Olá amigos!
I hope you all had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We (Nick and I and many of our friends) had to attend language classes on both Thanksgiving day and the day after, so we had our second annual potluck Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday evening instead. It was fun and a nice break from the intense language program that some of us are taking. The good news is that those of us in the intense program have only 4.5 days left! We've had five big tests thus far, plus many daily diagnostic tests and even a few oral presentations that we had to prepare and deliver, with our final test scheduled for next Monday. I can already confirm that we will all pass and receive our A2 certificates! And yes, we will definitely be celebrating!
My pulmonologist in the national health services recently scheduled me for a breathing test. Had I known how comical it was going to be, I would have videotaped it. The technician conducting the tests spoke absolutely no English, and I was having a difficult time understanding her. Often, when you tell a Portuguese person that you can only speak a little bit of Portuguese, they continue speaking to you in Portuguese at their typical rapid pace. 😵💫 She proceeded to act out her instructions of inhaling, exhaling, blowing, etc. At one point, she was yelling "barriga, barriga" because she wanted me to blow hard all the way from my belly (a word I actually understood). Another test involved blowing into a tube while trying to keep a cloud on the screen from dropping to the ground before reaching a flag on the other side of the screen. It took me five tries to even understand what I was supposed to be doing, all the while we were both laughing out loud. But I will say that we were able to chat a bit in Portuguese, and I was able to tell her how long I've been here and a bit about my language class and my friends. She asked a lot of questions about me, which I was pretty well able to answer. I am not fluent however, so don't even assume that.
On January 9th our two year visas will expire. Though we're eligible for a 3 year extension, we need to make an appointment with the immigration service (AIMA), which is virtually impossible right now. The agency is so backlogged (400,000 applications pending) that they don't answer their phones, and so far, we haven't been able to reach anyone who can schedule an appointment for us. Showing up without an appointment is not allowed. At this point AIMA has given a blanket extension to everyone in our situation until June 30, 2025. Failure to get an extension could cause our bank account to be frozen, so we have to make it a daily process of trying to schedule an appointment. In the meantime, Portugal saw the biggest surge ever in google searches regarding immigrating to Portugal the day after the U.S. election. We're glad we got here when we did.
Portugal now has the best cheese in the world! At the 2024 World Cheese Awards, a small family-run cheese factory called Quijaria Quinta do Pomar, located in central Portugal, beat out 47 other countries with their buttery sheep's milk cheese, to win top honors. Unfortunately, trying to get your hands on any of their award winning cheese is futile at this point, but hopefully we'll get to try it one of these days.
In early November we took a trip to Lisboa for the weekend to see a concert. Since we were also celebrating our 39th anniversary, I booked a nice room at a 5-star hotel near the stadium, which thankfully was also located far from the recent protests that were taking place there. We made friends with the bartender in the hotel on our first evening, and he introduced me to a lovely gin called Monkey 47. Weird name, but a really nice, smooth gin!
Monkey 47 Gin
The hotel had specially designed carpeting made to look like the calçada portuguesa, which is the small stone pedestrian walkways which are often arranged in beautiful patterns.
