Regular readers will know that I usually write about the new or interesting things that Jill and I have discovered during our grand Portuguese adventure. To change things up a little, I’m going to start this post with things that seem to me to be the same the world over…

Homeowners’ Associations

One Saturday, Jill and I attended the annual COA (Condo Owners’ Association) meeting for our snug little compound here in SMP. We’d had the date circled on our calendar since the meeting was announced. Going into the meeting we knew that it would be conducted entirely in Portuguese, so we made plans to sit next to our lovely Portuguese-native neighbor Ilda in the extremely likely event there were some topics we couldn’t grasp with our rudimentary Portuguese. It’s not a stretch to say I was actually excited about the meeting. I viewed it as an opportunity both to see how such things go in Portugal and to have a go at a real-world Portuguese language comprehension test.

The COA administrator sent out a comprehensive packet (in Portuguese) via email a few days before the meeting. I pored over it so I could familiarize myself with the slated discussion topics. It was also a fascinating read in terms of seeing the full accounting of income and expense (along with who was behind on paying their COA fees).

It all started out well enough. Filipe (our property manager that Jill and I really like) and António (our beloved gardener) had been working hard all week to make the grounds look very nice. Jill and I arrived 5 minutes early to the community game room and saved a seat for Ilda. One of my favorite things about Portuguese culture is the sense of community. Almost every person who came into the room would stop at the door and survey the room and say something to the effect of “Boa tarde a todos!” (Good afternoon to all!) before picking up their packet and finding a seat.

Universal Truth #1: Administrators of home owners’ associations have a difficult and thankless job.

The meeting had a clear agenda and the first part of the agenda was to present the past year’s budget and performance against that budget in terms of income and expense. Everyone with a grievance completely ignored the agenda and lobbed in their grenades whenever they wanted to. The president of the COA handled it patiently and gracefully. He granted the bomb throwers a minute or two to talk themselves out and then noted the portion of the agenda where we would come back to that particular grievance.

Universal Truth #2: People only want what THEY want

And the corollary here is that people resent paying for ANYTHING that is not specifically what THEY want.

This condo development is about 30 years old and is generally in great shape, but there are certain capital-improvements and maintenance that need to be done.

For example, we have a full miniature golf course that gets a ton of use by kids and families, primarily in the summer time because that’s when school is out and families are here. The proposed budget put before the owners for this year included €4,000 to do some work on the mini-golf course to get it ready for next summer because some of the wood borders on the holes have weathered and splintered and the artificial turf has degraded over time. There was a surprisingly fierce verbal campaign waged by a group of residents who NEVER use the miniature golf course to spend the €4,000 removing the course instead of maintaining it so that they would never again have to pay for maintenance on something they don’t use.

Universal Truth #3: Petty squabbles between neighbors apparently happen everywhere.

I’m not making this up… There was a heated 20 minute exchange between two residents about one of them planting tomato plants in the common area outside of their balcony that would have otherwise had to have been landscaped by the COA.

In point of fact, there WERE tomato plants there LAST YEAR, but this year it’s been landscaped to match the rest of the compound. Editor’s note: I personally thought it was a great use of space and those were some of the healthiest tomato plants I’d ever seen. Plus, apparently, the planting of tomato plants was sanctioned in advance by our gardener, António. In spite of the fact the situation had already been remedied, we were treated to a cage-match between two people who don’t hold each other in high regard. The aggrieved party was throwing around words like “mentirosa” (liar) and “cadela” (female dog).

I could not understand why the other attendees were all shaking their heads and openly laughing during that exchange, but Jill explained it to me in our post-meeting debrief. The complaint, by the rogue tomato-grower’s upstairs neighbor, was worded as “Unauthorized Tomatoes”. Apparently in European Portuguese (I can’t speak for the Brazilians), the word “Tomates” (tomatoes) is also slang for testicles. So every time the complainant talked about what translates as “Unauthorized Testicles” there was a wave of giggles in the room. A more accurate, but far less sophomorically comical, complaint would have been that there were “tomateiros” (tomato plants) planted in an unauthorized area.

And to put an ironic bow on that particular vendetta, the tomateiro planter got the last laugh because she is now the newly elected COA representative, which I do not think the agitator was considering when hurling invectives.

In retrospect, we needn’t have worried about having allies to help with our fledgling Portuguese, but it was comforting to have people looking out for us. Our neighbor Bruno also sat near us and kept checking on me to make sure I was keeping up (or to let me know when someone was just bloviating). But here’s the GREAT news, I understood probably 75% of what was said – which is saying something because this was rapid-fire back-and-forth exchanges (sometimes emotionally charged).

In the end, every proposal in the packet that was distributed in advance of the annual meeting passed and Filipe got a well-deserved raise, which we were delighted to see.

Other than the discourse happening in Portuguese, this same scene could have played out at our homeowners’ association meeting in Austin.

Car Maintenance

Last week I took our trusty Renault Austral in for its annual scheduled maintenance at the Renault dealership in Caldas Da Rainha (a larger town just down the A8 from SMP). I already knew the drill from last year’s scheduled maintenance and this was another good experience with the nice folks at the dealership.

Universal Truth #4: Car dealership maintenance lounges are the same no matter where you are.

I cooled my heels in the dealership’s customer lounge for a couple of hours while they changed my oil and gave everything a good once over and threw in a car wash for good measure and drove off a happy customer.

Drunk Driving

Portugal, the country that drinks the most wine per capita in the world, has an extremely low tolerance for drunk driving. The legal limit here is 0.05% blood alcohol content (vs. 0.08% in Texas).

Universal Truth #5: Holiday Checkpoints for Drunk Driving

At the end of the year the GNR (Guarda Nacional da Repubicana), Portugal’s national police force, launches a well-communicated campaign to let us know that they’re stepping up enforcement. For several weeks before the start of GNR’s annual national drunk driving campaign, every radio station in Portugal and all the news outlets trumpet the upcoming no-refusal regime with the full support of the GNR (I attribute this to the GNR preferring to PREVENT drunk driving over having to enforce the penalties). During the actual campaign the GNR sets up checkpoints and waves motorists over for a field sobriety check. One thing that is different about traffic stops here in Portugal is that while they’ve got you pulled over for any reason they will run through a laundry list of possible infractions. In addition to the standard license, registration, and insurance checks they may check to make sure you possess the required roadside emergency paraphernalia (yellow-vest and orange hazard triangle) and have functional turn signals, brake lights, etc. Portugal also has a presumed-guilty citation scheme. If you are found in violation of minor regulations at a traffic stop by the local police or the GNR you pay your fine right then and there via debit card, credit card, or MBWay (Portuguese Venmo). And if you want to contest it later in traffic court, you are welcome to try. That might seem a little heavy handed to Americans, but it seems to work ok here and probably keeps the traffic court docket manageable. This is just my opinion, but I think the seriousness with which enforcement is carried out conveys the notion that driving a car here carries more social responsibility than it does where we came from.

Universal Truth #6: The Christmas season officially kicks off with Thanksgiving

Even though Portugal doesn’t celebrate American Thanksgiving, the holidays (or “festas” as they are known here) seem to kick off in conjunction with Thanksgiving. For example, SMP’s tree lighting ceremony this year was Friday November 28th, the day after Thanksgiving. And we’ve noticed that since that date it’s not uncommon for American Christmas music to be piped into our local cafés.

That brings us to the title of this post: Boas festas!

“Boas festas!” means “Happy holidays!” in Portuguese and any town big enough to have a town council in Portugal has some sort of “Boas festas!” display during the month of December. Generally speaking, the larger the town – the larger the decorating budget. I may be biased, but I think SMP punches above its weight in the decorating department.

A brief digression into Portuguese conversational niceties…

Another of my very favorite aspects of Portuguese culture is the variety of simple situationally-appropriate ways that native Portuguese speakers convey good wishes to each other at the end of every conversational interaction. Almost without fail, at the end of every personal conversation or commercial transaction, the Portuguese close with situationally-appropriate good wishes. It’s both charming (because the range of options available requires people to make a conscious choice as to what to close with) and intimidating (because if I initiate the closing exchange I often muck it up by choosing poorly – the main evidence of which is that the other party responds with something more apropos of the current situation).

A partial list of sign-off phrases that we’ve been on the receiving end of (with rough translations) is below:

• Bom dia! – (Have a) good morning!
• Boa tarde! – (Have a) good afternoon! (in Portugal it is “afternoon” from when you finish lunch until it is fully dark)
• Boa noite! – (Have a) good night!
• Bom fim de semana! – (Have a) good weekend!
• Boas ferias! – (Have a) good vacation!
• Boas festas! – Happy holidays!
• Boa Véspera de Natal! – Merry Christmas Eve!
• Boa Natal! (also Feliz Natal!) – Merry Christmas!
• Feliz Ano Novo! (also Bom Ano!) – Happy New Year!
• Beijinhos! – Kisses! (I originally thought the “-inhos” diminutive meant “tiny kisses” but it’s an indication that you are speaking to a friend or relative that you are truly fond of)
• Boa sorte! – Good luck!
• Feliz Pascoa! – Happy Easter!
• Ciao ciao! – A little bit of Italian culture creep that’s accepted as a friendly conversational goodbye particularly with people you don’t know well
• Ate a próxima! – Until next time!

During the month of December, “Boas festas!” is the table-stakes of conversational closing phrases and as Christmas approaches, people will start to stack a few things into their closing line. For example yesterday we had our last Portuguese lesson of the year with Leonor and as she was putting her coat on she wished us: “Boas festas, boa Natal, e boa ano!”

Back to the topic of the holidays… We really like the feel of the holiday season here in Portugal – but it’s the first time ever that it’s just me, Jill, Woody, and Bulleit for the holidays. We are keeping some old traditions. We’ve decorated the house and we’ve watched all of our traditional Christmas movies. We’ve had lots of fires in the fireplace. I’ve made eggnog.

We also ordered a copy of Paul Hollywood’s British Baking cookbook so that I could expand my repertoire during the holiday season. I will be making proper ginger biscuits on Christmas morning.

