Musings on a Life Lived Well: Mary Lou's Portugal Journal #2: Our One-month Porto Anniversary

Much has happened since my first update upon moving to Porto. On Friday we will celebrate one month here. We are more settled in our apartment, learning to use local transportation (i.e. city buses and metro) and getting in our fare share of walking. My fitbit tells me we're averaging over 13,000 steps a day and last week we walked over 38 miles!

Many have asked if we were sweltering in the heatwave and/or near the fires that broke out here recently. Shortly after my first update a few weeks ago, we had three very hot days here. Porto normally has temperatures in the 70's and maybe low 80's in July however we had three days in the high 90's here, and to make matters worse, at the same time we were blanketed with smoke from the fires in the Algarve. Our skies were gray, the smoke was dreadful and we had all our fans on full blast, but had to keep the windows closed. We were not happy campers those three days. Since then the weather has been fabulous and the air has been clear.

Our new dryer arrived but a day late. Try calling to check on the delivery of anything here and you will get recorded messages in Portuguese of course, and though we are trying to learn the language, it's hard to decipher the messages so we had no idea whether or not it would be delivered as promised. Our landlord Nuno checked in with me to inquire whether it had been delivered and I explained our dilemma. After texting him a copy of the invoice he called on our behalf and later that evening he dropped by to let us know that it would be delivered the next day. Once it was delivered he again checked to see if it was installed correctly. He's been nothing but helpful to us and, by the way, he was very apologetic about the hot weather.

Our journey to becoming Portuguese residents (we're only halfway there, having been approved by the Portuguese Consulate in San Francisco but still awaiting our appointment with Immigration here) is at times baffling. More on that when we get clarification from our attorney next week. In the meantime we have a shipment of our household goods awaiting approval to ship. That entails quite a bit of time and work before our goods can even be placed on a ship. Two weeks ago we learned that we each needed an Atestado de Residencia, which must be obtained from our local Parish. Upon arriving at the Parish office a few blocks from here we attempted to communicate with the woman working there who speaks no English (and our Portuguese is very basic). Once she understood what forms we needed she attempted to explain what was required and thankfully she had a cheat sheet in English for us to read. It requires two local witnesses who live in this same Parish to sign our forms and allow us to take photos of their Citizen cards. Since we don't know anyone in this Parish our attorney suggested that we just go into local cafes and ask if people would sign our forms....not comfortable doing that! Nuno again came to the rescue. He has a cousin who lives very close to us so we left our forms in her mailbox. She and a friend each witnessed our forms and gave us copies of their cards. A few days later we returned to the Parish office and the same woman was working. The moment she saw me she smiled, pulled out a stack of papers and started going through them while saying "MaryLou, MaryLou, MaryLou" (imagine that with an accent) until she found our forms. One more thing accomplished!

My MacBook laptop was driving me nuts, constantly throwing me off our network. I took it to a repair shop nearby and Domingos found nothing wrong with my laptop and had never heard of this problem before. Then I posted a note on a private expat Porto group on FB to see if anyone could help. I can't begin to describe the number of people who tried to help me, sending me all kinds of tricks to try. Nothing worked. Then I heard from Domingos again... he had another person come into his shop right after me who had the exact same issue. So Domingos kept in touch with me on WhatsApp as he tried to help us both (and he charged us nothing). Days later Domingos contacted me to let me know that the other customer had found the fix and he wanted to share it with me. He walked me through logging into our router (who knew you could do that) and changing one setting on it that apparently MacBooks don't like. Problem solved. And he checked back with me a few days later to make sure it was still working.

Azulejos tiles at Sao Bento
train station in Porto

One day recently we ordered an Uber to take us to the downtown train station, Sao Bento (I posted some pictures of it on Instagram...you must see it). On the way there we were chatting with our driver and told him that we had recently moved here. He was so excited for us that he made a detour and took us to a spot overlooking the river that he said most residents don't even know exists. After getting out to take in the view he then took us to our destination. Who does that?

As we've been settling in to our new life in a new country we have been learning how to handle the mundane things like going to the post office to buy a large envelope and mail something and get tracking, finding a dentist who speaks English because I broke a crown, and getting packages delivered (can be quite maddening if it's one particular shipper). I was fortunate to find a good dentist nearby and had my initial consultation, got a temporary crown and will go back next week for my final. The post office clerk was so helpful and even gave me an envelope instead of having to buy a package of them. It's these little things, the meeting of people who want to help you, that make us love this place.

Over the weekend we took a bus trip to Braga, a 2,000+ year old town about an hour northeast of us. We caught an express bus (think

Braga's beautiful pedestrian
main street

Greyhound only nicer) that got us there in an hour and cost us $12/each roundtrip. In Braga we stayed at a lovely little hotel in the downtown historic district and had a wonderful time walking the area and enjoying great meals. As we were walking along one of the little side streets on Sunday we heard music and came upon some musicians playing traditional Portuguese music and all these people just dancing in the street. I posted a video on Instagram. Then yesterday we took a city bus in Braga up to Bom Jesus, a major tourist attraction/church that sits upon a hill overlooking the city. It was built in the 1700's and is quite spectacular. Initially we took a little trolley that takes you all the way to the top of the hill where the church is located. The views were amazing. However, there are also stairs you can take to get to the top....if you are in great shape. Once we took the trolley back to the bottom I decided that I at least wanted to climb the stairs to the initial landing where all the white stairs can be seen. Pictures explain this more than my trying to describe it....again see my Instagram postings. All I can say is that I climbed 330 stairs just to get to the initial landing where the white stairs begin. I wasn't about to try climbing the additional 577 white stairs. We returned to Porto last night and slept well from exhaustion.

And one more interesting tidbit.....it appears that rental properties here provide a mop and bucket....seriously. I see them in many photos of apartment listings and we have one in our apartment....in fact ours came with bottles of cleaners for tile and wood floors. Cute.

That's all for now! I hope that you are all staying cool.