Commitment

Since the last update, we’ve had lots of guests and even left Portugal for the first time since arriving here on April 21st, but the headline news is:

We are buying a place in SMP!!!

Our original plan was to spend a full year in SMP before starting to look for a place to buy, but we’ve ticked enough boxes in the first six months on the ground to be certain SMP is our town.

To that end we’d started looking at properties that were on the market with the goal of finding something that met the following must-have criteria:

• At least three bedrooms and two full bathrooms
• Master bedroom big enough for a king-sized bed
• Dedicated parking – so as not to wrestle to find parking during SMP’s July-August tourist crush
• An expansive view – we’ve been spoiled by the view from our rental
• A garden (yard) for Woody and Bulleit
• Similar or shorter walking distance to city center as our current rental – we love only getting in the car once or twice a week
• No significant updating/remodel needed – our Portuguese is coming along, but the idea of dealing with Portuguese tradesmen in their native tongue seems like a risky plunge into the deep end of the pool
• Room for a clothes dryer – if you ask us both independently what we miss most about living in the US I can guarantee we would both say, without hesitation, “Tex-Mex food!” But second on the list would be a clothes dryer. Because electricity is relatively expensive here, dryers are viewed as a luxury and the standard operating procedure is to line-dry laundry. For that reason Portuguese houses are typically built with a space for washing machine in the kitchen but no space for a dryer. We have been schlepping all of our sheets and towels to Sofia at the Lavandaria Italiana since we got here and would like to stop doing that if possible and just use Sofia for clothes that need professional care.
• I REALLY want a fiber Internet connection, but that’s more of a nice to have than a must have

One of the things that we probably should’ve expected – but failed to account for – is the available inventory of property suitable for full-time-living for sale in a beach town of 3,000 residents doesn’t turn over all that quickly. We pretty quickly narrowed down the candidate list of everything on the market that met most of our criteria and just as quickly determined every candidate was missing at least one of the must-have criteria above.

For example, we found plenty of properties with a garden for the dogs or a view but not both. There are beautifully updated historic apartments right in the heart of town, but they don’t have parking or a garden for the dogs. And there is some pretty stunning new construction a couple of miles up the coast toward Nazaré, but those houses would have us in our car every time we wanted to do anything.

We’ve been watching the market for a couple of months and have evaluated every new listing, but they’ve all been missing one or more of our criteria. During that time we also put the word out to our local friends about what we were looking for. Then one day, out of the blue, we were presented with a property that was about to go on the market that met all of our criteria. Just a few days later we had a handshake deal to buy that property.

The surprise to both of us is we are buying a unit in the same condo development where we’ve been renting. Because of our requirement for a garden, we’d both envisioned buying a single-family detached house. But there are a few units here that have their own back gardens and an even smaller number that have attached garages. The dogs are delighted with the choice because their favored walking routes will remain completely unchanged.

We are slated to close on the property this Wednesday and will take possession during the second week in November. We are buying it mostly furnished, which is common in Portugal, and that will give us about 5 weeks to find a few key items, like a king sized bed, and get delivery scheduled.

The timing works out nicely for Jill’s parents’ upcoming visit the first week in December. We can get settled into the house for a few weeks and then Jill and her mom can set about upgrading furnishings as needed and adding all of the decorative/nesting touches to make it really start feeling like our cosy oasis in Portugal.

It’s worth noting this is all happening a few months faster than our originally-planned timeline. Since I’m usually a measure twice – cut once kind of guy, this kind of timeline acceleration is out of the norm for me. But SMP already feels like home to both of us and we are excited to plant the flag and really start settling in. And, for what it’s worth, all of our guests so far see it, too. Buying a new home in Portugal is a big commitment, but we are both way more excited than we are nervous about it.

And now I get to geek out on research. I’ve got almost an entire kitchen to equip. Kitchen-wise we only brought my prized knives + a handful of kitchen implements + 4 Tervis Tumblers + Jill’s favorite purple mixing bowls with us. I’m also in charge of procuring anything we need that uses electricity. I ordered a dryer and a couple of dehumidifiers yesterday. This morning I ordered a TV, a nice coffee grinder, and panini press. And I just placed an Amazon Germany order for all the mesh network gear I will need for the new house.