And we are establishing some new traditions. Tonight, Véspera de Natal (Christmas Eve), we are going to an open house that some Austin friends are having. On noite de Natal (Christmas night) our local Indian restaurant, New Royal, is having a buffet dinner – which Jill and I have signed up for (in lieu of traditional Chinese take-out) along with one of our recently arrived friends who doesn’t have anyone to celebrate Christmas with. And on New Year’s Eve we’ve got dinner reservations with other ex-pat friends in SMP at Baía Cultural that will lead into SMP’s spectacular midnight fireworks display. Our new traditions seem to be skewed toward making sure our new friends who are also far away from loved ones have some company during the holidays.

Now for a bit of bad news… I regret to report that Woody has developed a limp in his right rear leg over the last couple of weeks and after a few visits to the local vet here in SMP he’s been diagnosed with a knee ligament issue that, pending near-certain confirmation from a veterinary orthopedic specialist, will require a surgical repair. Woody is his normal happy self, but I’m a complete emotional wreck. And it’s Christmas Eve so we likely won’t have any forward progress for a little while. In the mean time we have to get a happy golden retriever to stay sedentary, which is not an easy feat. Bulleit doesn’t understand why he and I are going on walks without Woody – my working hypothesis is that Bulleit knows Woody is not 100% and also that he is just SURE Woody is at home getting extra snacks.

We are both hopeful that we will get Woody all sorted, but it’s going to be a stressful journey and a long recovery. In the mean time I will keep baking myself to distraction.

Woody’s current situation aside, 2025 has been a banner year for us here in Portugal and we remain beyond grateful to be on this grand adventure.

From Todd, Jill, Woody, and Bulleit to all of you…

BOAS FESTAS, FELIZ NATAL, e BOM ANO!

Adventure is out there!

For the next week it’s just me and Woody and Bulleit holding down the fort here in SMP.

Jill is on a girls’ trip in Londres (you may know it as London) with our Austin friends Amy and Katharine. Amy and Katharine both had reason to be in Londres this week so the three of them hatched up a rendezvous plan. I dropped Jill at LIS Saturday morning for her 08:35 TAP non-stop to Londres (and, yes, “Londres/Heathrow” is how it appears on the Departures board at LIS) and she texted me that she was wheels-down at LHR 11:25. And I’ll collect her at our normal spot by the Starbucks in LIS Arrivals hall after she wings her way home this Saturday afternoon.

It’s not often that Jill and I are apart for this long and this is the very first time that we haven’t been in together in Portugal. If we still lived in Austin and Jill was in Londres for a week I would have reason to feel like she was on the other side of the world, but she’s currently only 933 miles away (according to Find My iPhone – not that I’m stalking her…) and we are still in the same time zone. I mention that because after Jill and I parted at the airport yesterday morning I had an unexpected twinge of anxiety. Not serious anxiety about our health or well-being, but just a spike of anxiety that I’m flying solo in Portugal until the love of my life gets back from Londres and also – even though she’s traveling with close and capable friends – anxiety that I’m not in Londres to be her wingman.

By the way, all is well in Londres. Jill is having a blast with Amy and Katharine. And, because she loves me, she has already made a re-supply stop at Fortnum & Mason to bring me back our favorite teas and biscuits.

And all is well in Portugal, too. Woody, Bulleit, and I are eating peanut butter right out of the jar, just because no one is here to stop us.

Regarding the anxiety:

• I find it noteworthy that it actually registered that I was feeling “anxious” (Jill is gonna be SO proud that I’m talking about feelings!), which I think means that – since moving to Portugal – my baseline level of floating anxieties has dropped to a level low enough where I am able to notice an uptick.
• This experience got me thinking about all of the stress and anxiety of moving to another country and how very little of what we feared was going to happen actually ended up happening – which is my segue to the meat of this post.

In a few short weeks, on April 23rd, we will mark one full trip around the sun since we packed all our worldly possessions into a handful of suitcases, handed Woody and Bulleit over to Kevin and the capable team from petrelocation.com, and voluntarily turned our lives upside down.

Here is my best effort at being objective about how all of our pre-move concerns have played out:

• Are we crazy? What if we have an overly rosy read on Portugal and it turns out that there are showstoppers that should have been obvious once we get there?
  • Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that there are no showstoppers to report. Portugal has exceeded our rosiest expectations on every axis. The people are lovely and the country is beautiful. And, while the final analysis may indeed show that we are crazy, the act of moving to Portugal will not factor in to that assessment.
• How will we stay connected with family and friends?
  • Staying in touch been harder than expected in some ways. The main way in which it’s been harder is that we are 6 hours ahead of Texas and 8 hours ahead of California. We didn’t expect that to be a big deal because there’s still a decent chunk of hours every day where we are awake at the same time as our Texas and California people. What we didn’t factor in is that communication tends to happen either at the beginning or the end of the day locally – both times that one or the other party in our situation is asleep. California is sometimes an exception to that phenomenon as there are times that we are up early and they are up late we get a surprise response.
    
    The silver lining to that is that our texts are likely the first thing people see when they wake up so we usually get responses while people are drinking coffee. The same is true coming the other direction. Jill and I routinely wake up to messages that people sent us after we went to bed and we address those while drinking coffee.
    
    And we sometimes do have mid-day text chains, but we’ve found that things tend to be clustered around one end of the day or another.
    
    As far as voice calls go – there’s really no spontaneity – we just have to coordinate via message in advance. That’s just how that is.
    
    On the plus side, we live in an amazing place that our people seem to want to come visit and we’ve been on the receiving end of a bunch of visits from family and friends. A thing that I think is actually true is that we’ve spent more and higher quality time with some of the people we care about because they’ve come to visit us here. All the expats tell us that will taper off over time, but it’s always nice to see people we love walking out of baggage claim at LIS.
• How will Jill tolerate the “winters” in SMP? We’d been forewarned that SMP winters were “like Winter in southern France – dreary, cold, and wet.”
  • Jill gets the Blahs if she goes more than a few days without seeing the sun – so the preview sounded a little ominous. But, our first winter in SMP was a piece of cake. The days got pretty short around Christmas with only about 9.5 hours between sunrise and sunset, but by the end of January we’d already gained an hour of daylight back. There was one morning where there was frost on the grass and on some car windshields, but the lowest temperature my weather station recorded was 1.6C (35F). And the average winter temperature was 12.7C (55F). We only had a couple of stretches where it was cloudy and rainy for three consecutive days. We had one pretty good storm with very high winds at the tail end of winter. The high winds from that storm did damage all over Portugal, but our only impact was that it wrecked the jalapeño pepper seedlings that I’d put out in pots a couple of weeks too early (lesson learned). Generally speaking, even on the days where rain was forecast, the rain came in bands and we would have some watery sunshine between the bands. I’m coming to the conclusion that maybe that’s just the way coastal weather works. It can be clear and then rain can come out of nowhere and then it will be clear again – meaning we just need to be prepared in terms of dressing in layers and having rain jackets at hand. The locals tell us that this was a mild winter and that last winter it rained for two weeks straight. I would say that the one big take-away from our first winter in SMP is that you have to be prepared for the weather to change on short notice.
• How will Woody and Bulleit fare in the actual move?
  • This was more of a tactical concern than a strategic one. Woody and Bulleit are full voting members of our family pod and Jill and I were both more than a little worried about them while they were traveling as unaccompanied minors between Austin and Lisboa. We’d heard horror stories of pets arriving dehydrated and in bad shape from the journey, but that’s why we’d sprung for VIP service to get them to Portugal. This is where the team at petrelocation.com really shined. We got updates and pictures of W&B’s progress all the way through their journey and, other than the minor inconvenience of not having anything on hand to cut the zip-ties on their crates when we were reunited at the air freight terminal, it could not have been any smoother. We picked W&B up at the Lisboa airport in the wee hours of April 24, 2024 and by the time we all woke later up that same morning they were raring to go for their first walk. They haven’t looked back since then. They get 5 to 10 miles of walks every day and we have plenty of different routes to choose from (Jill often lets Bulleit pick the route – Woody is just happy to be on the team), all with views of the ocean. It never gets so hot in SMP that we can’t walk them, as was the case in Austin most days after 9AM from June through September when the pavement was too hot for their paws. Woody and Bulleit are both living their best lives in Portugal. As I type, they are sunbathing on our patio listening to the birds sing.
• Portuguese is HARD. What if we can’t learn it?
  • I wish I could say that we overestimated how hard Portuguese is to learn, but we did not. After taking pre-move Zoom lessons for a year in Austin, having Leonor tutoring us twice per week at our home since the move, and now seven months of thrice-weekly government-sponsored night classes at the high school under our belt my honest self-assessment is… I MIGHT be able to hold my own in a conversation with a Portuguese 5-year-old (but I can also confidently say that the 5-year-old would have a better grasp on the imperative verb tense than I currently do).
    
    That’s not to say that we are not making good progress, because we are. Our reading comprehension is ahead of our auditory comprehension. The way I would characterize our current ability to listen is that if you give us context before someone starts speaking we can mostly follow along. But without context we flounder. The good news is that mostly we are provided with some context. If we are in a Farmácia (pharmacy) picking up a prescription, we can safely bet that the pharmacist will be talking to us about our prescription. Similarly, in any café or restaurant we’ve got the context that we are going to be going through the mechanics of ordering, receiving, and paying for food and beverage. When we are walking W&B and a person coming our way says “Que lindos!” (How beautiful!), we know they are smitten with our dogs and the next question out of their mouths will be something along the lines of “Posso fazer festas aos vossos cães?” (Can I pet your dogs?).
    
    But, any random encounter where we don’t know what the person is speaking about can get out of hand in a hurry. Fortunately there are magic words one can utter in Portuguese that will reset any conversation. Those words are: “Pode falar mais devagar, por favor? Estou a aprender português.” which translates to “Can you speak more slowly, please? I am learning Portuguese.” Beyond their literal meaning there is a subtext to last four words. Because of the verb tense and sentence structure “Estou a aprender português.” conveys that you are ACTIVELY learning Portuguese at this very moment and invites the person that you are speaking with to be a part of your education. In those situations one thing ALWAYS happens followed by a couple of optional outcomes. The thing that ALWAYS happens is: The person you are talking to will smile and acknowledge that “Português não é façil.” (Portuguese is not easy.) and will be genuinely appreciative that you are at least trying to learn Portuguese. After that, either the two of you will find a way to muddle through in your rudimentary Portuguese with a lot of smiles and laughter and maybe some help from a translator app OR the person will say something like “Inglês?” (English?) and when you confirm their suspicion that you speak English they will try out their English on you because at least some of the time they are also ACTIVELY trying to learn English.
    
