Two years in Portugal

We celebrated the beginning of our third year in Portugal on the 27th of February and spent the first few months of the year enjoying the improvements that we had made to heating water for the house, including the underfloor heating.

It didn't take long to figure out once the electrical bill started climbing, what we had saved with the wood-burning kitchen stove vs what winter would cost in the future with the new electrical systems (stove and heat pump).  The firewood increased to €185 per tonne (approximately half a cord) last year so the 6 tonnes (3 cords) would have cost €955 this year.  As the electrical bills came in it became apparent that we were not going to be saving much even with the efficient heat pump (€1500 between October and April) so we will have to accelerate getting the solar panels installed.

Since I last posted we took a trip to England

London, for Thanksgiving?  American traditions

in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with three of our children (Matt was planning to join us for Christmas in Portugal).   

Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday

 

Back in Portugal, we are part of an informal hiking group, and enjoyed a few hikes in October and November before the weather got consistently rainy.  There are plenty of really nice walks within a short distance of us, some along the coastline and others further inland. 

Lagging behind to record the hike

Our group takes turns to lead walks and we've led two so far since we joined.

In December we had a visit from Nick and his girlfriend Vanessa.  We spent a couple of days in Lisbon where we walked to a few Christmas Markets and visited a design museum.

Christmas Market at Parque Eduardo VII

  We picked Matt up at Lisbon's airport and traveled further north to Nazaré 

Nazaré lighthouse and waves

where we got to see surfers being pulled into the gigantic waves.  

Just after releasing the tow rope

Back in the Algarve we were invited to celebrate a wonderful Christmas day with our Scandinavian neighbors who sang entertaining songs each time a toast was made. 

A Scandinavian Christmas in the Algarve

As the rains came we hunkered down, spending time on personal projects at home, interspersed with hikes and alternate jam sessions with two guitarists I have been playing with.

Playing with Marcus

 Emma and Jess also came to spend a few days with us in March and the sunny weather showed up for them.

At the Alte waterfall

Our Portuguese classes continue.  We have finished the course work for A2 - which is shorthand for basic verbal and written literacy but unfortunately is not enough to really have a good conversation with a native speaker, unless they are very patient and speak slowly.  But we are determined to keep working at it and spend almost every morning with some activity like crosswords, conjugation exercises or a little reading.

We have planned two trips for this year.  The first to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet Matt and his partner and the second to Namibia to travel inland into the game reserves, going up to Etosha Pan and the Okavango swamps.

 Since we have already left for the USA I'll have an update on the trip there fairly soon.

 

Summer's end

I remembered how Kimberley summers felt during the two hottest months of summer in Portugal.  Temperatures didn't vary much over the few weeks - going down the 24ºC (75ºF) at night and burning a steady 35-38ºC (90-100ºF) during the day.

The days were actually not that uncomfortable - on the whole, excepting when the ubiquitous evening breeze and then the winds howling into the night took a break and left the night air still and hot.  The house stays cool if you close the doors and windows at around 10am.  You can open up again when the winds pick up in the evening so we used our air conditioners during a few of the windless nights but every other night we left the windows open for the breezes to cool us.

It is incredible how quickly you get used to these high temperatures.  We are feeling quite chilly now that the summer is almost over and the morning temperature starts at about 15ºC (59ºF).  It will be interesting to see how the winter feels.

We had all of our children and grandchildren visit this summer. 

A crazy but happy couple of weeks with high demand for trips to the beach.  

Over time my relationship with the beach has changed somewhat - I remember summer holidays in Kenton-on-sea and the Fish River that were idyllic as a young parent, but realized more recently that a big reason was that you could escape the sun and boredom of just sitting in sand to lounge with a book on the deck of the holiday house.  

Given that our house is 30min drive from the closest beach in Portugal these beach outings were, of necessity, extended affairs which were greatly enriched by an umbrella and collapsible camping chair that we bought to increase the likelihood of me joining everyone in the hot sand.

