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.