Highlights (Andrew)

• Reclaiming our time. As we settle into our new lives time has truly begun to feel like something we have near total control over. We’ve both been voraciously reading, taking leisurely walks through town, and frittering away an afternoon playing board games is becoming commonplace. For most of our lives free time has almost always come with either a feeling of impending doom (great vacation but we go back to work in two days…) or of a forced choice (we can play a game, watch a movie, or finish that chore we’ve been putting off with these last precious weekend hours). This isn’t to say we never enjoyed every bit of life we could, just that there was a negative “extra” attached. We have both felt that “extra” slipping away. Obviously the house still has to be cleaned, bills have to be paid, and blog posts have to be written… but now those are the bits of life that have to be squeezed in and not the other way around.
• Speaking Portuguese. Our longest conversation with a person who only speaks Portuguese has been with the proprietor’s daughter at our local cafe. She was attracted to our table because we brought Basil with us and he is pretty cute. We talked to her for about twenty minutes about pets (she has two turtles and a bird, her mother will not allow cats or dogs). Both sides of the conversation were supplemented by some pictures but overall it was great to force ourselves into a basic convo using our future primary language.
• Making friends.
  • I’ve mentioned that there is a board game shop quite close to our house. I had been told that the owner encourages you to bring your own games to play so we dragged Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion to the store. The owner speaks semi-fluent English and quickly pointed out that he prefers less complicated games but that we were welcome to use one of the tables. Just after setting things up two of the owner’s friends stopped in and we all talked about our favorite board games before splitting up to play our respective games. After both tables finished their game we all joined together for a five player game and had a blast – we are planning on heading back for more fun soon.
  • We continue to feel increasingly accepted in our community and hope to build friendships once we can communicate more consistently. Neighborhood grandmothers pet our dogs and show off their cats, one of our favorite grandmothers greets us with handshakes and cheek kisses, many vizinhos (neighbors) greet us with bom dia (good morning), boa tarde (good afternoon), and boa noite (good night).
  • The property owner of our building has been so generous and helpful, we have a dinner outing planned so we can all get to know each other better. Our real estate agent also falls into this category, she has been a huge help in our move here. When we find the time to visit her hometown, dinner is in the works there too. She is also an animal lover and we have had many exchanges about our respective furry kids.
  • We’ve met with Darmel (an expat from Texas who moved to Olhão three days before us) multiple times. It’s been fun working to problem solve some of the challenges in our new lives together. She introduced us to Karen and Jack who moved here 9 months before us and we ran into them a second time on my birthday when we found out that I share a birthdate with Jack (and we both randomly decided to celebrate at the same restaurant). Karen likes board games and Jack likes to read so we’ve begun chatting about some of those basic commonalities.
• We are officially living in Portugal! Now that both of our passports with the visas in them have been stamped we are no longer just tourists. We both have follow up appointments in October (Andrew) and November (Michelle) which will complete the process of us having extended residency, but for now we are approved to stay in Portugal until those appointments happen.

Challenges (Michelle)