Quietness has returned after the flood of small bodies - the smallest of whom had me running in circles indoors in a nerf-gun war that ended suddenly when I ran around a corner and smashed my toes into a industrial strength glass door leaving one of them bloodied and swollen.  My grandson came to me every day after that to ask if I could run yet - my answer was always "nope"!  Fortunately the pain was mostly over after a day and I'm left with a toe that reminds me of the incident with a sharp pain if I tread on it in an unusual way.

Other than that, it tolerates being put into a hiking shoe and taken on long walks.

One of my hiking partners from some years ago when we were hiking the 40 4000ft mountains in New Hampshire is coming to Portugal next week to hike the Portuguese Caminho do Santiago - a variation on the famous Spanish pilgrimage route to the famous cathedral.

Bruce was a colleague of mine for a number of years but we developed a friendship at work and over the many hikes that we did together.

Bruce recently lost his wife to Alzheimer's disease and he had been walking steadily for months as a way to process what he described as "the long goodbye" as he took care of her at home over the few years of her decline.  After her funeral someone told him on an impulse that he should look into the Caminho and after some research he decided to take the time to walk in Europe. 

When I heard that he was planning to come over to hike I decided to join him for a few days - thinking (sensibly) that it was not really in me to do more than that.  I use the very obvious excuse that he'd get sick of me, following the advice my grandmother often repeated about fish and visitors going off after three days.

I started my preparation during the summer, walking in the mornings before it got too hot and trying to build up to the distances of the three initial days of the hike (which are 21,14 and 22km).

 Anne joined me for the shorter stretches which included an adventure when we inadvertently entered private farmland of lush avocado trees and were accosted by the farmer who chased us down in his truck and asked what we thought we were doing on his land.  Of course the language barrier being what it was, Anne blurted out for some unknown reason "Nous sommes perdus!" (we are lost) in French and I tried the mix of Spanish and Portuguese that sometimes works for me to say "we are trying to find our way home".

After our fence climbing adventure

We ended up having to hike to the bottom end of his farm and then climb over a house-high pile of rocks and over his fence to get off his property.  I pointed out to Anne that getting in on the other side had been deceptively easy but I lack the nuanced Portuguese to have pointed this out to the farmer at the time.

I scoped out a 15km circuit near our home which includes some lovely scenic views of the countryside.

During the shorter training walks we came across a variety of dogs - for the most part they are behind fences, but occasionally they run out an open gate behind you which is always a little freaky as they rush at your ankles barking furiously.

We took some dog treats along with us after the first couple of incidents, thinking that we could distract the dogs with the treats.  Unfortunately farm dogs will ignore the treat if you put it down and will dash off it you toss it over to them - which gave us an idea to use a trick we learned as children in South Africa - to bend over and pretend to pick up a stone - which sends the dogs scuttling off.

Anne has a hiking pole that she brings along with her and she passes that to me if we get close to dogs in the open and I just point it at them as we pass.  I'm not sure why I want the stick because I think we'd both be doing the same thing if they attacked - waving it at them and shouting, but at least we have a plan!

The scariest dog encounter was a group of three dogs who looked pretty mangy and ragged and were fairly far from any visible property line - we assumed that the house was in the bush some meters out of sight and the dogs had heard us approaching and came out to ambush us.

They looked intent on encircling us and kept on dodging in to get closer so I was doing some pirouettes with the hiking pole and fake picking up stones until we were out of their territory.

My second long hike was a 22.5km hike along the coast at the end of a famous coastal path called the Fisherman's Trail (or Rota Vicentina).  The end of the route is the train station in Lagos, Portugal and we began there and walked along the coastal cliffs to a lovely beach called Porto do Mos where we had lunch and Anne stopped to swim and soak up the sun while I continued to a beach town called Luz.

The total waking time on this longer hike was about four and a half hours but we took six and a half with the lunch break.

