One down…

Big news this week!

The first bit of good news is that we both received our Atestados de Residência from the São Martinho do Porto Junta de Fregesia (parish council) on Wednesday. The Atestado is a single page declaration of residence issued by the Mayor of SMP that replaces the lease document that we’ve been presenting at various government documents as proof of accommodation while we are awaiting residency. Armed with our Atestados we can now register with the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS) the Portuguese national healthcare system. As I understand it the SNS funding for a local health precinct is ultimately driven by the number of people officially living the area that are registered with the SNS, with the Atestado being the thing that allows you to register locally. Apparently one of the things you need to do if you move to another parish is get a new Atestdado and re-register for the SNS in that precinct. Jill and I both have private health insurance as required for our residency appointments, but ALL prescriptions are handled by the SNS so getting registered is important for getting any prescriptions filled.

While we were at the Junta office picking up our Atestados, CTT put a notice in our mail box that Jill had a signature-required item from Loja AIMA (the AIMA office) in Viseu that we could pick up at the post office Thursday morning after 11. We showed up at the post office shortly after 11AM on Thursday, took our number, and when our number was called Jill presented her passport to João, who works the desk, as proof of identification and signed for her letter. And, just like that, Jill is officially a card-carrying resident of Portugal!

Practically, that means Jill is now free to come and go from Portugal as she pleases. I, on the other hand, am still limited to one more exit/re-entry into Portugal until my card arrives. ETA on my residence card is the end of August.

From here on out, the only time Jill should have to present her US passport in these parts is when she’s entering or exiting the Schengen region.

More news is that we have our first visitors booked. Jill’s sister Stephanie is returning to Portugal with her daughter Clara for a week in mid-June. That will give us an excuse to go figure out the pickup/dropoff logistics at LIS. We’ve heard that there is a reservation system for airport parking.

We have started a list of the things that we will ask Stephanie to bring us. So far that list consists of:

• Crushed red pepper – Red pepper here tends to be ground into fine powder, with the exception being some piri piri spice blends that seem to consist of more than just crushed pepper.
• A metal citrus squeezer – The ones we’ve found here are plastic and too small for lemons
• A proper pair of silicone-tipped cooking tongs – The tongs here all have scalloped metal tips
• A roll of heavy duty aluminum foil – The aluminum foil here, when you can find it, is about 2 microns thick and doesn’t lend itself to lining cookie sheets
• A large jar of peanut butter

I’m sure we will come up with more things for the list as we get closer.

Portuguese lessons are proceeding apace. We are settling into a good routine with Leonor, who is fantastic, and Jill has made us a 2 inch thick pile of flashcards so we can quiz each other. Technically they aren’t flash “cards”. They are mostly index card-sized pieces of paper – so it would probably be a five inch stack of proper index cards. We have been unable to find index cards in Portugal. To that end, my first order with Amazon Germany was a pack of 900 proper index cards. They are slated to arrive tomorrow before 8PM. We’ve heard Amazon deliveries can be dodgy because they rely on CTT for the last mile. Index cards were a low-dollar/physically small Amazon.de order we could make to start, just to see how delivery to our address works out.

If last-mile delivery turns out to be unreliable, there’s a locker option that we can use where our package gets delivered to a locker and we get a notification when it’s ready to pick up. The downside there is that the nearest locker is in Caldas da Rainha, about 15 minutes away. In a bit of good luck, the lockers are at Agriloja (the local equivalent of Tractor Supply) the garden store in Caldas where we purchased our jalapeño plants. So we at least know where they are.

Another win on the Leonor front is they have a small organic family farm with fresh eggs from happy chickens. We are going to buy our eggs from Leonor and she will bring them to us on lesson days.

We live right along the coast and there’s a pretty reliable wind coming in from offshore which makes the cliffs along our dog walking route a great spot for the paraglider. We see them almost every day. We were walking along the cliffs earlier this week and THIS happened…

Bulleit enjoyed the show.

All of the overlooks where the paragliders fly have little homemade weather vanes to help them judge the wind direction and speed on the clifftops.

We’ve been keeping the boys out of the ocean this until this week just to make sure we could count on them to be good listeners. We gave them the green light this week and it went well. Bulleit is a little more adventurous than Woody, but they’re both getting the hang of it. Now we just need to figure out how to get the sand off of them before we let them back in the house!

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. All in all, not a bad day in the gulag.

Adventure is out there!