movingtoportugal

Apologies for my absence last week – it was a rather unsettled week that threw a few curve-balls in our direction!

First of all we both came down with a nasty flu-bug – I guess we were due an illness of some kind, having been very lucky on our travels between London and Portugal so far.

Being ill forced upon me a life-change that had been long overdue: I decided it was time to give up smoking – something I knew I had to do before the low cost of cigarettes in Portugal

Lifesaver - the electronic cigarette

turned me into a lifetime chain smoker. I now have behind me eight days of really rather horrific “cold turkey” and am in possession of an “electronic cigarette” to give me a blast of nicotine in an emergency.

So, between flu and cold turkey, blogging moved rather far down my list of priorities last week!

Another reason for a slightly grumpy temperament last week was the Algarve in August. We had never been here in August before and I may even go far as saying I would rather not be this time next year. It was pretty horrendous.

Restaurants that are usually a pleasure to dine in became shambolic. Supermarkets were like Christmas Eve in London and we spent time in traffic queues for the first time since we moved to Portugal.

We had been told to expect it but we weren’t really prepared for it – it was a lot busier than July. If the first time we had visited the Algarve had been in August I would say there is a good chance we never would have returned!

And then, almost as quick as we had noticed all of these people, they all disappeared. This weekend they all, collectively, buggered off again – restoring the calm and serenity of our little town. I am looking forward to again swimming in the pool without having to dive underneath a film of sun-cream, and being able to buy prawns without having to queue for half an hour. Listen to me, the grumpy new “local.”

When we originally moved to Portugal, now ten months ago, our plan was to spend a year in the Algarve and then a year a bit nearer Lisbon to decide which lifestyle we preferred. At various points we have become convinced that the Algarve is right for us, making a Lisbon experiment unnecessary. After an Algarve August we are back to considering trying out somewhere a bit nearer the city next year.

The best advice we read while preparing for this move was to rent for the first couple of years – it gives us the flexibility to change our minds and experiment – and isn’t that what life should be all about?

I’ll be back next week, hopefully as a longer term non-smoker and slightly less grumpy with it!

Technorati Tags: algarve august, e cig, electronic cigarette, giving up smoking, lisbon, Moving abroad

Time really does fly.

Easyjet

Each time we land back in Portugal after a quick work-related trip back to the UK, we always count how many weeks it is until the next time we have to join the Easyjet “speedy boarding scrum.”

However many weeks it is, it always seems to only be five minutes before once again we have that sinking, melancholy feeling that always hits us around ten days before we have a trip back to the UK booked.

Once we get there it is fine – a whirlwind tour usually involving several different clients, a few friends, a corresponding quantity of city-sized hangovers and a couple of nice family visits.

Then, before we know it we have landed back in Faro again, ready to endure the first couple of days back in Portugal which always seem strangely unsettling while we get back into the flow of life in our new home.

In an ideal world we would pop back for work with less frequency than we have to now, but it is part of the deal, and having to spend just five weeks out of 52 in the UK is a lot better than the other way around! Being there and getting on with it is actually the easy part – the nasty bit is the few days before we go, when we suddenly start to appreciate everything about our life in Portugal all the more – rather like the sad end of a holiday.

Anyway, each trip back presents us more contrasts between our old and new lives and serves as a bit of an appraisal as to how well our move to Portugal is going.

This time the main thing I noticed was how miserable the average stranger looks in the UK – all the time I spent pounding the London pavements between clients, the words of Dizzee

Dizzee Rascal - accurate about London

Rascal kept playing through my mind: “take you down to London city, where the attitude’s bad and the weather is shitty…” accurate and slightly depressing!

Dwelling on the negative for just a moment longer, something about the UK we just cannot get our heads around now is the opening hours of shops. At shopping centres in Portugal, shops opening daily until 11pm is commonplace, yet in a city of 8 million people the doors are closing at 5.30pm.

Surely someone is missing a trick if the shops open at the precise times when most people are at work and close as soon as they would get a chance to visit them? One night per week of “late night shopping” until 8pm is a bit of a token gesture and surely in the peak of the summer, 8pm would mean, at best, “early evening shopping.” Next time the UK enters recession, opening shops when people are free to visit them could be a good way to boost the economy!