Luz from the top of the coastal cliffs

For those interested the Fisherman's trail is about 226km long and is usually walked over 13 days (17km average) with the longest stretch being about 22km.  There is a great interactive map from the link above that shows where food and sleeping stops here - a mixture of hostels, small hotels and small cafe-bars.  I know that some people bring a small tent along so that they can camp if they don't get to a hostel or hotel.

We'll park that as an adventure for another time!

Temporary resident

Monday morning early I was off to the Portuguese consulate in Boston.  The person who had helped Anne first, and had then handled my application was sitting at the reception window and very apologetically let me know that the entire computer system handling visa applications and visa issuing was down in Portugal for two days because it was being upgraded.

The previous weekend I had decided to change my flight from the 4th of July to the 8th to make room for error because of how short the week was with the July 4th celebrations, but it was disconcerting to learn that the visa would not be ready for at least two days.

Of course when they told me that the consulate general was not in the office that day I immediately extrapolated from that he might also not be in the office on Wed or Friday due to American holiday festivities which ratcheted up my anxiety a few notches.

Some good news did arrive in the form of confirmation that our driving records from the RMV were ready for pickup at the mail handling facility so my plan was to go into the city to see the Secretary of State on the Tuesday.

I decided to take an Uber to avoid the stress of having to find the building and having to find parking nearby.  In Boston you can easily pay $30 for parking for several hours so the Uber fee seemed like a reasonable compromise.

The building is right behind the imposing State House with its gold dome that faces over the one corner of the Boston Commons.  I had read up on the process to get the driving records "apostilled" and had filled in the online form and had made a check out to the state department as described in the online instructions. 

In reality, the entire experience was pretty pleasant compared to what I'd imagined given the warnings about how many forms you could bring and how you might have to leave them there if they didn't get processed by 4pm.

The room was fairly chaotic because it turns out there are a lot of people looking for apostilled documents for many countries.  The desk clerks were rotating to the counter calling out country names for people to pick up already processed documents, sending people off to the cashier to pay if they didn't have a check or a money order (two forms of payment that the web-site said were the only ones accepted), and calling on people in a line to step forward one at a time to hand over documents.

Columbia, Guatemala, Bolivia and a few European countries were called before I got to say "for Portugal" to the desk clerk who called me forward.

She took my check and pointed to the wall behind me and said "wait there" after pushing my carefully filled in form back at me (not needed), and then she vanished to her desk in a small office.  About 10 min later she handed me my folder with the completed documents.

One the way back I decided to take the Boston T which was fortunate because I was able to spot a sign on one of the street-side entrances with a questionable interpretation

and also stop at some places that filled me with nostalgia.

The State House of course, followed by a walk through the common to the State Street subway station and on to the Blue Line train which took me past our old home station, Orient Heights where I'd caught the bus to our first rental in Winthrop.

Our friend Gene had said that she was planning to take an evening ferry ride into Boston with a friend of hers and I should join them if I wanted to - we ended up having burritos for supper on a somewhat chilly, windy deck but with views of the airport,

Gene in the foreground getting ready to photograph the plane as well!

 the water tower in Winthrop

and a massive luxury yacht on the wharf.

I had lunch arranged with a colleague on Wednesday but had a phone call as I was getting ready to leave.  America has so many scams and ridiculous marketing calls that few people, myself included, answer their mobile phones when unknown numbers call them, but some instinct made me take the call.  It was the Portuguese consulate letting me know that my visa was ready to be picked up.

I raced into town and parked across from the consulate building and managed to make the pickup and get to my lunch meeting in time, feeling very much relieved that I'd now secured everything that I needed to return to Portugal where I can stay permanently (subject to one more appointment to get my residence card).

After lunch I went to Gillette stadium for what was probably my last opportunity to photograph the New England Revolution soccer team.  A privilege that I'd been enjoying since 2005 when a fellow camera club member had invited me to stand in for him while he was working at a National Park in the North West.