Jill is tackling researching where we can get a 200cm x 200cm mattress (the European equavalent of an American king-sized bed) and a commensurately sized bed plus linens, which is harder than you might guess. She’s also looking for basic bedroom furniture such as a chest of drawers and bedside tables.

We are heading into Caldas da Rainha tomorrow to checkout a recommended mattress store and to look at Portuguese stoneware.

We are currently spending all of our procurement cycles on curating the high touch items that are going to help us feel settled. For commodity housewares we’ve got an IKEA just this side of Lisbon that should go a long way in terms of filling those needs expediently.

The other big development is we have started our “formal” Portuguese classes three evenings a week at the Escola (SMP’s primary and secondary school)! A nice thing Portugal does for immigrants with resident cards is offer evening language classes in local schools that follow the school-year calendar. Between now and the end of June, Jill and I can be found in room B6 of the SMP Escola every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night from 5:40-7:00. We mostly see this as one more avenue to become proficient in Portuguese as fast as is practical, but upon successful completion of this course we will also receive an official certificate saying that we have completed the A2 level of Portuguese. Official A2 certification is a requirement if we want to apply for either permanent residence or Portuguese citizenship someday down the line. And, of course, we will also continue our twice-weekly private sessions with Leonor.

On the topic of the language – and speaking only for myself – I feel like I am starting to turn a corner on the Portuguese language front. I’m starting to have more frequent encounters where the correct Portuguese words flow freely out of my mouth without me having to fumble around for them. By way of example, we were at the pharmacy here in SMP last week with our guests who needed some cold medication and I was able to convey to the pharmacist that we needed “pastilhas para tosse” (cough drops) in addition to “comprimidos para constipacão” (cold tablets). The fun part was I was able to that without any conscious thought about what the right words were. I may still be messing up a conjugation, a gender, or a preposition, but I’m able to get my point across more often and if the person speaking to me speaks slowly enough we can muddle through. There are still plenty of times when I have no idea what someone is saying, but it’s still nice to have little things fall into place every once in a while.

In the mean time, we’ve also had bunch of fun adventures with friends and family.

Jill’s uncle Jerry and his wife Bev came to stay with us in SMP for a few days. Their visit started with us picking them up at the Lisboa airport, where they were dropping off a rental car after spending a few days bopping around southern Portugal. I don’t mind admitting I had a bit of trepidation about the passenger pickup protocol after my sub-par interaction with the police officer when we tried to do a curbside pickup of Stephanie and Clara way back in June.

To that end I did all of my research on the proper pickup protocol at LIS and we went in with a plan. We parked in the P2 garage, which is right next to arrivals and accepts the Via Verde toll tag transponder that we have on our car. It could not have been easier. We pulled up to the entrance to the garage and pressed the Via Verde button and the gate went up. We parked within a short walk to the arrivals hall and walked in to meet Jerry and Bev, who were walking in from the rental car return. Once we were all loaded into our car, I just pulled up to the gate at the exit of the parking lot and it magically opened when it sensed our Via Verde tag (if you’re curious about the cost of short-term parking at LIS, we were in the P2 parking lot for 42 minutes and the charge that showed up on our toll tag was 3,05€).

PROCEDURAL NOTE TO FUTURE GUESTS: Jill and I will be very excited to see you, but LIS airport egress and the roundabout just outside of the airport is the closest thing we’ve found to a high-wire act in Portugal. Both times thus far we have picked up guests at the airport, the first 5 to 10 minutes en route toward home have required the full attention of both the pilot and the co-pilot. All of that is to say that you MAY feel ignored until we are safely back on the A8 heading out of town. So, please be prepared for your hosts to be fully operationally focused for a few minutes as we exit the airport.