Before those reading from the UK tire of my whining, I must point out that this time round there were several aspects of our quick visit back we did enjoy immensely: a roast beef dinner, Thai food and shopping in big, well stocked supermarkets.

Most importantly though, we enjoyed a good helping of English banter. Conversations we have in Portugal can be quite repetitive – with expats they tend to be of the “how long have you been here? How do you make a living?” variety, and those with our Portuguese friends are restricted by our limited grasp of the language. It was a real pleasure to chat with people close to us in our native language – we do miss the quick, cutting English wit.

Home sweet home

One wonderful surprise in these conversations with friends and family, is that we now consistently refer to Portugal as “home,” without thinking, rather than England. I see it as an important part of the process that our subconscious minds believe here to be home…

So, the trip complete, we are back HOME in Portugal. As I said earlier in the post, there is generally a couple of unsettled days of “re-entry,” not helped this time by the fact we were not quite prepared for HOW busy the Algarve gets in August, even “up the quiet end” like we are.

As predicted by a couple of expat friends earlier in the year, we have now had our fill of tourists and are ready for them to disperse and give us back our roads, beaches and supermarkets.

Other than that it is lovely to be home, somewhere where the sun is shining and we have time to eat healthy food at a slow enough pace to avoid heartburn. After nine months we are starting to see the good and bad in our past and present lives, but we really do prefer this one

Photo credits: Autodance1234, Chaerani, Arpingstone

Technorati Tags: algarve in august, dizzee rascal, london, Moving abroad, moving to portugal

It was a few days ago, sitting in one of our favourite restaurants, Sabores De Ria in Cabanas, that it struck us that in some ways we are becoming “more Portuguese” after living here for nine months.

Given that the discussion was prompted by the fact we were enjoying a plate of prawns and sucking the juices from the heads as well as enjoying the meat of the prawns, we decided that in some ways we are indeed “going native.”

Here is a list of a seven ways we are becoming more “local”…..

1. As previously stated, we now suck the heads of prawns. Disgusting to some I am sure, but very tasty indeed.

Prawns

2. Still on the subject of food, our mouths seem to have developed the ability to hunt down small stray fish bones and move them to the front for discreet removal.

3. We now insist on parking as near to the hypermarket entrance as possible despite there being plenty of easier parking spaces a little further away.

4. We (finally) walk more slowly than we did in London – it’s hot.

5. It now makes perfect sense to us that people do a lot of their shopping when Brits would consider it to be “night time” – it’s hot.

6. It is fair to say we drink wine like it is water – thankfully it doesn’t cost much more than water. We also struggle to understand why anyone would order anything OTHER THAN wine to accompany a meal.

7. We are starting to get irritated by tourists – just the odd quiet five minutes in the communal pool that we have to ourselves the rest of the year would be splendid

Not a complete transformation but some early signs. I wonder if we will be complaining that it’s cold by November when the temperatures are down to the low 20s?! Time will tell.

We have a run of a lot of work and family visits coming up over the next week or so, so I may be a little quiet for a while – I’ll be back really soon

Photo Credit: Glen MacLarty

Technorati Tags: becoming a local, going native, prawn heads, tourists

My wife and I are both committed water-babies and we love being so close to the ocean. If, in years to come, we end up anywhere other than Portugal, I will make sure we don’t end up somewhere land-locked again.

We are delighted that, even after swimming in the sea at least twice a week for several months, we never experience the same conditions. The colour of the sea and sky is different every

Beach - I Love the Sea

time and the size and style of the waves offers constant variety too.

You get still days when the water is crystal clear and tinged with shades of green – sometimes on these days fish brush your legs as you paddle around in the shallows. You get days when gentle waves keep you bobbing around contentedly in the sun – ideal for spending hours sitting on something inflatable.

Days like last Saturday are probably my favourite – days when huge waves can knock you off your feet as you get into the water and it’s a very pleasant work-out just endeavouring to stay still – every wave giving you the choice: swim under it, swim over it, or let it take you towards the shore, ready to be knocked over by the next one.

Hours spent in a glorious sunny state of fear-tinged excitement – activity that costs nothing and is healthy too (or at least until you start on the caiprinhas at the beach bar!)