The evening was quite eventful because the media pass I was given was accidentally for a sportswriter and not a photographer so it did not give me field access.  I had to get the help of the person in charge of media liaison and then the head of stadium security to hand-write a pass for me and then tell all of the security personnel that my media pass was not fake.  Both of them were pretty busy in the lead-up to the game and I felt obliged to apologize for being so "high maintenance".  

At the end of the game as I was walking around to set up a spot to photograph the fireworks planned for after the game at least two security people looked and my pass and said brightly : "oh we were told about you!" 

As we've discovered before, traveling with gear that is not packed in a familiar container led to me realizing the next day that one of my really expensive camera lenses was missing!  I remembered having had it at the stadium for shooting the fireworks but could not remember seeing it when I got home.  That and the fact that the car I was borrowing ended up with a nail in one of the tires almost ruined my enjoyment of the 4th of July celebrations, especially the fireworks which I'd been looking forward to photographing. 

Another camera club friend had invited me to his brother-in-law's 4th of July barbecue. When I told him about the flat tire he offered to bring his battery-operated pump the next morning to get the car into a state where I could drive it to have it repaired.   I went out later on to take a look at the car after sending a few emails to the media liaison person and two of my sports photography friends asking whether the lens had turned up.  I reached under a seat and found the lens had rolled in there.  It is a black lens but it would probably have been revealed if I'd been a little less panicked and had used a flashlight during my two previous attempts to find it.

In the meantime, Anne had gone to England for a week to see our daughters (and their families) and Nick, and she flew back on the 4th to our empty house.  I took a screenshot of the security camera recording of her at the front door and called her to say welcome home despite not being able to be there to welcome her.

I arranged to see Matt on the weekend.  We met at this awesome restaurant at around the midpoint between Boston and New Haven.  It has lots of signed photographs of famous authors and has bookshelves lined with books on all the walls.  You can take 3 books from select shelves if you have a meal there.  The only problem is how long it might take to select the three since most people there are stopping for a bite on their travels.  In the end I found one book which I thought (in vain as it happens) that I might read on the way back to Portugal.   After lunch we took a walk around a nearby lake.

With all the admin tasks and the trip to see Matt, I didn't get to see many of the people I would have liked to see this time around.  This was possibly the last trip to the USA for a while.  My errands mostly involved taking care of things to prepare to move my primary residence to Portugal.  My tax residency will move to Portugal as well which means that next year (and forever more) we will have to file taxes both in America and Portugal as ex-patriot Americans.

My last trip over the Nahant causeway was an opportunity to take one more photograph of that view with the evening sky and a plane coming in to land at Logan airport.  This last trip was tinged with sadness but I was very happy to be on my way back to Anne and my new home.

I discovered on my flight back from Boston that, probably because I had reserved an aisle seat early on, no one had taken the two seats next to me.  I thought this was fantastic but discovered that with the combination of my body clock (it was early evening when we took off) and the 5 and half hour flight duration I would have scant chance of sleeping even though I did lie down across the 3 seats for 30 min or so to try my luck.

I proudly informed the customs officer that I had a temporary residence visa in Portuguese after which I opened the passport to the page because he had no idea what I had said.  "Bit by bit" our Portuguese teacher says but this was not one of those bits, it was pure incomprehension.

But it was a big relief to know, once he stamped the page opposite the visa, that I was not going to have to leave Portugal every 3 months anymore.

I arrived in Faro at around mid-morning and insisted on staying awake all day which meant that Anne had to tolerate my zombie mode until 9:30 that night.

So on to the next adventure - settling in and exploring!

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.

Stalking

The few weeks that I have been in the USA alone have been a little tough despite the warm welcome of friends here.