    As far as our ability to speak Portuguese, I think our pronunciation is getting better by leaps and bounds as we practice speaking and are gently (it’s always very gentle – never judgy) corrected. It’s generally slow going though because we are still learning a bunch of vocabulary and it takes a few extra seconds to make sure we know the right noun or verb and then get the gender and quantity right on the articles and adjectives. Jill and I have differing approaches to that particular problem. I just plow ahead knowing I’m going to make mistakes, but hoping my message will land in spite of that. And Jill takes a few extra seconds to doublecheck everything in her head and then delivers a fully accurate and coherent sentence.
    
    We are at the point where we are learning and using idioms, which gives us a certain amount of street cred with the natives. For example, in Portugal the way you say something is “Easy-peasy!” or “A piece of cake!” is “É canja!” (literal translation: “It’s chicken soup!”), which we now toss around with relative impunity.
    
    In summary, I think we are neither ahead of nor behind schedule on learning Portuguese, but we are making progress!
• Will we be able to find Our People?
  • This was never a concern of mine, but it was a big one for Jill. I am happy to report that our dance card is so full that I’ve asked Jill, at least partially tongue in cheek, to please stop making friends. Jill has also joined a group of “ambassadors” who act as resources to expats coming to our little corner of Portugal.
• Retiring AND moving to Portugal at the same time is a LOT of change. Will we have an identity crisis? What will we do with our days?
  • I can see how this could go badly for some people, but Jill and I have continued to try and view all of this as a grand adventure. We both absolutely LOVE our little town and are trying to get involved where we can. Jill is a part of a book club and has a steady trickle of ambassador contacts to attend to. I’m learning to make sourdough bread which takes a surprising amount of time, but all of our friends appear to appreciate my new hobby. We enjoy making the rounds at five different grocery stores (6 if you count the tiny Asian grocery store in Caldas da Rainha where I have to go to get dark soy sauce to make chicken adobo) to fill our larder. We spend two hours per day walking W&B, which is both a nice way to hide exercise and an easy way to meet people. And between Leonor and our class at the local school we spend 10 hours per week learning Portuguese.
    
    We’ve gotten to know most of the proprietors and staff of our favorite restaurants and cafés, which makes those experiences feel more familial.
    
    One project on the horizon for me is to try and find some land where I can have a garden and a beehive or two. I’m having fun researching that process and figuring out if I want to be a tenant farmer or own a hectare (10,000 square meters or about 2.5 acres) of land. In the mean time Leonor is showing me the ropes on her farm and letting me learn how things are done here.
    
    We have a morning ritual where we drink coffee and play our word games (Wordle, Connections, Quordle, and Octordle). Sharing those results among fellow players is a fun way to stay in touch with friends and family.
    
    And, so far, we’ve always been able to see the humor in any roadblocks that have popped up and have managed to smile our way to the other side.
    
    In summary, I see no signs of identity crisis and we certainly have no trouble filling our days.
• We’ve heard that the Portugal bureaucracy is nightmarish. How will we navigate that without knowing Portuguese?
  • The bureaucracy is real and it’s definitely been our experience that more-often-than-not when we present ourselves at any sort of official outlet that we are expected to be able to communicate in Portuguese. Fortunately at the MOST important appointment, which was our residency appointment with AIMA we both got someone who spoke English. But at the Segurança Social (Social Security), Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (DMV), Junta da Freguesia (Mayor’s office), and Centro de Saúde (our local health center where we registered for the national healthcare system) it was Portuguese from start to finish. Here’s the good news: In Portugal there’s always a FORM. So if you fill out the requisite form in advance of your visit you can familiarize yourself with the words you are likely to hear in person.
    
    AND if you start with the magic words: “Estou a aprender português.” even the most hardened bureaucratic heart will start to thaw and it will all be ok.
    
    Our most recent accomplishment was to exchange our US driver’s licenses for Portuguese ones. While we await our shiny new Portuguese driving licenses we currently only have the paper receipt from that IMT that they gave us when we forked over our US DLs. But last week we just received an email that our processing was complete and physical licenses would be forthcoming via CTT. Official mail tends to require a presentation of ID and a signature here in Portugal so I’m betting there’s probably a visit to João at CTT at City Hall in our near future.
• Will we have to adapt to eating fish every time we go out to dinner?
  • This one was just fake news. The Portuguese have a fish-forward diet and there are lots of fish-only restaurants – the standard preparation for fish is to grill fish with just olive oil and salt and they are masters at brothy rice (think risotto) with fish and shellfish. My favorite seafood discovery since arriving in Portugal is the brothy rice with razor clams at Taverna do 8 Ó 80 in Nazaré. But we’ve also found plenty of non-fish oriented and ethnic restaurants as all of our guests can attest.
• Will we be able to find dog care that gives us peace of mind when we are traveling?
  • This one is still an open question. We’ve got two viable options that absolutely LOVE W&B. They both send us photo and video updates multiple times per day. But, they’re both high stimulation environments with lots of friendly dogs. Woody thinks that’s the best thing ever, but Bulleit gets stressed out by all the stimulation and after 24-48 hours he starts to show physical symptoms from the stress. The staff knows this and does their best to compensate, but I think we are going to have to keep trying new things. Our current thought is to use our current providers for short stays and find someone to stay in our home for longer stints.
• What basic necessities are we not going to be able to find?
  • As of this writing, we have whittled this list down to three critical items that do not appear to exist on the Continent:
    
    1. Trader Joe’s Everything but the Bagel seasoning
    2. Heavy duty alumínio (did you see how I adopted the alternate spelling because I’m going native?) foil. As I’ve mentioned previously, the 2 micron thick standard foil here is just sad.
    3. A quality garlic press. I had an OXO garlic press that I absolutely loved in Austin, but I did not bring it. The garlic presses here are flimsy and hard to clean.
    
    Fortunately all of our visitors from the U.S. so far have been very willing to bring us humanitarian aid in the form of the items above so we are well stocked for the foreseeable future.

It’s not all skittles and beer, though. I do have two protests to lodge in the Book of Complaints:

1. Portuguese cheese – I think this is my biggest disappointment about my newly adopted country. When we moved here we were agog at the vast range of Portuguese cheeses on offer and eagerly started beavering our way through them. What we’ve both found is that there’s something about the Portuguese cheese making process (maybe the way they use the rennet?) that gives Portuguese cheeses, both hard and soft, a slightly sour aftertaste and in some cases makes your mouth tingle a little bit. Because it’s very consistent, it has to be on purpose. I think it’s a thing that Portuguese imprint on and they all like it, but we did not imprint on it and are struggling with it — struggling the way some people in my family struggle with the concept of mayonnaise (Rich Mosher) to the degree that we are now gun-shy about Portuguese cheeses. The only Portuguese cheese I’ve found without the sour aftertaste is Flamengo, which is the soft/melty Portuguese cheese that is used on toasties (what a nice twist of fate, since toasties are essential to my ongoing well-being). Because we’d like our Cheese Euros to benefit the local economy, we are forcing ourselves to keep trying Portuguese cheese varietals to try and find one that deserves a spot in the happy hour/nibbles rotation. Never fear, though… Until then we have easy access to fantastic Spanish (Manchego), English (Coastal Cheddar), and Dutch (Gouda) cheeses, plus all of the French and Italian cheeses.
2. Aggressive roadside curbs – In the U.S., roadside curbs are typically poured concrete with rounded edges and if you get too close to one you’ll feel it but you’ll be able to self-correct without damaging your vehicle. Here in Portugal, the curbs are generally quarried stone with a sharp right angle corner and a vertical face. Because the roads here tend to be “cozy” there’s not a lot of margin of error on the passenger side of the vehicle when passing oncoming traffic and when parking on the street. The first indication that you are too close to the curb is a horrible scraping sound on your wheel. I’ve now scraped the front passenger wheel on our trusty Renault Austral TWO times by getting too close to these curbs. The fault is mine, but – compared to the priority of giving oncoming traffic plenty of leeway – maintaining curb clearance wasn’t on my radar as a thing that I needed to be extra careful about. Now that I’m in the scraped wheel club I’ve made it a habit of checking cars as I walk past them and I would say at least 80% of the cars have some sort of curb-related scuff on their front passenger wheel. That does not make me feel any better about being in the club.

To put a bow on this assessment: Jill and I willingly opted into a certain amount of stress and anxiety when we decided to move to Portugal. Some fears were rational and some were irrational, but thus far I can confidently say that relative to our pre-adventure anxiety list… É canja!

Last night, after Portuguese class, a group of us went out for a delicious dinner at Quilha Mar – a local restaurant that Jill and I hadn’t been to yet. We are lucky to have a good group in our class. Everyone missed Jill and demanded that I send her a selfie.

As I was pulling into the parking lot at Quilha Mar, I looked up and saw a full rainbow which seemed to be symbolically apropos of how our grand adventure is going so far.

Now I just need to keep W&B amused until Jill gets back…

Adventure is out there!

Since the last update we’ve had a lot of extra-curricular activities. We’ve had an expat Thanksgiving, a visit from Jill’s parents, made our first pilgrimage back to United States to see family and friends. And, we’ve hosted Ella for two weeks, which I will recount in an upcoming post. Because I’ve let so much time pass since the last post, I’ve had to refer back to pictures to remember all of the stuff we’ve done.

Starting with Thanksgiving… Our friends Jane and Steve, who live in Nazaré, hosted seventeen people for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and dressing. Kudos to Jane and Steve. Seventeen people is a very big crew to host, let alone to cook for. Jane had to negotiate access to her next door neighbor’s oven to accommodate the volume of food that needed to be heated up.

Because we are all expats and missing home to some degree there was a good familial feel to it. The notable differences from our traditional Thanksgiving were not being with actual family and, because of the six-hour time difference, not getting to watch the Cowboys lose while eating pie.

The week after Thanksgiving, we picked Jill’s parents up at the Lisboa airport.

We’ve now made enough trips to LIS that it feels like we have the ingress, parking, and egress pretty well dialed in. That’s not to say it’s not still stressful, but it’s just normal airport stress – not completely overwhelming like it was in the beginning. But every time we go to the airport it seems like there’s something different to contend with. For example, when we picked up Jill’s parents the police were seemingly-randomly waving cars exiting the airport over to the shoulder for some sort of check. It could have been they were checking drivers licenses, or checking ride-sharing services, or doing random breathalyzer checks. Fortunately, they waved over the car in front of us and we skated through unscathed – so we don’t know what they were looking for. It may be just me, but even though we are following all of the rules we are aware of that kind of situation makes my heart rate go up and my palms get sweaty.

