicle increases. CLASS 2 tolls are about 50% higher than CLASS 1 tolls.

In order to get our Via Verde tag, Jill and I made a pilgrimage to Glassdrive in Alcobaça. Glassdrive is an auto glass repair company with locations all over Portugal, which makes it a handy option for toll tag distribution. This was a nice first test for us because the nice office manager at Glassdrive didn’t speak any English. We managed to get through the transaction successfully with a little help from Google Translate and we walked out with our new toll tag and affixed it to the windshield. The toll tags aren’t active until you go to an ATM (all ATMs in Portugal have an option for setting public service payments) and enter the corresponding confirmation number to set up automatic debit for any tolls you accrue.

It was a celebration-worthy accomplishment. So, when we got home, we walked Woody and Bulleit down to city center for a toastie and a cappuccino at a cafe. And after lunch we went to the ATM and successfully activated our Via Verde tag!

The next big item was to present ourselves to AIMA (the Portuguese Ministry of Immigration and Asylum). Our AIMA appointments, scheduled for the morning of April 30, were the driving factor for the timing of our move. By flying on April 22nd, we’d given ourselves a week of lead time to get sorted in advance of our appointments. All we had to do was present ourselves at the appointed times with all of the necessary documents supporting our residency application – including:

1. Our Portuguese tax numbers, called NIFs
2. Proof of accommodation (our lease)
3. Three months of bank statements from our Portuguese bank
4. Proof of private health insurance (required until we receive residency)
5. Our US passports with affixed visas
6. Proof that we’d entered the country since the visas were issued (our boarding passes from our flights)

Piece of cake… Except there was one little complicating factor. Jill’s appointment and my appointment were at the same time in two different towns – towns that were 100 kilometers apart. We opted to turn that particular problem into an expense. We hired a driver named Diana to take Jill to her appointment and perform any necessary translation services at her appointment in Viseu. And I went solo to my appointment in Coimbra, which involved an underground parking garage in city center.

My appointment in Coimbra, the big university town in Portugal, was a little intimidating for no other reason than after parking I walked into the government services building and the queue for the AIMA desk stretched down the length of a hallway and around the corner down the next hallway. That made me think that my appointment time was more of a general suggestion than an actual appointment. Fortunately there was an information desk where you take numbers for the various services on offer and I asked the person manning the desk if I needed to take a number and she said that as long as I had an appointment I just needed to wait until they called my name. I waited about 15 minutes and didn’t hear any names called, which made me think I was in WAY over my head. About then I heard someone call “Christopher Praisner!” I worked my way up to the desk and said, in my shiny new Portuguese, “Eu sou Christopher Praisner!” and we were off to the races. I handed over all of the documents Jill had sequenced in my folder, paid my €177.40 application fee, and I was out in 15 minutes for a celebratory toastie and a cappuccino at a nearby cafe where Jill, Stephanie, and I ate on our first trip to see our digs back in January. I only had two difficulties and they’re both humorous in retrospect:

1. The person doing my paperwork put down an address on my form that didn’t match our mailing address. As politely as possible I tried to make her understand that she had entered the address wrong. I even showed her the mailing address on our proof of health insurance, which is correct, but she would not deviate. It turns out that our lease document contains the legal description of our rental taken from the deed on the property rolls at the tax office, as opposed to the mailing address… and both Jill’s person and my person used that legal description for the address we will have on file for our residency applications and, more important, the address our cards will be mailed to. After some subsequent back and forth with our attorney, she assures us it is a perfectly legal address for us to use on the residency application so there’s no issue with our application, but there’s some question as to whether our cards will be delivered to us successfully. That’s not the end of the world, but it means we may have to track them down if they don’t show up. In the mean time I took our label maker that I brought with us and put PRAISNER as prominently as I could on our mail slot. We are also going to try to befriend our CTT mail carrier and let them know that we are expecting our residence cards that may be slightly mis-addressed. Time will tell.
2. The second difficultly was just full-on funny. Portugal has this rule where you don’t show up with documents that you’ve signed – you sign in front of the person you are handing the document to. That makes sense to me. The funny part is the person witnessing your signature aways says “exactly as it is on your passport”. So, I get to the end of my residency application appointment and the last thing I need to do is sign the application on a digital pad. I signed once and the person holding my passport looked at my signature on the monitor and shook her head and said try again. I repeated that process three more times and got the head shake each time. I had no idea what to do at that point so I looked at her with a supplicating gesture, whereupon she told me that on my passport the “i” in Praisner does not have a dot on it and I was dotting the i on the digital pad. Rather than having to remember not to dot the i on future government encounters where I present my passport, I have added the missing dot to my passport signature.