Before I left Portugal, Anne suggested that we get a couple of cameras, partly for animal activity and partly as extra security.  In the USA we had been using a platform that has a base station that the cameras connect to and a monthly subscription.  I was not too keen to use something with a monthly recurring fee so I settled on a camera company that has SD cards and a mobile phone app with an optional monthly subscription if you feel you need to store information for later retrieval online.

So it was that my phone in the USA kept on pinging me when there was movement in the front or back of our house and I would regularly open the phone app and see Anne or Nick hanging out on the front porch. Once or twice I said something to them through the camera but more often, I'd send them a WhatsApp message to tell them that I was snooping.

In my last post I was so focused on talking about being hosted by people we'd met and befriended in America that I forgot to mention some old friends!

In 1999 we had decided that I'd look for work outside of South Africa and we had a couple of friends who had gone to America to work in the booming information technology industry during the dot com bubble.  One family who we'd known for years in Grahamstown and who's children and ours built an elaborate fantasy that they were cousins, had moved to America and offered to host me at their house for an exploratory trip.

In 2000 I planned to go first to England and then to America on a scouting trip.  Our friend in England was away for a conference once the dates were finalized so I switched the plan to start in America.  Before I left home I used a facility on one of our servers to send an email set to arrive while I was in the air.  At the time this was a trick that was not known outside of tech circles so was utterly unexpected.   The email said goodbye, and made some promises about a different future.  I discovered with some horror that this email coming over the ether from me freaked her out.  Suddenly the sweet message played out as somewhat sinister message saying goodbye to the living and reassuring her that despite this, her future would be different now.

My hosts in America treated me to tours, road trips and a ride up to meet a climber who knew a mutual friend of theirs.  It was on one of these climbing outings that I learned about a company that was looking for someone fitting my background.  It was also not the first time that "Rhodes University" in my resume was interpreted as "he was a Rhodes Scholar".  Technically I suppose I am a scholar from Rhodes, but I only learned quite a lot later that this false conclusion had helped to cement my credentials at the time.  

Anne had a similar experience with an item in her resume that listed her as having taught in East London.  It was on the morning of the day that she was introduced to the school that she realized, as the headmaster proudly announced that she had taught in East London, that he had assumed it was London, England!

We have had a standing tradition of a Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) lunch with these South African friends since we came over to America so our more recent visits have been a little sad given the distance to travel for a meal like that.  They also have the distinction of being friends that we have jokingly alternately blamed and then thanked for encouraging us to come to America in the first place.

I was able to take a trip down to Raleigh to visit a couple we grew close to over the first ten years in Boston.  I had worked with the husband at my first job.  He and his wife adopted a daughter who become our adopted niece.  She was a the subject of many of my attempts at child portraits before they moved down to Raleigh and is in her early teens now.  I was honored that she agreed to allow me to take a photograph of her while I was there.  Anne will no doubt use one of them as a reference for a new drawing of her.  I really enjoyed hanging out with them and experiencing the warmth of their company.

Their daughter has inherited her dad's sense of humor.  I told her the story of the fairy house and asked her if she thought the fairies would find the house that our granddaughter built for them and move in?  She said:

"Yes, they'll find it.  And they'll get you!"

After I officially retired at the end of April I have been going through these bittersweet steps to transition from full time work.  I have made myself available for some consulting to smooth the process of my exit so I expect to have increasing time at my disposal in the coming weeks to get started on the few projects that are lined up.

Last all-hands send off

I told a colleague that my daily routine would probably involve carting some wheelbarrow loads of stone from the yard, fiddling with technology to get our gates working again, setting up graphs to show the temperature trends in our hot water system and reading.  When I told Anne what I had said, she reminded me that I have a lot to catch up on in the cooking department so I guess there is that too.

My last stop was at Yale where Matt graduated on Monday.  He has a Masters in Nursing Science which makes him a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner, a career in the USA (and perhaps elsewhere) which allows him to consult with patients and prescribe medicine.  It is a role that is somewhere between a nurse and a doctor.  He specialized in Family Medicine (General Practice) and he will start a residency in Seattle in the fall at an outpatient community clinic.