We had a great week with Jill’s parents. We struck a balance between lots of day trips to see the normal sights we take our guests to see, visiting Christmas markets, and Jill and her mom decorating the new house.

On their last day in Portugal we took the Palmers to Lisboa. We parked at the Meliã hotel to get them checked in.

Then we took a taxi into town to wander around the Baixa district.

There were Christmas markets in full swing at Praça da Figuera and Praça do Rossio which gave Nana one last Santa fix before their flight home.

After Nana had wrung all of the Christmas out that Lisboa had on offer, we took a taxi back to the Meliã. We said our “temporary” goodbyes and headed back to SMP. I say temporary because we were already slated to see Jill’s parents twice more in two different locations over the ensuing two weeks.

A few days later it was time to take Woody and Bulleit to the pet hotel for their extended stay during our trip stateside. It’s always hard to leave them, especially for a long trip, but the nice folks at Espaço Verde do their best to make sure we know that W&B are well cared for.

If we go to Lisboa the night before we fly, we take the bus from SMP and stay at the Meliã. But we’ve also found a driver, named Carlos, that we really like who picks us up at our house and delivers us directly to LIS. On travel day Carlos picked us up at our gate at 6AM for our 9:40AM flight and we were at the TAP Air Portugal checkin desk by 7:30AM.

A note on TAP: TAP is the national (as in nationalized) carrier of Portugal and has nonstops from LIS to a whole bunch of interesting places. Portugal is soliciting bids for a major airline partner to become a majority owner of TAP. Jill and I previously flew on TAP when we met Mia and Rich in London and really liked them.

When we were booking this trip we found out that TAP has nonstop flights between LIS and SFO, which are super convenient for us visiting California. That nonstop flight allowed us to plan our trip to the US to start on the west coast so we could work our way continually east over the course of the trip and then fly back to Portugal on our now-customary United flight from Newark.

The long-haul TAP flight was a great experience and we will have no hesitation flying TAP to any destination where they fly. We landed at SFO at about 2PM local time and my parents met us at baggage claim and we were off the races on our three-day visit to California.

There were lots of people we wanted to see on our trip, but none was a higher priority for us than Aunt Betty (technically Rich’s GREAT Aunt Betty). We absolutely adore her, as does the entire family. Betty is 103 years young as of this writing, sharp as a tack, gracious, generous to a fault, and an absolute joy to be around. I think it is safe to say that we all hope to grow up to be Betty.

The first formal order of business after landing was our traditional dinner with Betty at Tai Pan in Palo Alto. As tradition holds, Rich does the ordering for the table and all we have to do is show up and eat. For the record, that’s my kind of dinner.

At dinner, Betty distributed Christmas cards to all in attendance. Our card contained cash designated for gaming in Las Vegas – more on that shortly – and See’s Candy gift cards. What can I say? Betty gets us.

The next day was more Betty Time with group pedicures (Thank you Non!) and a nice lunch.

Jill and I finished our pedicures a little before everyone else and used that time to walk to the local Chase branch… In a long-running comedy of errors, the IRS failed to apply an overpayment from a prior year to our taxes. Then in all of the back and forth with the IRS to get it sorted out they still chose to send us a refund check instead of carrying the overpayment forward to the next tax year as requested. Jill’s dad brought that paper check from the US to Portugal when they visited us. I wasn’t able to deposit it on the Chase mobile app so we schlepped it back to the US with us and walked into a Chase branch to deposit it. Best I can tell, that check traveled about ten thousand miles before it got deposited several months after it was issued.

The timing also worked out for us to attend Carter’s 25th birthday omakase fiesta at Robin with Mia, Rich, and Carter. For those of you from Austin, Robin is Menlo Park’s answer to Uchiko.

After three days of fun with my parents, the Moshers, and Betty – and in possession of some very thoughtful and Portugal-appropriate Christmas presents – Jill and I decamped for Las Vegas for two nights at Bellagio where we would meet back up with Jill’s parents to hit all of our favorite experiences, including Garth Brooks at Caesar’s the following night.

Everyone’s flights were largely on time and we had no trouble meeting up with Team Palmer at the appointed time in the Bellagio lobby. We all dropped our bags in our rooms and immediately trooped to Club Prive for the requisite Espresso Martinis.

We went to the Michael Jackson One show at Mandalay Bay the first night. It’s the third time we’ve seen it and it never disappoints.

The next morning, we did our traditional breakfast at Sadelle’s and I got my Eggs Benedict, everything bagel, and coffee cocktail. Then we ate at Mon Ami Gabi at Paris for lunch so Jill could get her French Onion Soup.

Between meals and shows, I found 20 minutes to play some video poker with the money Betty had given us for that express purpose. And look what happened!

Before the Garth show we hit Yellowtail and had another spectacular meal.

Then we were off to see Garth!

And just like that it was time to leave Las Vegas and head for Dallas.

Because we were flying Southwest from Las Vegas and the Palmers were flying American we needed a pickup from Love Field in Dallas to take us to Chez Palmer in Frisco. Steph and Brad assigned Mason to be our chauffeur for the afternoon. Mason gets five stars!

We spent two nights in Frisco catching up with the extended Palmer/Bierman clan. Then Jill and I parted ways for a couple of days. On Christmas Day I picked up my mom and we had a nice drive to the ranch in Junction where I spent a few days communing with nature in my happy place. And, the day after Christmas Jill flew from Dallas to Austin and started catching up with friends while I was doing my part to keep the world safe from feral hogs.

My good friend John met me at the ranch and we did all the ranch things for a couple of days. Then I rode with John back to Austin with the traditional homeward stop at Whataburger Burnet. Whataburger craving satisfied, John dropped me at the Loren Hotel to reunite me with my betrothed. I’ll admit was a little weird to be in Austin and not staying in our own house.

What did we do on my first night back in Austin in 8 months? We went to the Chuy’s mothership on Barton Springs for Tex-Mex and Mexican Martinis!

We also managed to squeeze in Eldorado Cafe with our friends Greg and Nancy.

The next night our friend Amy orchestrated a get together of a big chunk of our Austin friend circle at her house so that we could see as many of them as possible on our short visit, plus there was a delicious spread laid out with Franklin’s BBQ!

We spent our last full day in Austin with Ella, who had the day off of work. It was a beautiful day so we put on our shorts and walked around Town Lake (Sorry Lady Bird, it will always be Town Lake to me).

Ella also joined us for a last minute Costco run (you know my position on Costco-sized bottles of Ibuprofen vs Portugal’s 8 count blister packs), and wrapped up with dinner at the food trailer park on BartonSprings.

The next morning it was time to come home to Woody and Bulleit. We dropped the rental car at AUS and started our homeward journey with a flight to Newark.

Carlos was waiting for us when we walked out of LIS with our bags and he whisked us home. We dropped our bags, jumped in the car and went to pick up the boys, who wasted no time curling up on the couch next to Jill.

The final scorecard for our first trip back stateside since arriving in Portugal:

• Elapsed time from LIS-SFO departure to EWR-LIS return: 12 days 22 hours 30 minutes
• Quality family time with (in order from West to East): Aunt Betty, Praisners, Moshers, Palmers, Biermans, my mom, Ella
• Catching up with too many friends to list
• Five total locations: California, Las Vegas, DFW, Austin, and the ranch
• Eating at all the places: Tai Pan, Robin, Spago, Sadelle’s, Mon Ami Gabi, Yellowtail, Whataburger, Chuys, and Eldorado Cafe (plus Franklins catered in 🙂
• Signature cocktails consumed: Espresso Martinis at Club Prive, Coffee Cocktails at Sadelle’s, Sunset at Yellowtail, the classic Mexican Martini at Chuy’s
• Garth Brooks + Betty’s Christmas Cash Jackpot
• Quality ranch time with John
• Flight segments: LIS-SFO, OAK-LAS,LAS-DAL,DAL-AUS,AUS-EWR,EWR-LIS

We knew our itinerary was aspirational, but Jilly P plans things – that’s her superpower. I contend that we successfully crammed about 8 pounds of holiday adventure into a 5-pound-sack.

From Thanksgiving dinner at Jane and Steve’s to watching the SMP’s spectacular firework display at the stroke of midnight on the New Year we had one heck of a holiday season. It’ll be hard to top it this year, but we’re open to ideas.

Adventure is out there!

The title of today’s post “Quem não arrisca, não petisca.” is my absolute favorite Portuguese phrase. Literally translated, it means “Those who do not risk, do not snack.” It’s the Portuguese version of “No risk, no reward.” So simple, but a perfectly apt maxim for our grand adventure of living in Portugal.

One of the fun aspects of the government-sponsored Portuguese language class we are currently taking three nights per week at SMPs public school is that our teacher, Sandra, selects several students to do a brief “leitura” (reading) at the start of class. It’s a great exercise because it forces each of us to have a passage in our back pocket that is in line with our respective reading comprehension levels. The way the process works is we select our passage, do our best to translate it to English, and email it to Sandra. And when it’s our turn to read, Sandra projects the Portuguese text and our translation onto the whiteboard at the front of the classroom and has us read it aloud to the class. Everyone does something different. Some people do a passage from a Portuguese children’s book, which is right in the sweet spot for a lot of us. My first reading was a public service announcement about an upcoming train strike (the ticket taker’s union was having a strike – which meant the trains would be running but no one would be checking tickets). It’s a great judgement-free icebreaker to start class with, because it’s a Portugal-centric sharing exercise that demonstrates we are making progress but also that we ALL have LOTS of room for improvement in our vocabulary and pronunciation.

One of the younger students in our class is Hannah from Ucrânia (Ukraine). Hannah is an IT professional in her 20’s working remotely from Portugal. When it was Hannah’s turn to read to the class, she trotted out “Quem não arrisca, não petisca.” and I knew immediately that I’d found my Portuguese catchphrase.

Apropos of both risks and snacks: Jill, Woody, Bulleit and I have quietly reached the seven month mark since we all boarded our respective planes in Austin to embark on our grand adventure. In preparation for writing this post, I’ve been comparing notes with Jill. We are in agreement that on all the important metrics of getting settled into Portugal we feel like we are ahead of our most optimistic expectations. And we also agree that none of the things we were scared of have happened (or when they have happened it hasn’t been as big a deal as we were worried it would be).

