June flights

 

I have one more mandatory trip to the USA, this time prompted by the end of my 3 month tourist visa. I ran out of time after our arrival here at the end of Feb despite interrupting it with my short month-long trip for the consulate appointment in Boston in May.

At the consulate appointment I had to produce proof of travel - a ticket to Portugal - but it is not clear whether this is used as a guide to the government department processing the visas.  The ticket was for the 4th of July so we were hoping it would be approved by then.

Our best hope is that I'll get an email from the consulate in the next two weeks telling me that I can collect the temporary visa in Boston. Of course I have been playing the "what-if" game with this because if the request to collect the visa doesn't come in time I'll have to change my return ticket without knowing how how far into the future to do it.

I bought the cheapest ticket combination I could find that included a flexible return ticket. This had us up at the ungodly hour of 3:20am to make the flight at 6:05am from Faro to Lisbon where I have a 10 hour layover.  Anne had an opinion about my life choices with having to get up at 4am to take me to the airport in Faro.

 

Faro and the salt marshes very early am

It would have been way better if I had time on the tourist visa to just wait it out in Portugal and fly when I knew for sure.

We are in the meantime progressing a little tentatively in Portugal. We have started to feel our way around healthcare and shopping and learning the language. Both Anne and I caught something that led to doctors' visits and, in my case blood work for diagnostics. We are both close to fully recovered after three weeks with thankfully the total cost of these visits (without health insurance) amounting to more or less the co-pay that we have previously paid in the USA for similar treatments.

 

Pheasant and its chick in the field behind our house

 We did get some health insurance which we presented to the clinic for my last visit and the consultation was half of what it had been for the previous visit.

We still have to do more research on private health insurance to figure out how big ticket treatments are discounted but have more or less decided in the meantime to use the private clinic located about 30min drive from our house at least until we get more comfortable with our Portuguese.  Most expats use the private hospitals but our experience of the public health is generally positive having used it in Porto on a previous trip.

The few weeks of not feeling great has made the prospect of us being forced to separate much harder.  So having to delay before I return while I wait for the email from the consulate will be hard for both Anne and me.

On my last trip to Boston I arranged to join our friend Kees on the West Coast.  He has been traveling around in his RV and is keeping us up to date with his blog. He is making his way up the coast and we'll be hanging out north of San Francisco for the week. So the trip to join him from Portugal was extremely long with the 10 hour layover in Lisbon, the long 7 hour haul to Boston followed by a single night and then another early morning flight to San Francisco which is about as far from Boston as Lisbon is!

I'll be returning to Boston after visiting Kees to do paperwork to prepare for our driver license swap in Portugal. We have to hand in our USA driver's license and wait for new Portuguese driver's licenses to be sent to us - but the process includes getting a specific drivers' history from the RMV in Massachusetts and getting it "apostilled"at the Massachusetts State department.

Apostille is a process codified in the The Hague whereby a person can get their home country to certify a document as a legitimate product of the origin country's bureaucracy.

My stop in Lisbon was uneventful.  I took an early morning arrival photograph of Lisbon from the window seat.  I keep getting window seats with these cheap tickets.

Lisbon arrival

Choosing a movie has also become a little challenging.  In days gone by movies were heavily censored on flights to avoid offending passengers sitting next to or behind you but that is apparently no longer the case.  On my previous flight from Boston to Lisbon in May I had watched "Poor Things" sitting next to a middle-aged Southern woman.  I started watching with her husband beside me but they swapped seats at some point during the night and more or less in the middle of my movie.  

In all fairness to me, I had not expected the the film be as sexually explicit (or as relentlessly so) as it was.  If you haven't watched the film, it is pretty surreal and very explicit with a very strange premise.  A brave movie for Emma Stone who has won accolades for her acting in the movie.

At first I thought - "ok, they are establishing some things about her and after that it will be a little more muted", but then there WAS more and the mute stayed off.  I was cringing, not sure whether to say something to my neighbor, stop watching or just pretend it was nothing (which was the path of least resistance).  At one point though, as I opening a seltzer water, it sprayed all over me and potentially over her.  There was no avoiding talking to her at this point so I said how sorry I was to be spraying water and by the way I'm so sorry about the movie.  She said something like "Oh don't worry dear, I watched something outlandish as well I ain't even a little bit wet!"

Window seats, for someone years over 30, is not a great experience. This time, the two women sitting next to me on the way to Boston from Lisbon were clearly pretty religious so I avoided watching anything with a screen rating above PG13.  I watched the "Barbie" movie which Anne and I had avoided when it came out.   Their bladders lasted all of 7 hours and they patiently made way for me each time I needed to go.

On the way to San Fransisco (another 7 hour flight) the two younger men next to me never went to the bathroom either and I had to go at least 3 times on the flight, each time waking the guy next to me who slept the entire trip.

My last arrival photo was over the sea coming into Boston.

It might be worth it to pay for the upgrade on the way back to get an isle seat.

Blowing in the wind

At several places in Portugal during our original trips in 2023 to tour the country we had heard people reference the wind.  When we were in Setubal our host told us that the weather and lagoon was perfect in this location for kite-surfing.  There were placards near the beach showcasing some international tournaments that they have there.

Our hosts in Aljezur mentioned when we stayed there that is very windy there too.