The Yale campus is truly beautiful and I was proud to be able to go there and be with him for his graduation.

My flight back to our new home leaves in a few minutes and I won't be putting an email up to be triggered while I am flying over the Atlantic, though mostly because in all likelihood I'll have wifi and be able to message from my seat way up in the air.

I have one more month on my tourist visa to the EU after which I have to leave.  I'll have fingers crossed and be holding thumbs that my visa approval for the residence permit is approved in time for me to return to the USA, pick it up and head back home at the end of the first week of July.

News from Home

It has been weird not having a constant companion. 

We have incredibly generous and dear friends in the USA.  For the most part we have used Trusted Housesitters and AirBnb to find places to stay in Europe, England and here in the USA.  But some friends insisted that we stay with them each time we returned to the USA.  Mary, our first American friend, with her little King Charles Spaniel welcomed us and also took the “trusted house sitter” lead to have us mind her house and dog on a couple of trips that she took while we were there.  

Getting soft-serves in Swampscott with Mary

Our first (new) South African friends in America made their home and one of their cars available to us on multiple visits (including accepting our offer for some pet sitting on one occasion).  Other friends have offered to have us stay once they learned how we have been making our way since we sold our house.

I'm particularly sensitive to not imposing on people.  It's a delicate balance, because we are very aware that no matter how "chill" we are as guests, we are still there.all.the.time during our stay and it does make a difference in the house.  So we have kept our stay-overs (even with these close friends) to one to two weeks where possible.  We have promised to reciprocate when they visit us in Portugal, which we hope will be soon.

I am heading to Raleigh to see our friends there on my third week of this trip. They have a daughter who came into our lives in 2010 when I became her honorary uncle and portrait photographer until they left for Raleigh in 2015.  We haven’t been able to see them all since before 2020.  I’ll spend a week with them catching up before coming back to New England for our son Matt’s graduation at Yale a few days before my return trip to Portugal.

Anne had a "Mission Impossible" moment or two back in Portugal on the second week after I left. 

She had to take a trip to a city in the far North West, called Braga - a five hour drive to her appointment with immigration officials in Braga.  She learned on the weekend before they left that the furniture was going to arrive on the same day.  

She was able to move the furniture arrival to the day after they returned and she and Nick were able to enjoy their visit to what turned out to be an absolutely beautiful city which they both loved.

We had heard that the weather up there is pretty cold and wet in the winter - similar to English winters, so we had not visited it when we did our tour of Portugal in the months that we had been there in 2023.

After an exhausting drive back and not too much sleep she awoke to two men from Spain (neither of them young) arriving in a big truck to unload our storage stuff.  In Boston, 5 men had loaded the truck and it seemed absurd that only two older men should have to do this huge job. 

The truck driver decided that our street and the corner into our street was too narrow for their large truck despite the evidence we had in realty photos that a 40ft container had been parked outside our house before.  So they used a smaller van to shuttle between the large truck on a feeder road and our house for about 6 hours, unloading stuff that I know from residual pain in my back are very heavy.

I'm somewhat relieved that I was thousands of miles away - I suspect I would have been inclined to try to help them.  I joked with a colleague whose son had done some of the work helping me loading that we might be willing to pay him to fly to Portugal to help out.  The notion definitely appealed to his son I learned the next day.

Naturally the days following were filled with nostalgia as Anne started sorting through the boxes and unpacking things.  I really would have liked to be there because this is the part where the empty house becomes a home.

At our house near Boston we had found a hollow at the bottom of a pine tree that was just the right size for a fairy house.  We put furniture in it and found a little fairy door  for the opening.  Our grandchildren were enchanted by it and used to leave little notes for the fairies - the last of which was something along the lines of "dear fairies, granny and grandpa are leaving and going to another country.  I hope that you can find them when they find their new home and come to live with them".  