The negative side of the ledger is pretty short:

• We continue to be inefficient in Portuguese because phone conversations are still beyond our abilities.
• We’ve had one failed bureaucracy interaction. Our attempt to get an EU health card got kicked back because the person taking our application didn’t make a copy of our residence cards. We will re-apply soon as having that card gets us reciprocal medical services anywhere we travel in the EU and UK. We aren’t planning on needing it, but better to have and not need…
• We are still sorting out the best option for Woody and Bulleit when we travel. We’ve got a pet hotel/doggy daycare place that loves having them. It’s a converted stable – the boys get the run of the place with other friendly dogs during the day and share a stall with a large bed to sleep in sleep in at night. Woody LOVES it, but all of the stimulation seems to stress Bulleit out and after a fews days he stops eating and starts throwing up. Last time around we asked them to give the boys an afternoon siesta in their stall so Bulleit could decompress, which they did, but then Woody rubbed his nose raw during Bulleit’s siesta trying to get out and play with his new friends. And it’s not as simple as just giving Bulleit a siesta and letting Woody play because then Woody would get anxiety from being away from Bulleit. We will figure it out, but until we do it’s a little stressful to leave them.
• Our address is a little unconventional in that we don’t have a street number so we have to be on high alert for anything where that can cause a problem. For example, EDP, the Portuguese utility company, sent a service tech out last week to do a courtesy checkup on our home electrical system and he called asking me to drop a pin so he could find his way to us. It turns out that EDP was missing the whole stanza of our address beyond the street name. I’ve tried once to get the missing stanza added to our address, but even though the customer service person told me it was changed it doesn’t appear to be updated in the EDP app.

On the plus side of the ledger:

• While we are routinely humbled by the most basic interactions, our Portuguese is coming right along. We have lessons with Leonor four hours per week and class with Sandra for six hours per week. Pronunciation is going to be a problem for a while. There are sounds in Portuguese that just don’t exist in English. We’ve been told over time we will develop the muscle memory to make those sounds. Example: The Portuguese word for bread is “pão”, which, as native English speakers we instinctively pronounce as “pow” – but the proper pronunciation is a nasal “pauwng”.
• We have found all of the absolute necessities to live the lifestyle we want to live. So far our big departures from the Portuguese Standard(TM) way of life are that we have a giant – by Portuguese standards – bed and a clothes dryer.
• On the restaurant front we’ve been able to find things that we like on every menu (of course toasties are widely available so that’s a bit of a layup for me). The only thing obviously missing is TexMex – but we grow our own jalapeños and are doing a passable job of making tacos at home. We were a little worried everything would be too seafood-forward for us, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case. We’ve recently added the Michelin-mentioned Sabores d’Itália, in Caldas da Rainha to our rotation for serious Italian food.
• As far as purchasing groceries we feel like we now know where to get all the things we need to cook comfort food. Shopping does often entail multiple stops. For example, I made chicken adobo a couple of nights ago and we had to make a swing by the only grocery store that regularly stocks scallions (Continente). But, Jill and I make the best of it. Shout out to Jill’s sister Stephanie, who turned us on to AnyList. We’ve got a running AnyList list for all five of our mainstream grocery stores: Pingo Doce, E. Leclerc, Continente, Mercadona, and Aldi. Whenever we happen by one of those outlets we pick up all of the accumulated things on the related list. About the only things we’ve conceded we will need to import from the US on regular basis are heavy duty aluminum foil and Costco-sized bottles of Ibuprofen and Benadryl. Ibuprofen and Benadryl can be purchased at the Farmácia here in SMP, but they only sell them in individual blister packs of 8 tablets. On the topic of pharmaceuticals: Another thing you have to get used to here is that grocery stores generally don’t have any medicines – all of that is purchased at a pharmacy.
• Being a car owner in a foreign country is going well. The Via Verde toll tag makes everything so easy from a tolls and parking perspective. The parking garages are certainly cosy, but Jill just closes her eyes while I navigate the tighter spots.
• Thanks to Woody and Bulleit, we’ve met a ton of people. When we are out walking the boys it’s not uncommon for someone we don’t know to stop us and ask if they can pet them, which leads to conversations – sometimes in English and sometimes in Portuguese.
• We haven’t had any of the difficulties we were warned about getting packages delivered. It may be a little convoluted, but it’s always worked out. When possible we use Locky – the locker system run by CTT – but even when we have something too big for a Locky locker we’ve always gotten our goods. Sometimes they come to our door and sometimes they drop them at a pickup point in town, but we always seem to get our stuff.
• And now… We have a new home!

We’ve spent the last two weeks getting settled in…

Much to Woody and Bulleit’s delight, we’ve taken delivery of an Emperor-sized bed (look it up – it’s a thing). We’ve also taken delivery of several appliances, including Jill’s prized clothes dryer, a TV, and some dehumidifiers.

A quick note on dehumidifiers: Our new home is on the end of a narrow finger of land projecting out into the capital-A Atlantic Ocean, which is no further than 200 meters away on three sides of us. Humidity is just a fact of life here and something that needs to be managed and mitigated. Those of you who know me well know that I take water VERY seriously when it comes to being a homeowner. My first line of defense includes four dehumidifiers – three in the main dwelling and one in the storage room in the garage.

My initial goal is to keep the relative humidity down below 60% whenever all the windows are closed. With the exception of the closet in the office, the dehumidifiers are currently doing the job. Fortunately, we also have these nifty passive dehumidifier bags to hang in our closets.

They’re pretty amazing. They have consumable desiccant beads in the top pouch and when the desiccant comes in contact with water it liquifies and gravity drains it down into the bottom pouch. When the crystals in the top pouch are gone the bottom bag will be full of liquid and it will be time to put in a new one. They last between a month and two months.

The primary test will be when it gets cold and wet for two weeks at a stretch during winter. If I need to call in reinforcements, our two split heat pumps also have a Dehumidify mode and can be added to the mix.

If you want to follow along at home, the live feed from our home weather station, including relative humidity, can be found here.

Back to the topic at hand, which is settling in…

We’ve made multiple trips to Hôma, a Portuguese home goods retailer. And we are at four trips to IKEA… and counting. All of my sixty-year-old joints are extra creaky from long sessions sitting on the floor cross-legged assembling IKEA purchases.

We’ve stocked our kitchen with Portuguese stoneware and glassware. And I’m gradually building up my cookware inventory piece-by-piece, with a bias toward made-in-Portugal items whenever possible. Jill is excited, because a couple of days ago we picked up an appropriate saucepan for me to make popcorn for her. We tried it out last night and it performed admirably. We bought some inexpensive, but perfectly adequate, flatware with the plan to ultimately replace it with Portuguese-made flatware from a specialty store in Lisbon, but between now and then we still need utensils.

Perhaps the seminal purchase was my new Instant Pot. I celebrated it arrival by making chicken adobo on one of our first nights in our new home.

Our patio furniture was delivered last week and we’ve purchased a new guest room bed which will be delivered in the next couple of weeks. It will be tight, but the new bed should be here before Jill’s parents arrive for their first visit on December 4th. From there on out it will be just decorating and figuring out how to optimize in the new space – both things that Jill and her mom can tackle when they are here.

I’m pleased to report that our 1Gb Vodafone fiber Internet connection is awesome and my wireless mesh network (using the existing wired network drops for backhaul) yields the Vodafone-advertised speeds with low latency everywhere in the house and garage.

Everyone seems to be settling in just fine…

Earlier this week the nice folks at Amazon Germany came through with a 2 meter tall pre-lit artificial Christmas tree. We will start decorating in earnest for Christmas next week. One of our 14 pieces of checked luggage when we made the move to Portugal was dedicated to our favorite Christmas keepsakes. My prediction is that Jill and her mom will do a fine job rounding out our Christmas decorations with new purchases at the various local Christmas markets we plan to explore during their upcoming visit.

In and amongst all of the move-related activities we’ve maintained a full social calendar.

We had a fantastic visit with my college roommate Jim and his wife Kay. They live in Germany and had never been to Portugal. They came to visit and were immediately smitten with SMP. We are planning to go visit them in Germany this spring. Spoiler alert: Jim and Kay have an important announcement coming sometime in 2025.

We’ve been trying to engage in more community events in SMP. We are now doing Tai Chi in the community room at the Bombeiros Voluntários (volunteer fire department) and we walked in the Cancer Awareness Walk around the bay.

Our Austin friends Ron and Mike, who are building a house in Famalicão – halfway between SMP and Nazaré – were in town to check on their construction project and we introduced them to our favorite French restaurant, Meu Jardim, which will be right in their backyard, and showed them around the various places we shop in Caldas da Rainha.

I’ll close with this… I still can’t believe how lucky we are to be on this adventure. And now that we have our new home base up and running the possibilities seem endless.

Adventure is out there! Plus, there’s the possibility of snacks.

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!

Jill and I were talking this morning… Since we’ve been experiencing so many new and generally awesome things during our first four months in Portugal, there’s been no shortage of feel good moments to report in my periodic blog updates. We agreed I probably haven’t given equal time to the various chronic and acute challenges we are experiencing as strangers in a strange land. So I will devote the first chunk of today’s entry to a couple of our ongoing challenges – and also to what we are doing to adapt and overcome.

By far the most common and frustrating challenge is not yet having a working handle on the Portuguese language. Portuguese is a tough language to learn and we are objectively on track to learn it, but each time we have a random encounter with someone who doesn’t speak at least a little English we are humbled by just how little real world skill we have in Portuguese.

Here’s a practical example that happens frequently enough to warrant a mention here:

SMP has some twisty streets and, if you don’t live here or use Waze, it can be challenging to get where you want to go. Periodically when we are out and about walking Woody and Bulleit a lost driver will pull up beside us and ask us, in rapid-fire Portuguese, how to get somewhere. More often than not the desired destination is the “Cais” (the pier).

The first time it happened, the encounter was over before we really had a chance to realize what was going on. A guy pulled up and hit us with the obligatory “Bon dia!” and then launched into his ask. When Jill and I looked sufficiently bewildered he said, “Ah, English. Não Português…” then shrugged and drove off. We talked it over trying to pick apart what he’d said and the only word we understood was “Cais” – so we convinced ourselves he was asking for directions to the pier.

