We’re ahead of schedule!

The headline news for this post is I now have my official Portuguese resident card in hand – two months sooner than expected!

That means Jill (who got her residence card back in mid-May) and I are both now free to come and go from the EU as we please. Practically, it means we can start to plan our first trip back to the US to visit friends and family. That trip is currently penciled in for early January.

And from an adventure standpoint we can executing junkets to ports-of-call outside of Portugal. First up on the junket front will be London for a few days in mid-September with Team Mosher. Mia and Rich, along our awesome friends Gareth and Jackie, are all coming to see us September 21-29. In conjunction with that, Mia and Rich are stopping in London for a few days on the way to visit us and asked if we’d like to join them. We’d been waiting to commit to that trip until I got my residency card and now we’ve got the green light.

We’ve got a reasonably spaced slate of visitors coming between now and the end of October and Jill’s parents are coming the first week in December, so we will be doing a lot of bopping around Portugal with guests for the remainder of the year. If we can squeeze another trip in before heading back to the US for a visit, we are going to maybe try to go to Marrakech in November. It’s just an hour and a half flight from Lisboa. How hard can that be?

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

After resting for a day or two following Stephanie and Clara’s visit, we went to pick up our Portuguese social security numbers, called a NISS, at the Securança Social office in Nazare. We are becoming pros at grabbing a number from the queuing kiosks and then taking a strategically positioned seat to see the “Now serving…” monitor in the waiting area. And, when our number flashed up on the board, we walked back to the assigned desk and breezed through that interaction in about 5 minutes

Having a NISS is a recently added requirement for getting registered for the SNS, Portugal’s national healthcare system. We’ve heard that Portugal is transitioning to electronic health records. My guess is that the newly-required NISS number will somehow play into the identifier used for that scheme.

Armed with our NISS and our resident cards we walked down to the local Extensão de Saúde (Health Extension) in SMP one morning to apply for our “números do utente” (user numbers that we will provide to pharmacies and providers). That was a bit of a Keystone Cops routine. The lady who mans the front desk at our local health center doesn’t speak a lick of English, but we practiced our lines in advance of going in. The full pitch went as follows:

“Hola. Bom dia!” – Hello. Good day! (which satisfies the requirement that one properly greets everyone they interact with)

“Estamos a aprender Portugues…” – We are learning Portuguese… (just to level set that we are putting in the effort)

Gostariamos de solicitar os nossos números de utente por favor.” – We would like to request our user numbers please.

We delivered the lines as scripted and got a welcoming smile and a “Claro” (which means “I understand”) in reply. So far so good. We then had a successful 10 minute back and forth with her going through the form and which documents we would need which she also checked on an accompanying slip. We’d forgotten to bring our passports, but it didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to make copies for us in any event. We exited the building with instructions to return with the application form completed per her instructions and with copies of the requisite supporting documents, which included:

1. Our residence cards
2. Our passports
3. Our tax ID certificate (the NIF which is distinct from our NISS)
4. Our NISS certificate
5. Our Atestado de Residência from the mayor of SMP – strictly speaking this may not have been required but we thought we heard her say those words and included it just in case

Oh, and she was very certain that we understood she closes for lunch from 1-2PM and then is back again from 2-4PM.

We had plans that afternoon so we (meaning Jill – whose handwriting doesn’t take an Enigma machine to decipher) took our time completing the forms as requested. I was in charge of making copies of the supporting documents and, of course, our Epson inkjet printer chose that moment to let me know that I needed to replace all three color cartridges. Fortunately, knowing that the universe is always plotting against me when it comes to ink and toner, I had replacement cartridges, purchased at Worten, at the ready.

Two mornings later we walked back to the Estensão de Saude with what we thought were all of our documents in order. The nice lady said they all looked good, but where were our vaccination records? To be fair Jill and I both remember her requesting vaccination records in the initial encounter, but vaccination records weren’t listed on the document checklist and we didn’t remember. And she made it clear that she wanted both our childhood and adult vaccination records. We did our best to explain that we didn’t have our childhood records and she SEEMED to say tetanus was the headline vaccine they were looking for. We were relegated back out the door with a reminder that she closes for lunch from 1-2 PM and then is back again from 2-4.

We’d planned to have lunch and afternoon coffee in town to celebrate our successful SNS application submittal and we stuck with that plan even though we hadn’t actually succeeded.

We got home around 2PM and set about logging into our US pharmacy to download our vaccine record – at which point we discovered that I hadn’t installed the VPN on Jill’s laptop yet so we had to do that so that she could log in. By the time we printed out the vaccine records it was pushing 3PM and it’s a 30 minute walk to the Extensão de Saude, which was going to make it a little tight (not to mention that its a 4 mile round trip walk). So, we popped into the Austral and motored down.