Sometimes guests ask us if we think one day we’ll get bored with days on the beach. I don’t think we will. Sometimes we take a Frisbee, sometimes a wake-board, sometimes an Ipod and other days we just give in and buy an English newspaper to read! Each of these beach days feel different to us, and that’s before we even start on picnics, walks and hiring kayaks.

No, I don’t think I will ever get bored of the beach..and if I do, I’ll go to a different one

Image Credit: photographar

Technorati Tags: beach. algarve beach, portugal beach, sea

I promised to some readers a while back that I would post an update on our situation with regards to making our move to Portugal all official. For those who didn’t hear about the fun and games we had the threads can be found here:

Red Tape in Portugal
Portugal Red Tape Rant

I am pleased to say some progress has been made! We are now officially Portuguese residents, albeit currently only for one year as no-one at our local camara (town-hall,) seemed to be able to get their head around the fact that we live here in Portugal but make all our money in the UK via remote working.

The residency was more complicated that we had been led to believe. In the end we needed to have a form from our local village council signed by two residents of the village – an interesting job at the time when we didn’t KNOW two residents of the village. A big thank you goes out to the man in the bar and the lady in the shop!

After we had this form all we needed was passports and tenancy papers and we were good to go. I have made this sound a lot easier than it really was – it required several visits to various government buildings, including an extra two trips when we discovered that Tavira camara had managed to get our address wrong on the first residencia certificate we were given.

Our next task is getting this certificate renewed when our year is up. This involves us getting a form called a “workers S1,” from the UK (now in progress) which proves to Portugal that

Portugal Red Tape

we are still paying national insurance in the UK and therefore covered by a reciprocal arrangement. I think we may need to take a native Portuguese speaker when we come to do this part!

Health cover was next. Until we have our workers S1, we don’t fancy our chances of registering with the local health centre, so if we need a doctor we will go and pay 40 euros at the local private surgery, something a lot of people do anyway. We have also taken out private healthcare for emergencies.

Driving licences are a bit of a minefield, and one that the majority of the expats we speak to choose to ignore, but we have always been determined to be 100% official and respectful of the local laws.

As soon as you become resident in Portugal, or as soon as you no longer live at the address on your UK licence, your licence is technically invalid. It needs to be replaced with a Portuguese licence or supplemented with a piece of paper from the IMTT (Portuguese equivalent of the DVLA,) which makes it legal again.

This part of the red tape was the easiest at all. Twenty minutes at Faro IMTT resulted in the correct form being issued. It is slightly odd that despite having a photocopier onsite they insist you go to a small kiosk down the road to get the documents copied, but if it had been 100% straightforward it wouldn’t have felt right!

So, for now at least, we are completely official and with a bit of time to sort out our taxation situation, the next part of the battle. Anyone going through these processes is advised to take it slow and try to treat any tiny bit of progress as a significant step forward – you do get there eventually.

If anyone is doing any of the bits we have been successful with and would like any advice, please leave a comment and we will try to help.

Photo Credit: Kozumel

Technorati Tags: Moving abroad, moving to portugal, red tape, residencia, residency

Once again some visitors have left and home feels strangely empty – we are, however, getting a bit more used to the transition!

This time we had some family over and spent a wonderful week doing the tourist bit in the local area.

As well as our trip to Zoomarine, which I wrote about in a previous post, we have visited beaches, stopped at numerous cafes and restaurants for sustenance and experimented with two new modes of transport….

A pedalo on the sea, complete with an inbuilt slide, was tremendous fun and a whole lot less straightforward than you would expect! When you take into account waves, currents and everything being extremely slippery, it is a wonder that we returned from the experience with only minor injuries – all completely worth it for being able to splash into the sea in heat.

Even more exciting was our experience on the electric mopeds they currently have for rent on the seafront at Cabanas. These machines have pedals so are ridden like a bike but also

Electric Moped - fun

have an electric motor and a couple of compartments to store shopping. As they are classified as bikes, you are allowed to ride them on the Ecovia cycle routes, keeping you away from the Portuguese traffic.

This is a fantastic and very eco-friendly means of transport and ideal for little trips to the local shops where we live…we are looking into the possibilities of getting two of our own and look forward to a more extended trial of the bikes having booked a half-day on them later in the week.