Another driver stopped us with a similar request a couple of weeks later and we picked out the word “Cais” quickly and between us we started piecing together how to give him directions. The way to the pier was the second left turn ahead in the direction the gentleman was traveling. And we actually got as far as “vira a esquerda” (turn left), but we couldn’t figure out how to tell him the second left. We knew that “proxima” would indicate the next left, but we couldn’t figure out how to say the SECOND left. ARGH!!! Ultimately, he gave up and smiled and waved and drove on. I should say that no one has been rude to us when we failed to be able to give them directions. They just smile and wave and drive on.

From that moment, Jill and I vowed we were going to be ready for the next person who asked us for directions. Then one foggy morning a few weeks ago we were walking the boys back up the hill toward our place when a young woman out for a jog stopped and asked for directions to “Parque Campismo”, which is a camper-van camping facility that is fully occupied during the tourist season. Feeling confident, we started to give her directions – only to belatedly realize that she had asked the question in Spanish and didn’t speak a lick of Portuguese. She was a Spanish tourist staying at the Parque Campismo. To add to the difficulty she wanted help figuring out how to get back via the hiking trails instead of on the road – in the fog. My rusty Spanish did not extend to those kind of directions. In the end I got out my phone and pulled up Google maps and showed her where we were and where the campground was and the route that would get her where she wanted to go on surface streets. She was clearly not getting the information she wanted from me and gestured for me to hand her my phone, which I did. She zoomed in and out a couple of times, handed me my phone back and jogged on. So not, technically a failure to communicate in Portuguese, but still a general failure to communicate.

Then this week I was walking the boys up the hill from our rental and an elderly couple with fishing poles in their back seat stopped and asked me how to find the cais. The context of the seeing the fishing poles made me very confident that I understood the question! This was my moment!!!! Except for the fact that they were traveling in exactly the wrong direction… The cais was the next right turn back the way they’d come. Rather than try to figure out how to tell them to make a u-turn, I pantomimed turning the car around and then I said “Vira na proxima direita” (take the next right turn). The man said “Proxima direita?” and I smiled and said “Sim!” (yes). He said “Obrigado!” (thank you) and they turned around and motored happily off.

Minor victory on the last go aside, we can both attest that routine failures on even the most basic social interactions put a dent in your confidence. The practical impact of that is we are currently both conditioned to lead with – “Fala Inglês?” (Do you speak English?) whenever we find ourselves in the deep end of the pool. While everyone is super gracious when we do that, it doesn’t help in our quest to learn Portuguese.

Our Portuguese lessons with Leonor are going well and she continues down the gradual path of only speaking Portuguese to us – we are about halfway there at the moment. Leonor also gave us a children’s book to read and we are slowly grinding our way through that. But Leonor speaking slowly and clearly to us is not the same dynamic as the panicked fight-or-flight reaction when a stranger asks you a question at native conversational pace assuming you speak Portuguese. We are gradually getting better at replying with “Estamos a aprender Português…” (We are learning Portuguese…) and “Pode falar mais devagar por favor?” (Could you please speak more slowly?). And, in truth, when we trot those out in less exigent circumstances than someone needing directions in a hurry, it seems to go okay.

At any rate, on the Portuguese language front we both know there’s no way out but through and we are committed to becoming proficient. We both just wish we were further along by this point. In addition to our lessons with Leonor, we are supposed to start our three-night-per-week Portuguese class at the high school sometime this month but we haven’t yet received email confirmation on the schedule.

Under the heading of minor victories, this week we were having lunch at the café in Pingo Doce, the grocery store in Caldas da Rainha where do the bulk of our shopping, and there was a mother sitting behind us with her three-year-old son and I was able to eavesdrop and understand his half of the conversation. I *think* she asked him how his food was and he answered “Está bem.” (It’s good.) Pouco a pouco (little by little).

An ongoing tactical challenge is a level of inefficiency that’s really a secondary effect of not being confident in speaking Portuguese. For example, each month I get my hair cut by Vera – I pay €7 for a haircut that’s worth at least €9. But, because I don’t have confidence that I can call Vera’s shop and make – and subsequently show up on time for – an appointment without losing something in translation, I present myself at Vera’s shop a few days before it’s time for me to get a haircut to make the appointment. Fortunately, we love the café next door to Vera – Padaria da Serra. Jill and I typically make a strategic afternoon cappuccino stop at Padaria da Serra when it’s time for me to schedule my next haircut and I pop next door to chat with Vera and observe what day/time she writes my name on in her scheduling book.

Last Saturday, while Jill was out having lunch and doing some shopping with a friend, I walked down by myself to schedule my appointment with Vera. I popped my head into Vera’s on the way to Padaria da Serra and saw that Vera was just getting started on a haircut. I ordered a cappuccino and a cherry cheesecake to give Vera a few more minutes to finish with the guy in the chair. My cappuccino and cheesecake came out to €3.70. Knowing that cafés appreciate it when you pay with exact change, I meticulously counted out my moedas (coins) while the owner of the cafe waited patiently at the register and when I got to €3.50 I was out of coins. And the smallest bill I had in my wallet was a €20. Argh! When the owner saw my plight she happily took my €3.50 in coins and held up a €0.20 coin from the till with a smile on her face and said, using words even I could understand, to bring her one of those next time.

When I walked down to Vera’s this past Monday for my haircut, I made sure I had a €0.20 coin to repay my debt. I stopped by Padaria da Serra before my haircut and met the owner at the cash register and said the big line that I’d rehearsed on the walk down – “Boa tarde! Creio que isto é teu!” (Good afternoon! I believe this is yours!) – as I ceremoniously handed her the coin with both hands. She smiled and said “Obrigada!” And I said “Até breve!” (See you soon!) and headed on to Vera’s, pleased at being able to successfully accomplish that small but important exchange.

I’ve mentioned before that we’ve learned all expats are here for different reasons. Being an expat may be something you have in common with other expats, but it doesn’t mean you are compatible with those people. A corollary to that is not all expats have the same commitment level to Portugal and learning Portuguese that Jill and I have… We have kissed a fair number of frogs to find our current friend circle. And now one member of the circle has just pulled the pin and decided to move back to the US after two years in SMP – with one of the primary drivers being that she was tired of not being able to understand the language. That’s something neither of us saw coming and it hit Jill particularly hard. We now know that one aspect of being friends with other expats is those friends may not be having their dream expat experience and may end up being transient. As Foghorn Leghorn says: “Figures don’t lie.” A lot of expats end up moving back home within a few years.

And this past week we tried out a new pet hotel for Woody and Bulleit for one night while we went to Lisboa for my birthday dinner. When we retrieved the boys on Thursday afternoon they were both their happy selves and then about an hour after we got home Bulleit started throwing up and became listless – Bulleit has always had a sensitive stomach so we are well versed in the chicken and rice diet for him. Whatever it is has been working its way through his system for the last four days. He seems to be on the mend and hopefully we are coming out the other side. But at the peak of it, the prospect of needing to find an emergency vet in Portugal over the weekend was pretty intimidating – back to the hurdle of needing to communicate something important to someone in Portuguese with confidence. We didn’t end up taking Bulleit into the vet over the weekend yet because he’s mostly started keeping food down, but we now know exactly where to take the boys if we have an after-hours veterinary emergency. And we have an appointment with our regular, English-speaking vet tomorrow morning at 11:45. I did just manage to go to the pharmacy and, in rehearsed Portuguese – “Boa trade. Preciso disto para o meu cão.” (Good afternoon. I need this for my dog) get a prescription that we’d been holding onto for Bulleit from the last time he was having stomach issues. The pharmacy tech understood me and popped right out with my €5.80 box of medicine for Bulleit so that is a minor victory.

All of the above is just par for the course and doesn’t do anything to take the shine off of this adventure for me and Jill, but its not all skittles and beer and we do get our everyday bumps and bruises along the way.

On to fun stuff…

When I retired from Boundless, the Boundless team gave me a touching sendoff and some fantastic and thoughtful gifts. Two of the gifts were a dinner at the Michelin-starred restaurant Ceia in Lisboa and a hotel voucher at Pestana, our favorite Portuguese-owned hotel group. Since my 60th birthday was coming up we decided there was no better occasion to celebrate at Ceia. Because Ceia only has one seating per night and a maximum of 14 guests, we booked way back on May 7th for August 28th. Jill booked the boys into the pet hotel in Caldas da Rainha for one night and booked us a hotel room at the Pestana Vintage Lisboa using the voucher from Boundless and I secured us round trip bus tickets on the express bus from SMP to Lisboa.

When the big day came last Wednesday we dropped W&B off in the morning and made the 20 minute walk down to the bus stop. The bus rolled up right on time and we were off to Lisboa.

The one hour and fifteen minute ride passed quickly and we caught a cab to our hotel at Lisboa’s Sete Rios terminal.

We had the whole afternoon to kill so we walked to El Corte Inglés. As mentioned in a previous post El Corte Inglés is where we purchased refried beans last time we were in Lisboa for the day. We had a nice lunch there and bought the only three cans of Old El Paso refried beans on the shelf (€4.50 per can, but SO worth it).

We are getting serious about finding a permanent place to live in Portugal so we spent the rest of our time at El Corte Inglés making notes on furniture, textiles, and kitchen wares for when we are ready to start nesting. Seems like the heaviest lift will be finding a king size bed. And once we have done that we will need to find king sheets, blankets, and comforters. I suspect that sometime in the not-too-distant future we will be asking our US guests to sherpa bed linens over to us.

We walked back to our hotel in time to get changed for dinner and then grabbed a cab to Ceia.

The first thing we noticed was there was no name on the door. Just the address. We opened the door and entered the magical world of Ceia.

I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the single best culinary experience of my life, which seems appropriate for a sixtieth birthday celebration. Because it was a gift, I have no idea what the evening cost – but whatever the cost was it was worth it!

Upon entry we were greeted by our host, Kristin. She handed each of us a glass of wine and showed us to the courtyard to relax among the lemon and orange trees until dinner was served. We chatted with Kristin for a few minutes and then she was off to greet the other guests. Ceia is a one table restaurant and it turns out that part of Kristin’s role is to develop the seating chart on the fly based on her quick read on the folks who turn up each night.