At 3:15PM, we went through another round of document checks and the lady at reception gave us a thumbs up and then rattled off a burst of Portuguese Jill and I couldn’t understand. Rather than try to hash it out with us she called the security guard over from the main entrance. And when I say she called her over, she yelled “Ilda! Preciso de ayuda com inglês!” (I need help with English) Ilda wandered over smiling and listened for about 15 seconds and then turned to us and said, in English, “Come back in a month to pick up your card.”

We smiled and said “Origado!” (technically Jill said “Obrigada!” and I said “Obrigado!”) and took our leave. And we put a reminder on our calendar to go back to the Extensão de Saude on August 5th to check on our cards.

The important take-away here is:

Bureaucratic tail-chasing aside, we accomplished this whole three-act play in our fledgling Portuguese (modulo the final assist from Ilda) and at no point did either party in the transaction get frustrated. Jill and I both think that’s a significant win we can add to the mounting pile of evidence that we’re actually pulling this whole grand adventure off.

We also had our first overnight road trip since we move to Portugal! Spoiler alert: It was a fantastic success!

Our friends Ivan and Lori pinged us a month or so back to let us know that they’d be in the Douro Valley for a few days if we were available to meet them, which we instantly confirmed – both because we LOVE them and take every opportunity to see them AND we love the Douro Valley.

Jill took care of the three big logistical pillars of the trip:

1. Finding trustworthy pet sitters to stay in our place to watch Woody and Bulleit
2. Booking a hotel close to where Ivan and Lori were staying
3. Lining up our friend Bruno, who guided us on our first trip to Douro Valley last September, to take us on a tour of the valley

Turning the boys over to someone else for a couple of nights was probably the most stressful part, but the pet sitters came over for a meet and greet before the trip and it all worked out just fine.

Jill got us a very nice and reasonably priced riverfront room at the Vila Galé in Lamego just a few minutes from Ivan and Lori’s hotel.

And Bruno was available!

We set out on Tuesday the 25th for a leisurely drive from SMP to the Vila Galé. One of the fun parts of being new here is everything is basically terra incognito for us and Portugal is a very pretty place.

We arrived at the Vila Galé without incident and had a little time to kill before Ivan and Lori arrived from the airport in Porto.

The Vila Galé called us a taxi to ferry us to Ivan and Lori’s hotel so we could drink wine with dinner. I mention this not because getting a taxi is a big deal, but because Mario, our taxi driver refused to take payment from me when he dropped us at Ivan and Lori’s hotel. He said we could just pay him on the return trip. In our limited experience, that kind of handshake integrity abounds here in Portugal.

We had a lovely dinner with Ivan and Lori and then I sent a WhatsApp message to Mario that we were ready for pickup and he materialised to take us back to Vila Galé, whereupon I settled up with him for the roundtrip.

The next morning Jill and I were excited to see Bruno again. He picked us up at our hotel and then we went to get Ivan and Lori.

You know how sometimes you build things up in your head and then you go back to repeat the experience and it falls flat? This was NOT one of those times. We’d had such a fantastic time with Bruno back in September and this time was just as interesting.

Bruno, grew up just up the hill from Ivan and Lori’s hotel and he started off by telling us the story of their hotel, the Six Senses Douro Valley. Turns out it was originally a manor house that had been reduced by a fire long ago to just the ancient stone walls. Bruno and his friends had played hide and seek in the ruins as kids. Then Six Senses bought the property and refurbished it into a very nice hotel. The day was full of lots of that kind of local knowledge.

That evening we reversed the logistics and our taxi driver Mario drove Ivan and Lori over to our hotel for dinner and then ferried them back to Six Senses afterward.

It was an absolute delight to Ivan and Lori and have the Douro Valley be the backdrop for catching up!

Moral of the story: If you’re going to be in Portugal, but not coming specifically to see us… Give us a heads up and maybe we can meet you on neutral ground!

In other news, Hell may be freezing over because not only did I watch a football (soccer) match… I actually enjoyed it!

Portugal was playing in the Euro 2024 and made it out of group play into the elimination rounds so we made a date with our friends Catharine and Bob to head down to the Status Bar, a local watering hole, and watch the match with other members of the SMP community,

I picked an exciting first match to watch as it ended regulation 0-0, and then was still tied at the end of the extra 30 minutes. Portugal took the win in a penalty kick shootout! Sadly, Portugal lost in exactly the same fashion to France in the next match. Jill, Catharine, Bob, and I are talking earnestly about finding a local team to support so we can go to live matches.

Two final notes:

We can add Mercadona, a Spanish grocery chain, to our list of local supermarkets stores that are awesome in at least one vector. In Mercadona’s case it’s “presunto” – that may sound vaguely familiar because it’s the way you say prosciutto in Portuguese.

And last but not least, we discovered this morning with the onset of summer throngs here in SMP…

WE HAVE A SEASONAL FARTURA STAND!!!!

Adventure is out there!