• We are exhausted by administrative paperwork. The San Francisco Portuguese consulate seems to take forever to do most things. We finally received our Portuguese visas after 99 days, which is very slow compared to most processing times. A huge thanks to the new residents of our old home on Sarah Way, they received the visas and kept them safe for us until our friend Tommy could retrieve them and ship them to my parents’ house in Minnesota (Tommy thank you for not holding our visas hostage).
  • I traveled to Minnesota the first week of July to pick up Zoe and our visas. While I was in Minnesota, I also sent requests for two sets of customs paperwork to the San Francisco consulate in order to import our belongings without fees. I sent the paperwork on 7/6, they received it on 7/11, cashed our two checks on 7/28 and we STILL haven’t received the paperwork we need for customs.
  • Our customs agent has been a dream, very patient and understanding with our struggles, he also doesn’t understand why we don’t have the paperwork because it “usually takes a week”. At this point our property is already at the port in Lisbon, going through customs without all of the appropriate paperwork and we won’t be able to avoid a hefty import fee.
• COVID strikes. At the beginning of August, Andrew traveled to Florida to visit his brother Rob and to get the correct visa/passport stamped upon reentry into Portugal (we initially came into Portugal with our secondary passports which didn’t contain our visas). Unfortunately Andrew brought COVID back to us. I was hoping to avoid it, but my hopes were dashed. Andrew was sick for about a week, and while I have recovered from most of it, at the two week mark I still have some lingering head cold symptoms.
• UGH – will we ever be able to cook at home? Andrew purchased our gas cooktop and electric oven combination on 6/22, it was delivered on 7/5, and it wasn’t functional until 7/25. Things work a bit differently here and our real estate agent took care of arranging hookups for most of our utilities. There were miscommunications about whether the cooktop was natural gas or bottled gas (our fault, not hers). She made several calls but had little success and eventually Andrew just walked to our local Galp which sells gas.
  • The local Galp store in Olhão referred us to the regional Galp store in Faro (the “capital of the Algarve”, just west of us), which is a short 10 minute train ride. We took our first train ride, finally found the municipal offices which are on the top level of a large mall in Faro and they advised us that our stove needs to be hooked up before they could assist us.
  • Our lovely landlord Janine told us that when using gas appliances we would also need an inspection prior to hookup. After weeks of frustration, Janine came through for us by recommending a local oven installer/inspector, and she also assisted with translation (communicating technical requests and answering engineering questions are way beyond our language abilities at this point). The grand total for labor, installation, inspection, and the gas canister was €94!
• Where do we fit in here? There are several expats in Olhão and they have been friendly and outgoing, but our primary goal has always been to learn the language, customs, and culture and try to live as a local would. We don’t want to recreate our lives in the U.S. on the cheap here, we want to embrace a new way of life, adventures, and new perspectives. Our language skills are not at a point where we can have easy back and forth conversations yet, so sitting with locals (which we try to do most days) usually involves exchanging a few sentence and mostly a lot of listening. We are better at reading Portuguese, so when the news channel is on at Café Bianca, we can follow most of what is going on via the headlines. When it comes to the speedy verbal exchanges between other patrons at the Café, we know we are missing most of the tea about drama, gossip and the microcosm that is our immediate bairro.

Things we didn’t know… (Both)

• Michelle: quite a few men pee outside in public here. I have been on quite a few hikes and am from rural Minnesota, so peeing outdoors isn’t a new thing to me, but doing so in a city setting is a new experience. Maybe the consumption of copious amounts of beer and people walking everywhere is a combination that makes this more common here. I definitely feel less concerned about where my dogs pee outside.
• Andrew: The predominant language seen on clothing is English. Sometimes sayings like “I’m the life of the party” or “Blessed”. State tourism shirts, like “Ohio! A great place to live!!”, “I partied in Lansing Michigan”, or any number of NYC slogans. Brands make common appearances, Coke products, Nike, Pokemon, Levi’s and other common ones are prevalent. These often seem to be unironically worn by people who speak little to no English. I have a theory that various places send excess clothing here to be sold off between €2-10, probably recouping the cost of production.
• Michelle: We have become dessert people. Living back in the U.S. we would always have chocolate (for me) and sour gummies (for Andrew) in our pantry. We would get donuts every now and again, but if there was a course we would most commonly skip at a restaurant, dessert was it. There are desserts we never could have imagined in cases in every café here and we keep trying them. Most are delightful and many are custard forward. There are tortes and cakes and pastries. Sometimes we make special trips to cafés just for coffee and a dessert in the afternoon between lunch and dinner or post dinner.
• Andrew: Two men spend inordinate amounts of time in their car, but they aren’t homeless. They go in and out of a nearby building regularly. One is in his 30-40’s, the other maybe 65 years old. I may have mentioned before that it isn’t uncommon to see people sitting in their cars, especially on very hot days. But this is an enigma that confounds me every day since they park right on a main street that we walk the dogs past multiple times a day.