Mary Lou's Portugal Journal #39

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Greetings all and I hope this finds you in good health and ready for the holidays.

Today, December 11th, there's a nationwide general strike that is affecting almost every major service, including transportation (the metro, buses, trains, and airlines), hospitals and medical professionals, schools, courts and more. Many businesses/services will also be closed in solidarity with workers. This is all due to proposed legislation that appears to be very anti-workers rights. Fingers crossed that this hurts our mini trump, Andre Ventura, who is running for President in January and who heads the extreme far right party Chega, because he supports this proposed law. Portugal hasn't had a strike of this size since 2013. Anyway, I thought I had better get busy and finish writing this email that I started over a week ago.

I had hoped to start this with the great news that we had finally received approval for our three-year renewal of our residency. Alas, that is not the case. Although we each saw an "approved" message on the immigration portal on November 16th, yesterday that message was replaced with "your application is awaiting a decision." Bloody hell, this truly is insane and shows what an inept immigration department we have in Portugal. In the meantime, thousands more people are applying for visas/residency (up 60% from a year ago) and, newer residents who arrived in the past two years, almost 33,000 of them, have been able to successfully apply for their three-year renewals digitally and have already received their new cards. Meanwhile we're in the group that arrived three+ years ago and aren't allowed to renew digitally. I'm sure I sound like a broken record, month after month complaining about this, but it really is the most f'd up system ever.

On a lighter note, we enjoyed two back-to-back Thanksgiving Feasts in November. The evening before Thanksgiving we attended.a lovely turkey dinner with all the trimmings with 70+ people through an organization to which we belong. The caterer did a fantastic job with the turkey in particular. We met a delightful couple from Sarasota, FL who recently moved to Porto, Richard and Liz. Richard is actually from London originally and was a drummer back in the day. Then on Thanksgiving day we joined friends Cagla and Bob for the third year in a row, along with some other friends, to again enjoy yet another Thanksgiving meal. Nick was in charge of cooking the turkey this year, and it was delicious. He had to order a whole, fresh turkey from the butcher because a) frozen whole turkeys aren't available here and b) grocery stores don't carry whole turkeys, only parts and c) the butcher has to place an order for a freshly killed bird. I will say that a fresh turkey is much more flavorful than a frozen one. Days before, Nick and I noticed big ads on almost all the bus stops indicating that a large grocery chain, Continente, was offering whole roasted turkeys (peru assado) by advance order only, with a beautiful photo of a roasted turkey on the sign. At first I thought that they must be trying to appeal to the Americans in Portugal, or, that they were alerting Portuguese people to place an order for Christmas dinner, because turkey is considered a Christmas tradition here ... but then something else struck me ... ovens here are smaller than what you have in the states. I think you can order a whole roasted turkey because a whole turkey likely won't fit in many ovens here. Nick had to spatchcock ours in order to cook it. Nevertheless, we enjoyed two wonderful meals with good friends.

Thanksgiving dinner at Cagla and Bob's

A few days later we hosted some new friends, Stephanie and Alex, for my homemade Pozole. They were so kind to bring me some cans of Ortega mild chiles on their recent trip back to Virginia because those chiles are definitely not available here. In exchange for their kindness, I fixed a nice dinner of my favorite Pozole dish. Hint, hint to any future travelers coming to Porto 😄.

This will be the first Christmas we actually spend together in Porto: During our first year we traveled back to the states, the following year we spent in London, last year I went to the states but Nick stayed behind, which I will never do again. Even though he didn't care, it made me feel awful. We have many activities with friends lined up for the rest of the month. In my next update I will post photos of the world's largest Santa, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. On Saturday we're taking a trip on a vintage Christmas train to the town of Águeda, where this giant resides. According to my hairdresser, Águeda is also home to the world's smallest Santa, which can only be seen through a microscope. Not sure I will be able to include photos of that one! And, of course, I'm looking forward to attending the Christmas Market there as well.

Finally, while I could write a huge piece on how much I hate Cheetolini, but I think I've made that clear previously. Every day is more appalling than the previous. I will end with this quote: "If your country opens a Department of War and closes the Department of Education, then you live in a shithole country."

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays to all!

Adeus, abraços e beijos,

MaryLou