We kind of rode with that.  Both Anne and I have lived in Cape Town which has a just-deserved reputation for being windy.  I suppose you should take note when something like this comes up several times in conversation about a place.  Like for example, "it rains a lot in England"!

In Cape Town the wind is notorious, I've been stranded clinging onto a pole in the foreshore with little prospect of making it across the street without being blown along like a leaf!  Anne has a strong memory of both her feet lifting off the ground with her dad holding fast to her hand in a street in Cape Town.

The truth is that it is often very windy.  I suspect in Portugal people watch the weather forecast as much for the wind as we used to watch for snow warnings in Massachusetts.

I took a screenshot from windy.com which shows the wind situation over the past day and future few days.  The averages are about 14mph with gusts going up to 30mph.  The Beaufort Scale describes 14mph as"Leaves and small twigs in constant motion; light flags extended. Large wavelets on sea" (Beaufort Scale).

A few weeks ago - not long after I arrived to rejoin Anne and Nick, we had a night with winds that were strong enough to wake us. 

Coming in to land at Faro airport

It has been quite warm so we sleep with a window open but we have learned that having something on the windowsill (portable speaker, ornament) is asking for trouble.

We woke up the the next morning to find drawings and prints all over the yard, in the street on the other side of our 2m (7ft) fence and in the neighbors garden - the wind had whipped a heavy box of broken ceramic pieces off a table where it was doubling as a paper-weight and scattered the papers that were stacked there.

Anne and I spent 45 minutes wandering around picking up copies and originals of images that she had made on our travels and for a book she had worked on.

We are still gradually unpacking, which is why there was a box of papers on the rear porch.  We have more photos and paintings than wall space so the process of choosing what we want to hang has been fairly slow - made even slower with us both succumbing to a virus that laid us both low for more than a week.

I mentioned before how the wind at night has at various times lead to me making wild assumptions about what the noise actually was and yes, we are still having occasional WTF reactions to noises even though the wind has become the usual suspect.  

My first thought now, when it happens, is: "What's banging in the wind?" but unfortunately, when the sounds comes from inside, from the kitchen, at 10:30pm while you are watching a creepy TV show ("Dark Matter") all of our sensors go up.

When it happened we immediately started thinking it was a creature of some kind.  Anne went to "rat" and I went to "cat" - our first leaps of the imagination.

I go into the kitchen and there was nothing remarkable in there.  We have a pantry/under the stairs storage room which was crammed with boxes, paper and suitcases but the door was firmly closed.

I opened it and saw that one of the wall hooks uses double sided tape had pulled away from the wall.  The yoga seat that had been hanging on it was lying on the floor next to it.

"Whew,  the damn hook fell off, how useless are these hooks!?"

So we went back to the TV show until there was another very distinct clatter/scrabble(?) from the kitchen.

This time I was thinking there was a bird in the chimney (maybe) but as I inspected it, a sound, like a box rustling, came from inside the "pantry".

I opened the door again and took in the scene - basically clutter with boxes, cardboard recycling and suitcases and a small window that tilts inward that was open! 

"It's a creature",  I called out confidently.

Anne was still thinking "rat" so she wanted to know what I was going to do about it.

My plan was to get some storage boxes and line the kitchen to give the creature a wide corridor to the back door and then take everything out of the pantry and onto the back porch.  Anne kept saying, "but Tim, rats can jump!" and I was thinking "its a cat", because the idea of a rat leaping over a packing box was not where I wanted my thoughts to go.  "I'll encourage it along the ground if it is a rat", was my thought - a cat would have none of the corridor anyway but at least they are domesticated and may not immediately attack me.

After we had built this corridor, I found our ceremonial sword.  This is something that Anne has from her Highland Dancing competitions when she was a wee bairn.  I spent a few moments wondering what the hell I'd do with it if a creature leapt out of the box at me.  I don't want to stab a cat but I'm pretty sure Anne wouldn't mind me stabbing a rat.  Besides, quite frankly, there is nothing more unwieldy than a sword in a tight space and I was picturing myself, pierced in the leg by our own rusty sword.

So sanity prevailed and I grabbed a walking stick.  I would shoo rather than decapitate whatever was in there. 

I dragged the first box all the way out of the back door - it was filled with cut and torn cardboard that were use as kindling for the stove - an ideal home for a rodent.  No creature in there.

The same was true for all of the remaining boxes under there and the next morning when I went to close the window I was reminded by the wire mesh beyond it that it has a mosquito screen, so no creature could have got in there to start with.

I'm going with the idea that we should only use the drill and screws to set hooks and never use glue-backed hooks to hang things inside.  My other ideas, like what the F was that noise then after all, have been closed in the pantry for now.  I'll keep thinking it was either the wind blowing a calendar or a picture hanger that fell and leave it at that.

I have to go back to the USA by the 23rd because I will have used up my 3 months on the tourist visa by then.  Anne will be here with a promise of a visit by one of our daughters and a short trip of her own to England.  Hopefully my temporary residence permit will arrive soon enough for me to return at the end of the first week of July.

When I get back I'll make an album of photos of the house.  We have decided to hold off on doing anything in the garden for a few months and focus on getting our things properly situated first.

And we'll let sleeping cats lie.