Pego Do Inferno

As always it made us appreciate where we live all the more having people to share it with us – a particular highlight being the beautiful waterfall of Pego Do Inferno, where we all swam in the cool water, and a couple of our number worked up the courage to swing from a rope by the waterfall into the water below. This magical place is slightly off the tourist track and so good to visit in the summer.

We have certainly noticed it is VERY busy around these parts now – some beaches, such as Montegordo and Praia Verde are ludicrously busy, and when we visited the latter yesterday we had to queue long enough to get out of the car park to warrant a game of “I-Spy” in the car! We have identified one local beach that gets largely bypassed by the worst of the crowds, and I’m afraid I am unwilling to disclose which one it is

So, once again, back to work and reality after sharing another holiday with some more visitors – time to get the house clean and tidy, go and see how much beer is left in the fridge, and look forward to the next arrivals. Happy days.

Technorati Tags: ecovia algarve, electric moped, holidays, pego do inferno, praia verde, swimming, swimming in waterfall

We have family visiting us at the moment and they kindly treated us to a day at Zoomarine Algarve.

Zoomarine is a sea-life based theme park near Albufeira, with an aquarium, water and fairground rides along with various animal shows.

I’ll start my report with a word about dolphins. Until I mentioned on my Facebook wall that I had been to a dolphin show which attracted several comments, I was unaware that a lot of people see these shows as being inhumane.

Zoomarine Algarve - Dolphins

Now I can’t say for certain, as I struggle to speak Portuguese, let alone dolphin, but the affinity the trainers seemed to have with these dolphins was both touching and awe-inspiring. One section when the dolphins pulled the trainers through the water by their feet, following by lots of affectionate cuddles with the dolphins truly brought a tear to the eye. I must say that from what I saw, it certainly appeared that the dolphins and trainers shared a lot of love and the dolphins seemed to love performing.

I may be wrong about all this, and it may be that other places like this do not treat the dolphins correctly, but everything I saw at Zoomarine seemed to be about caring for the animals and the environment – if it IS inhumane they hide it well – anyone with evidence to the contrary, please tell me and I won’t go back!

Anyway, back to the point. After the dolphin show, which really blew us away, we had a good look round and went on the basic but fun fairground rides, including a big wheel which terrified my dear wife!

The aquarium wasn’t the biggest one I have ever seen but was enjoyable – I can spend hours happily looking at fish. We also went on the water rides and spent a while sitting by the inviting, but hugely busy swimming pools.

Food was the typical theme-park junk food, but, very surprisingly, sold at prices that weren’t a huge rip-off – a very welcome break from the norm.

All in all, a lovely day with the family at a place that didn’t rip you off, and accommodated the crowds fairly well, aside from the scrum just before the dolphin show – this isn’t the place for adrenaline filled theme park rides but for a great day out with a lot of variety I do recommend Zoomarine.

Photo credit: The Admiralty

Technorati Tags: dolphin shows, dolphins, zoomarine, zoomarine algarve, zoomarine dolphins, zoomarine portugal

Clapham Junction - Not Missed!

After my slightly negative post on Friday, it’s time to put my positive head on again to start the week. Also, I am either getting more used the weather or it has cooled down a bit, so no moaning from me today!

So to start my week filled with positivity. Here are….seven positive ways life has changed since we moved to Portugal:

1. My most frequently used method of public transportation is now a small boat that takes me to the local beach and back, sometimes with a light spray of sea cooling us down as we go. This certainly beats London Underground and South West Trains.

2. We now start each day with a drink on a sunny balcony, rather than in a car, hating every other human-being on the A3.

3. I often have time to have lunch at a table – rather than lunch which is encased in pastry and eaten whilst walking and checking emails on a handheld device.

4. Swimming is now something we do almost daily rather than something we just do on holiday.

5. Our main method of cooking is outside on a barbecue rather than the wok in the Chinese takeaway down the road.

6. We look tanned and healthy, rather than drawn and anaemic.

7. We get to wear shorts and flip flops every day without the risk of coming home with trench-foot.

As always, for sense of balance, here are a few things that aren’t quite as good.