There were 10 people total for dinner that night and we were all seated at one big table and the seating chart was perfect. Jill and I sat across from each other and there was a French couple – currently living in Canada – bracketing us on my right side and a Belgian couple bracketing us on my left side. And, of course, they all spoke multiple languages and talked to us in perfect English.

Ceia is a farm-to-table restaurant in the most authentic sense, the food comes from their farm in the Alentejo region of Portugal, which is Portugal’s bread basket. The only exception to that were the seafood courses, which featured some seaweed and catch-of-the-day fish and shellfish from the Açores (the Azores).

The theme for dinner was “The Last Harvest”, which included nine courses each with a wine pairing. However, because we live in Europe now, we did not waddle out of there at the end of the night uncomfortably full nor were we uncomfortably inebriated – the pours were scaled back to be in line with the number of courses (although if one wanted more of a certain wine it was there for the asking).

I give you the best bites from our evening at Ceia…

In summary, if you are ever in Lisboa: Do anything you can to get a seat at Ceia. If you have the same experience we did, it will be one of the great dining nights of your life. We could not have scripted my sixtieth birthday dinner any better. And our new friends at Ceia sent me home with a dark chocolate candy bar that the head chef whipped up for me when he found out I was celebrating a big day.

Special thanks to all my friends at Boundless for the most thoughtful gift ever!

I’m think going to wrap it up there. Having a sick dog has us both dragging a little bit and I need to make some more rice cooked in chicken stock for Bulleit.

As always: Adventure is out there!

If you know me at all you know I have cultivated an aversion to all events with the word Fair(e), Fest, or Festival in them and to crowds in general. I’ve never been to a music festival as an adult and I’ve never been to a Renaissance faire. Full stop. Thus far in my decade of marriage to the lovely and talented Jill Praisner, we have not had any instances where I have knowingly/voluntarily braved a festival.

Only once did Jill trick me into putting my head into the lion’s mouth. One Saturday when I was returning to Frisco from visiting my mom in Dallas, Jill suggested I meet her and her family for a late lunch at Pizzeria Testa, my favorite pizza place in Frisco. Jill selected Pizzeria Testa knowing, but not telling me, that it was right smack in the middle of an art festival – and also knowing I can’t turn down pizza. After a delicious lunch, I had to endure an excruciating half hour of sweaty, snails-pace browsing all of the artisan stalls. Fool me once…

Well, my streak is over.

Every year the nearby walled city of Obidos has a Medieval Fair. Our friends Catherine and Bob bought four tickets this year and, at one point when we were enjoying a bottle of vinho verde with them, invited us to accompany them. The wine must have slowed my reaction time and before I could raise my hand to give my standard opt-out speech with the disclaimer about things with the word Fair(e), Fest, or Festival, Jill said “We’d love to go!”

When the appointed day came, Bob chauffeured us for the 25 minute drive to Obidos.

Well…

I’m pleased to report that maybe ALL festivals aren’t horrible. We had a great time at this particular one.

As we were walking toward the castle from the parking lot we saw lots of attendees in period costume. I learned at that point if you dress in appropriate period costume, admission to the festival is free. However, you can’t just phone it in. There’s a set of judges who rule on whether you’ve met the mark before you are granted free admission. I thought that was a really clever way of making the festival more interactive for everyone, because once inside the castle walls it wasn’t always obvious who was officially on festival staff and who had dressed up for free admission – although authentic period footwear seemed to be one common distinguishing point. I wish I had known about that before disposing of my leather jerkin and wolfskin traveling cloak pre-move to Portugal.

We had a great dinner at one of the representative food stalls. Here’s a thing that’s different in Europe – sustainability-wise… There were no plastic cups or plates at the various purveyors of food and drink and the utensils were bamboo. When we ordered our food I paid a 10€ deposit for the stoneware our food came on. And when we finished eating, I returned the stoneware to be washed and got my deposit back. It was a subtle, but feel good thing.

We had a great time watching the various dance, music, and acrobatic performances which seemed to be going all the time so no one of them drew so many people that there was jostling to get a good view. And Bob, who is a man after my own heart, was able to wander off on a whim and get us all pastries without waiting in a line that caused him to miss the show we were all watching.

In summary, the Obidos Medieval Fair had a little something for everyone:

1. Jousting
2. Giant pigs roasting on spits (but not a turkey drumstick to be found)
3. Roaming gaggles of geese
4. Acrobats
5. Petting zoo
6. Dance troops
7. An armorer making chain mail
8. Falconry
9. Adult beverages

I think a major factor in making it work out for me was it never really felt hot and crowded – which is certainly what I conjured up in my head when I first heard “Let’s go to a medieval faire in late July.” The temperature was about 65F (and more like 60F after sunset) and there were maybe 2000 people in attendance on the night we were there. Plus we really enjoy our time with Bob and Catherine.

If anyone happens to visit us when the Obidos Medieval Fair is on, we will definitely offer it up as an evening outing.

Fresh off of the success of our Obidos fair outing, Catherine and Bob invited us to an Opera and Chocolate event in Nazaré. That turned out to be quite an adventure.

We’ve been on a mission to try new restaurants to broaden our list of go-to options for when we have company, so Catherine got us a reservation at a nice restaurant called Tia Caia just down the street from the Opera and Chocolate venue. Because there was also a bullfight scheduled for the same evening (no, we are not bullfight fans) we allowed plenty of time for dinner. We arrived at our reservation time and the restaurant was still in the process of setting up the dining room so we walked across the street to a neighborhood cafe for to have a beer while we waited for the Tia Caia to be ready for us. Total cost for three mini-beers was €3.50.

When we saw Tia Caia open up their front doors we wandered over and were seated. First off, the food was delicious, but boy did we dodge a bullet by getting there first. Between the Opera and Chocolate crowd and some bullfight patrons, the restaurant was completely overwhelmed. We got our order in as fast as we could before the one server on duty got too far underwater, which didn’t take long. From then on we just sat back and watched a number of tables come in and sit down and after 20 minutes of not getting a menu or drink order taken just get up and walk out. Best we can tell there was some sort of situation where the seasoned waiter(s) couldn’t make it in to work and they pressed some inexperienced family members into service. They did their best but it was a disaster service-wise for it to occur when there was an event-driven dinner rush. Fortunately, we all had great attitudes and our food was the first food out of the kitchen. Again, it was delicious and we will likely give them another go at some point on a regular school night.

After dinner we were off to Opera and Chocolate, which was held in a small century-plus old local theatre. It was well attended and there were only a few empty seats. There were also multiple parties that we’d seen at Tia Caia – and we KNEW they hadn’t managed to have dinner before the show. It was a fun event with different genres of music and my only complaint was that the chairs made for the standard-issue Portuguese person of the 19th century were about 75% of the size they need to be for me. It was an expat-heavy crowd. A thing the event drove home to me is expats in our area will turn out in droves for any plausible event. We are still the new kids in town, but there was a non-stop stream of people checking in with Bob and Catherine.

The show had a 9:30PM start and we didn’t get home until around midnight. I mention that because it was the first time I noticed that EVERYTHING closes at night here. There are no all night gas stations, convenience stores, or grocery stores in our neck of the woods. I suspect there may be some in the bigger cities like Lisboa and O Porto, but not here. And our local Intermarché does’t open until 9AM.

Here’s the latest picture of SMP’s beach on a Saturday. Things should start to tone down a little bit in the next few weeks as the Portuguese families who frequent our town have to head home for the beginning of the school year.

And hopefully that will translate into us encountering fewer dune buggy excursions from Nazaré on our afternoon dog walks…

I’ve made it almost four months in SMP before trying a Francesinha, a decadent sandwich creation from not too far north of here, but I finally took the plunge this week.

My verdict: Francesinhas are solid, but not better than a good tosta mista on Alantejo bread. The Francesinho is a creation from near O Porto – so I’ll likely try one again when I’m there just to see how the original compares to SMPs version.

Now that we’ve been here for almost four months we are starting to brave the dental/medical establishment for routine things like teeth cleanings and annual checkups. Jill and I both had our first visits with the dentist at Clinica Baía here in SMP this week. We both had x-rays, checkup, and cleaning. Everything about the office was more modern than our dentists in Austin. Most notable was the space-age x-ray machine where our x-rays were taken while we were standing by putting our chin in a tray and having an x-ray robot swing around our heads. No more bite-wings!!! And our total bill for the services was €12/each with insurance. I mention the cost because recently in Austin, even with insurance, our semi-annual cleanings were routinely >$100.

I’ve got my first annual medical checkup tomorrow in Leiria, which is about 30 minutes from here. I’ll be interested in my first set of local bloodwork labs to see how they compare to my most recent bloodwork from the US. My blood pressure continues to be down substantially from pre-move levels, which I attribute to less stress, more-exercise, and less sugar/processed food levels. I’m hoping that translates into better LDL, HDL, etc. values.

We had a fun surprise a couple of days ago when we were walking the boys around the bay…

And finally, we’ve been spending some time at Storytellers Palace to get to know the owner so we will have a connection for our out of town guests who may end up staying there when we don’t have enough room in our rental. We tried out their speakeasy-themed bar, called The Gatsby, for gin and tonics with Stephanie when she was here with us in January. And now we’ve also sorted out the main patio bar area, including both adult beverages and nibbles. The owner, Marco, is really nice and we are quickly becoming regulars there

And that is all the news that’s fit to print here in Lake Wobegon.

Adventure is out there!

We’d been warned that July 15 through the end of August was the peak of the tourist crush here in SMP. People have used adjectives like “crazy” and “overwhelming” when describing the tourist onslaught. Keeping in mind that SMP is a destination for Portuguese families and not some Florida panhandle Spring Break town, I think the hyperbole is unwarranted. Sure, there are LOTS of people on the beach, parking in town is hard to come by, it’s currently faster to go around city center than through it, and our newly refreshed Intermarché is picked over by tourist families cooking at home. But, if this is as bad as it gets, it’s totally manageable from our perspective. Plus the tourists make the summer Fartura stand possible (thus far we have stopped for a Fartura more often than not when we walk by the stand).