Jill was lucky to have Diana to help her navigate both the town of Viseu, where parking was nearly impossible to find, and the logistics of the appointment. Where my facility had on site parking, clear instructions, and an information desk, Jill’s did not. Diana got Jill to the right room in the right building and Jill took it from there.

The appointments ultimately worked out just fine. Because each AIMA office does their own end-to-end processing, each office has its own turnaround time. Based on our respective AIMA locations, Jill can expect her card in the next couple of weeks and my card will take at least 120 days – which puts me at the end of August before I can expect it.

Having our successful AIMA appointments under our belts was a HUGE relief. Even though we (and by we I mean Jill) have done everything leading up to this point by the book and knew there was no reason our residency applications wouldn’t be successful, we’ve taken a big leap of faith by moving here with Woody and Bulleit – so getting through this final residency wicket was a very big deal emotionally.

Under the heading of general commerce, we have now successfully ordered and received a couple of deliveries at home. I ordered some all-weather car mats for the Austral and Jill ordered a delivery from Ikea near Lisbon. Those were small victories, but it feels good to have a transaction work end-to-end even with the language barrier.

We have also stepped up our efforts to learn Portuguese. We got a recommendation for a local tutor, Leonor, who met us at a cafe to talk about our goals for learning the language. We hit it off right away and now we meet with Leonor for two hour sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We went to the Junta (the local municipal offices of our town) to get a start on our Atestados de Residência (an official document that says we are residents of São Martinho do Porto). The nice lady gave us two blank applications and instructions on how to complete them (in Portuguese).

Why do we need an Atestado? In order to register for the Portuguese national healthcare system we have to have :

1. Our residency cards from AIMA
2. An Atestado from SMP, signed by the mayor himself, that shows we’ve been residents here for 90 days

To get our Atestados we have to have present proof of accommodation (our lease) and the signatures of two Portuguese citizens who are residents of SMP to the Junta – and pay €5.60 each (a thing that I’ve learned since we got here is all interactions with the government come with some sort of fee). If it all checks out we will get a letter from the mayor that says we are bonafide residents of our little town. We asked Leonor and our next door neighbor, Ilda, very nicely if they would sponsor us into the club and they were both happy to do it.

We’ve become regulars at the local farmer’s market. We have our favorite person to buy from and I have a routine with her where she teaches me a new Portuguese word for something we are buying each time we shop (for example: cilantro is “coentros” in Portuquese). She’s also helping me get better at paying for our produce with exact change in Euros. She will say the total price of our accumulated purchase in Portuguese and wait patiently while I dig out exact change – and corrects me gently when I get it wrong.

In a surprise, we found some jalepeño plants at a local garden store!

Those plants are now repotted, soaking up sun on our patio, and already have a few tiny peppers on them. I also bought some cayenne pepper seeds and planted a few of those.

We took W&B to the veterinarian in SMP for an introductory visit to get vaccinated for a parasite we don’t have in the US and to get their EU passports. There’s a requirement for their chips to be registered in the national system within 30 days of arrival.

I’ll close with this in terms of us getting settled in. Weather permitting, we’ve been walking Woody and Bulleit 5 miles on the beach every morning. We get up and have a cup of coffee then head down our hill and into town and then hop onto the beach and walk all the way around the bay and back. We mostly have the beach to ourselves in the morning. Yesterday we were on our outward leg of our walk and Amanda, a new friend who is a recent arrival from Hong Kong, intercepted us on the beach to tell us that there were two people in town looking for the people with the two golden retrievers. Turns out it was another couple we’d met, but not exchanged numbers with. They got their message to us by telling someone they were looking for the two people who walk their golden retrievers on the beach every morning.

Adventure is out there!