1. We have a LOT less money.

2. We now frequently buy meat that we discover is off when we get it home and have to throw it away.

3. We have to be a lot more organised in terms of making sure we have what we need at home – no 24 hour Tesco’s for us any-more!

It’s really not bad at all. My little whinge last week should only be viewed as a blip

Have a good week.

Image credit: Martyn Davies

Technorati Tags: beach, commuting, living in portugal, london, swimming

It’s time for a little confession. I have been reluctant to admit to this but it is important I give readers planning to move to Portugal a fair and honest assessment of our time here including the good and bad – so here goes:

This past week we have been struggling, a little tiny bit, with the heat. There you go, I said it.

Hot, hot, hot

Having complained about the English climate for years, it feels awfully ungrateful to complain in any way about a constant blue sky, temperatures in the low 30s every single day and not so much as a hint of rain, but the relentless heat does have its drawbacks.

It’s important to emphasise that when we have friends here and are spending days by the pool, in and out of the sea and relaxing on beaches, the heat isn’t a problem at all. It is more the times when we have work and chores to do when it is a bit of a struggle.

Mainly it is the nights. When for weeks it rarely goes below 25C in the middle of the night, sleeping becomes a problem, and even if you accept a huge bill for air conditioning, it is not a perfect solution. Air conditioned air is not particularly good for you, and if you inadvertently fall asleep with it on, you make up with a sore throat and not feeling particularly tip-top.

It is reassuring to see that it doesn’t just seem to be us. We walked into town the other day and there seemed to be a general air of lethargy amongst everyone from the Portuguese to the tourists. It is just a lot more effort to get anything done.

All this said, every day we feel more used to it, and we are working to wean ourselves off the air conditioning, relying more on fans and a water spray.

Watching the UK weather from afar in the past week – going from heat-wave and then back to grey and rainy reminds me what we left behind, and it was that sudden disappearance of summer that used to really get me down. I certainly wouldn’t want to swap back, even though I do have a secret desire to see a day of rain at some point!

Have a lovely sunny weekend.

Technorati Tags: algarve weather, hot weather, it's getting hot in here, sunshine

As someone who frequently bemoaned the lack of individual shops in England when we lived there, Portugal is a bit of a treat when it comes to shopping.

We always used to say the only cities in England that offered anything better than the dull identikit high street were Cambridge, Brighton and York. A recent visit to Norwich would make me inclined to add that to the small list, but generally, shopping in the UK was a rather dull experience.

Here in the Algarve, browsing the shops is far more rewarding. There are all manner of small shops, some of which have clearly been in families for generations and seem to

Portugal Shops - Butchers

be selling the same quirky mix of products they were probably selling decades ago.

True, a lot of these shops sell typical tourist tat, but in this hot weather you can’t have enough inflatable dolphins and wakeboards to play with. In amongst the tat there are some lovely craft shops, delis and wine shops, as well as plenty of privately owned boutiques and shoe shops.

Best of all though are the quirky shops, usually run by wrinkly eccentrics and selling some of the oddest mixtures of products you will ever see in one place.

There is a shop in our local village that my wife has named “the magical mystery shop.” As well as cigarettes, lottery tickets, wine and spirits (but strangely, not soft drinks or beer,) this shop sells the strangest mix of household and hardware items. On one recent trip my wife came back with a bottle of ginginha (Portuguese cherry liqueur,) a lightbulb and some tweezers – a strange mix.

On my last visit to this shop, tucked away up a corner I found a small bink bicycle, a pile of barbecues, a used outside floodlight, and an inkjet printer that appeared to date back to the late 80s. It is a strangely enchanting little place.

People wanting a more modern shopping experience in the Algarve can always visit the huge shopping centres which are just like American malls, but to shop exclusively there would deprive them of some of the quirky finds in the towns themselves, not to mention the fact that some of the best cheeses and chorizos you can find come from these little independent places.

The last shop that deserves a mention in this post has to be a small butchers that we found in Tavira. Along with the small selection of meat they also had, on sale, a large pile of toilet rolls. This combination of offerings did serve to make us a little uncertain of the meat on sale, it has to be said!

Image credit: Paul Keller

Technorati Tags: algarve shops, brighton, norwich, portugal shops, shopping, shpping in portugal, uk high street