Honestly our only legitimate complaint is related to Nazaré. There’s a tour company in Nazaré that does dune buggy excursions, which involves caravans of 5-7 caged vehicles driving the dirt roads between Nazaré and SMP, stopping at the lookout above our place, taking a slow lap around the bay in SMP, and heading back to Nazaré. We frequently encounter the dune buggy tours on our clifftop walks with W&B. I have to say that it looks miserable. Everyone who is not in the lead vehicle is wearing goggles and bandanas around their mouths to keep from choking on dust kicked up by the preceding vehicles and we’ve never seen anyone smiling. We have plenty of warning they are coming because of the noise they make. Whenever the dust parade comes ripping along the road toward us, we find someplace handy to move to the side to let them pass because I don’t trust they have decent visibility out of their grimy goggles. I spent some time musing on why watching them go by felt vaguely familiar and I settled on the notion that it’s reminiscent of a scene from Rat Patrol (one of my favorite WWII shows about the North African campaign as a kid).

Dune buggy parades notwithstanding, we’ve settled into a slightly modified routine while the tourist crush is on. We are doing more walking along the cliffs than the bay and more cooking at home while the restaurants are under siege. Other than that it’s business as usual.

We have two sets of couple friends from Austin, Mike and Ron and Natalie and Rob who are building villas about 10 minutes away from SMP in the village of Famalicão. We met Mike and Ron through a mutual friend in Austin when that friend heard we were moving to Portugal and were amazed to find out we’d all independently picked this tiny little patch of Portugal. Mike and Ron introduced us to Natalie and Rob, their good friends who’d decided to follow Ron and Mike’s lead in building here.

Early last week Natalie and Rob were in-country – staying in Nazaré – to check on their constructions and finalize some design decisions. It was super fun to meet up with them a couple of times while they were here to just get caught up, talk through our experiences in our first 90 days on the ground, and we even got to show them a little bit about why we love SMP so much.

Shortly after we saw Natalie and Rob, our friend Amy and her daughter Evelyn came to stay with us for a few days. After spending a few days in Lisboa, getting over the worst of jet lag, Amy and Evelyn hopped a bus to Caldas da Rainha, where Jill and I picked them up.

We popped over to Nazaré on their first full day here.

After working up an appetite walking all over Nazaré, we popped into La Muñeca, the only taqueria we’ve found so far in our area, for a delicious meal. I discovered their shrimp aguachiles, which is my new favorite there.

The next day we went inland to see some historical sites. We started with the Mosteiro da Batalha (Monastery of Batalha), which was erected on the order of Dom João I (King John the First) and built in the Manueline style over about 150 years, with construction starting in 1385 and completion in 1517. The building was sacked and burned by Napoleon’s troops and restored in the 1800’s.

There was a wedding slated for later that afternoon at the monastery (we were there on a Saturday) and we were serenaded by chamber music as the musicians warmed up for the ceremony…

We then moved on to Tomar, which is home to a famous convent – the Convento do Christo.

We’ve been wondering whether we needed to warn potential guests about the crowds of the tourist season in SMP. Between our experience with Natalie and Rob and hosting Amy and Evelyn, I’ve concluded the answer is no. We may curate your visit a little differently to avoid crowds, but there’s plenty to see and do that’s not crowded. Nazaré was bustling but not overrun with people and we shared the monastery and the convent with maybe 50 people at each site.

One of the things we’d been looking forward to in conjunction with Amy and Evelyn’s visit was that it was going to give us an excuse to brave to the regional train system. Amy and Evelyn were set to meet up with some traveling companions in O Porto (NOT just Porto. It’s “O Porto” because in Portuguese taxonomy if the name of location contains a common noun you have to use the article. Porto means “port” so it is correctly referred to as “The Port” or “O Porto” – and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the airport designation is OPO). I’d booked train tickets from SMP to O Porto for the four of us on Sunday with a return trip for just me and Jill on Monday (more on that later). It was a beginner-level experience that involved us catching a train from SMP to Coimbra (the university town where I had my residency appointment) and then changing trains in Coimbra to continue on to O Porto.

Not knowing what we would encounter, we packed baguette sandwiches, fruit, and our good attitudes for the train adventure.

Our first lesson was that at hinterland stations like SMP, where there are no train system personnel working, you are on your own to figure out which track your train will arrive on. Our station consists of three tracks and a printed paper schedule on the cork boards that shows what time the various trains are scheduled to come through SMP. Fortunately, we knew which direction our train was coming from so we positioned ourselves to see in advance which track it was going to be coming in so we could scuttle to our proper platform.

Our train was running a few minutes behind schedule and we started to wonder whether it was going to come at all and then we heard the railroad crossing bells start to ring and spied our train approaching from the south on the next track over from where we were waiting. We had no trouble getting to the correct platform before our train rolled to a stop and was ready to board.

The train trip to Coimbra was mostly uneventful, but we did learn something new. When we’ve ridden the bus you just show your ticket QR code to the driver at the door and go find your seat, but when the conductor comes through the train to check your ticket he wants to see ID, because he’s got a list of passengers he’s checking against. This was the first opportunity I’d had since getting my residency card to present it as a valid form of identification. The conductor matched our residency cards and Amy and Evelyn’s passports against his passenger list, gave them back to us and moved on down the train.

The Coimbra station was the big leagues compared to our little station in SMP. It had a monitor to show which trains were arriving on which platforms with their scheduled and predicted times plus it had fair-warning announcements of arrivals and departures. A couple of the monitors were showing the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death (as we were traveling shortly after the big Crowdstrike debacle) but there were others that were working and they showed our connecting train about 10 minutes behind schedule.

Our connection to O Porto arrived at the updated time shown on the board, it was easy to stow our bags and find our seats, and then we were off again.

We arrived at O Porto’s Campanha station, a multimodal train/bus hub, right on time and put Amy and Evelyn into a taxi to their accommodations. And Jill and I hopped into the next taxi in line to take us to our hotel.

When we were last in O Porto it was on the heels of having picked SMP as our desired destination and we had a bit of a celebratory mindset. Perhaps for that reason, both Jill and I think O Porto has a slight edge over Lisboa in terms of being our favorite – which is not to say we don’t like Lisboa, because we do.

When picking a hotel this time around, Jill chose a hotel right on the water, the Pestana Vintage Porto, where we’d enjoyed a nice happy hour last go round. Sure enough within 5 minutes of checking in we were at a street side table watching the world go by with espresso martinis.

It turns out that Amy and Evelyn were staying nearby so Amy came and joined us for an espresso martini and then the three of us set off across the river to explore Vila Nova de Gaia, which is the hub of the port wine industry just across from the oldest part of O Porto.

We walked Amy back across the bridge so she could go to dinner with her traveling companions and we popped into a sushi restaurant that Jill spied earlier in the day just up from our hotel. We had an amazing meal and will definitely go back when we are next in O Porto

Our plan had been to take the 11:30AM train back to SMP on Monday morning, but Jill caught a news flash a couple of weeks ago about a planned rail strike on Monday July 22. Not knowing what that meant, we wisely purchased bus tickets (a €9 insurance policy) for the 2:30PM bus back to SMP as a backup in case our train home was impacted by the strike.

We asked the person at the front desk at our hotel how to know whether we would be impacted and they said that, unfortunately, the only way to know for sure was to be standing there when your train didn’t leave. And since our plans involved change to another train in Coimbra, even if the first train was running as scheduled we could find ourselves in Coimbra without a train for the second half of our journey. Discretion being the better part of valor, we wisely decided to pull the plug on the train tickets. The good news is the CP (Comboios de Portugal or “Trains of Portugal”) app makes it super easy to get a refund for any reason up to 15 minutes before your scheduled departure so a couple of clicks later I had the €50-ish back in our bank account.

Now that we know how the strike actually played out, it was 100% the right answer for us to fall back to the bus. 80% of all trains in Portugal were idled on Monday and we certainly would not have made it home.

That also gave us a few extra hours in O Porto on Monday so, after a delicious breakfast at the hotel, we set off on foot to meet Amy and show her around the part of O Porto that we know well. The most important thing was to show her where La Salumeria, our favorite 6-table Italian restaurant is so that she could dine there one night while in O Porto.

We stopped for a few photo ops

And then it was time for me and Jill to head back to pick up our bag from the hotel and take a taxi to the Campanha station to catch our bus.

When we arrived at the Campanha station it seemed pretty crowded in the bus terminal, but we don’t have anything to baseline that perception against. My guess is there were a lot of extra people who, like us, had originally been booked on trains and needed to make the switch to a bus. I’m SO glad Jill heard about the strike weeks ago because it would have been easy to be in the dark. We now know where the part of the CP site is that publishes possible disruptions and we will check that religiously in the future. My suspicion is that there were plenty of people at the Campanha station who didn’t get a seat on a bus, because it turned out our bus was completely full.

We stopped and got snacks and water bottles in advance of getting on our bus and found our seats like seasoned professionals. We had a direct bus that would make a few stops on the way home, but we didn’t need to make a transfer anywhere so we felt like we were in really good shape. The bus left right on time at 2:30PM and we were making good time until about 5 minutes outside of Coimbra. That was when there was a big jolt and the bus driver eased over to the shoulder and stopped.

I assumed we’d blown a tire, but it turned out that someone had come up behind the bus in the right hand lane at high speed (this is an assumption on my part) with the bus traveling the posted limit and they’d misjudged a lane change to pass the bus and clipped the left rear corner of the bus.

I’ll lead with EVERONE IS OK! That’s the important part. But it took a little while to sort out what had happened. The SUV that rear-ended the bus apparently caromed and wedged its front end in the guard rail on the inside of the left-hand lane and we didn’t see it at first because it was about a quarter-mile back from where we’d pulled over on the shoulder. The first official vehicle on scene was a GNR sedan, followed quickly by one of the roving roadside assistance trucks. Once they’d checked the driver of the SUV they started putting out cones to block the lane occupied by the crashed SUV. Next on scene was the Bombeiros (fire dept paramedics). They didn’t whisk anyone away to the hospital which we thought was a good sign.

We spent about an hour and a half on the side of the road while our driver, who handled himself very professionally, walked back and forth between our bus and the GNR officer assigned to the incident. At no point did we exit the bus and, thankfully, the AC stayed on the entire time because the external thermometer on the bus was reading 40C (104F) and the bus was full of people which made it hard for the AC to keep up in a stationary vehicle. We were thinking maybe they’d send us a replacement bus, but the next thing we knew the bus was in gear and we were moving along. The driver must have cut some stops short because we arrived at our stop in SMP only about 45 minutes behind schedule.

All’s well that ends well, but what an adventure…

Adventure is out there!

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!