Once the initial white-knuckle portion of our journey was over and we were safely on the A8 with Jerry and Bev, they regaled us with their just-concluded adventures in Ireland and the Algarve and then they got caught up on all the extended family news

And just like that it was time to take Jerry and Bev to their Lisboa hotel for their homeward flight the next morning.

Everyone was still up for adventure so we stopped on the way to Lisboa to show Jerry and Bev our favorite medieval town of Óbidos. Germaine to the story: Óbidos claims to make the best Ginja, a traditional Portuguese sour cherry liqueur. There are little Ginja stalls at the doors to most of the shops lining the pedestrian path in Óbidos that sell thimble-sized servings of Ginja served in an edible dark chocolate cup for 1€. If you pop the whole concoction in your mouth at once it’s basically like a boozy chocolate-covered cherry. We stopped for a Ginja photo op with Jerry and Bev thinking “This will be a cute picture for the blog…” – and in the time it took me to pull up the camera on my phone Jerry managed to have an “accident”.

With his shirt doused in Ginja, we went in search of new togs for Jerry…

After a fun diversion in Óbidos, we delivered Jerry and Bev safely to their airport hotel and headed back to SMP to get ready for our next adventure:

A long weekend in Londres (you may know it as London) with Team Mosher!

Way back when we thought we wouldn’t get our residence cards until August or September, Mia and Rich booked a trip to come see us in Portugal with a pre-Portugal stop in London. They’d secured lodging with an extra bedroom in case it turned out that Jill and I were free to travel by then. And once we got our residence cards we wasted no time in booking a TAP (TAP is Portugal’s flag air carrier) flight from LIS to LHR.

The day before our LIS-LHR flight we dropped the boys off at the pet hotel in Caldas da Rainha and took the bus from SMP to Lisboa. Jill had booked us into the Meliã, a hotel that’s within easy walking distance of the LIS terminal. You know how all airport hotels are predictably bland and without personality? The Meliã is not that. We had a great happy hour and meal at the hotel bar and the room was spacious and well-appointed. The Meliã has set the new high bar for an airport hotel and whenever we travel out of LIS in the morning we will just head to the Meliã the night before to make flight day easy. We’ve even started looking at where Meliã has other hotels… Vietnam, anyone? In summary, if you are coming to visit and need to spend a night in Lisboa before your homeward flight, we can vouch for the Meliã.

The next morning we made the easy stroll from the Meliã to LIS Terminal 1. Whenever we enter or leave the Schengen Region, which – thanks to Brexit – we were doing for the first time since getting our Portuguese residency, we have to present both our US passports and our Portuguese resident cards. How did we come to have this knowledge, you might ask? We learned the hard way. When we went through the electronic passport control line on the way to our LHR gate in LIS, we both got the dreaded red X and were directed to go stand in the long queue for manual passport control.

It turns out that our Portuguese resident cards are electronically tied to our US passports in the Portuguese immigration system, but the electronic passport readers apparently can’t see that connection. So to the passport readers it looked like Jill and I had overstayed the maximum 90 consecutive days in the EU without a visa and the purpose of sending us to the human line was so the very polite immigration officer when presented with our valid residency cards could manually approve our egress from the EU. And we had to do the same dance on the return from London because it would’ve looked to the electronic passport like we were returning to the EU before the mandatory 90-day cooling off period. At any rate, the line moved quickly and now we know the drill.

Once through the passport control line we were off to our gate. This was our first flight on TAP and we were on a shiny new A321 Neo LR with very generous seat pitch. I’m now a fan of TAP and now Jill and I both have shiny new TAP credit cards so we can wrack up TAP miles on our expenses in Portugal. It’s also worth noting TAP has a nonstop from LIS to SFO. So, when Jill and I make our first pilgrimage back to the US in a couple of months we will likely take the TAP flight to SFO and work our way west-to-east across the US to visit family and friends.

Will you look at the time!

It’s about time for us to walk down to the Escola for class and then after class we are going to walk to New Royal to meet our friends Nic and Amanda for Indian food. That’s just a little something we like to call Monday here in SMP.

Rather than delay this post again, I’ll pick up where I left off in the next post!

Adventure is out there!