One of our granddaughters went to a ceramic class with Anne and made a  house of clay for the fairies to move into when we did find a new home.

Anne sent me a photo of the little house placed at the foot of our juvenile lemon tree.  

Anne asked me if I thought the fairies would find the house and come over and I said: "Never".  I hope that I'm wrong because the little girls might be disappointed if a pair of mice take up residence instead.

Before I left, we hung two swallows, which Jess had given us as a housewarming present, on the wall in front of the house, following a tradition in Portugal. We had learned that they are a much loved symbol representing love, loyalty, hope, and new beginnings which are all very appropriate.  They also mate for life.   

Next to the swallows is our happy gargoyle face that we have had hanging outside our homes since our daughters were little and Anne has added an elephant sculpture, another thoughtful gift from a friend,  showing her love for these majestic beasts.  

The house trim is now turquoise instead of dark grey.

In the meantime I retired from my job and started gathering all the remaining paperwork for the Portuguese residence permit, which included an FBI criminal check.  I'm not sure why there is anxiety involved in this process.  They take electronic fingerprints and your details and run them through their criminal database to see if there are any matches.  Despite never having been near to any crime or crime scene the moments between submitting them and the email where they tell you that you are not a criminal are filled with anxiety!  Luckily it takes less than thirty minutes to get the results emailed to you so it is more or less like begin pulled over by a cop and then allowed to drive on because your driver’s license shows you live in the same town as the cop.

Anne has this great attribute where she will reinvent how she thinks of ongoing experiences to make them positive, particularly if she has to live with them. She would often say to the children, "Change the picture in your head".

I remember years ago her saying something, like "the crickets are loud today".  I looked at her and said, "what crickets".

"Can't you hear them?"
"Nope... where are they?"

It turns out that Anne has tinnitus and because she decided that the sound was crickets, she has been experiencing these sounds as the somewhat pleasant, ubiquitous night sounds of Africa. 

So she told me one morning recently that the wind had sprung up one night as she was getting ready for bed.  Keenly aware of how the banging of the storm shutters had alarmed me when I was there alone, she carefully battened them down and got into bed only to be jarred by a loud whistling sound - like the movie sound effects of high winds in a storm.

In her sleepy mind these were the sounds of the wind whistling in our electricity lines along the side of our house.  She started thinking: "oh crap, this is something new that we are going to have to live with and its awful!"

And then as she lay there she decided that the wind was singing to her and she drifted off to sleep, feeling a little better about having to live with this sound in wind storms in the future.

The next morning when she went to open the storm shutters she noticed that the window was not properly closed and as she opened it fully the sound went away.

I think I said before that I've been waiting suspiciously to discover some bad thing about our house that the seller never revealed, so it is always a great relief when something that seems like a contender for this horror ends up being really easy to deal with.

Anne had an interaction with a grumpy man at the gas station where she stopped to fill the car and check the tires.  There is a machine the size of a petrol pump there with two more or less identical hoses on it and a sign: "Ar/Agua".  She grabbed one of the hoses and as she was about to apply it to the tire an old man behind her hooted and started shouting something unintelligible in Portuguese.  She stopped and looked at him and went back to the task at hand.  

So he got out and came over and said to her saying in English this time: "that is water that you are about to put in your tire, you need to use the other hose!"  He was trying to be helpful and was not grumpy at all.

My appointment at the Portuguese consulate went smoothly except that, because some of my documentation mentioned Anne, the official asked for our marriage certificate.  Anne was able to scan and email it before my appointment with them was over.  The official was the same one who had handled Anne's application and she said with a smile that she remembered Anne well - so we were off to a good start from the begining.  Anne was touched at the compliments she paid her about her appearance on that day.

Sorted and labeled documents for the residence application

I will have to make one more trip to America to collect the temporary visa late in June but I’m heading back to Portugal in two weeks where I expect I’m going to be hanging paintings and photographs, putting my own stamp on the home-making process.