movingtoportugal

It’s hard to believe that in just ten days time we will have been living in Portugal for a year. The time has flown past in a wonderful whirlwind of barbecues, wine and seemingly endless Easyjet flights to and from the UK for work trips.

A year on, I can genuinely say we have no regrets about making the move. It certainly hasn’t all been plain sailing, and although we have now experienced first-hand all the different seasons, we still have plenty of “firsts” to come…..our first tax returns and our first Portuguese car purchase being just two that make me shudder a little bit.

Recently though, we have started to realise how far we have come. Arriving back from working in London last week was the first time I didn’t experience a few unsettled days on our return to Portugal. Here is undoubtedly home now, and the homesick “what have we done?” moments that used to be quite frequent seem to be a thing of the past.

Salad on Altura beach in late October

Some more family members have completed their move over here in the last couple of weeks as well, and knowing the answers to some of their questions as new arrivals makes us realise we have actually learned rather a lot, even though along the way it hasn’t always felt like we were learning that much!

The same applies to our Portuguese. We have been far more slack than we intended, but can now catch the jist of the odd news story on the radio and understand a tiny bit of conversations—again, progress we have made without really noticing we were making it.

So, all in all we have little to complain about at the moment. The weather has been perfect since our return from the UK. When summer finishes in the Algarve, what you get next is far more like another spring than an autumn, which makes this seasonally-affected blogger a very happy man

Readers of Food and Wine Portugal will know that we decided last week to have a go at Weightwatchers, and I am proud to say that I have managed to lose 4 pounds of the weight gained by excessive consumption of clams, wine and custard tarts over the summer. A very positive result, although I have to confess that the sight of someone slurping a plate of fresh cockles, swimming in olive oil and butter, was almost heart breaking as we headed to the sands of Altura on Saturday with our packed lunch of salad (with a carefully calorie-counted portion of croutons.)

Even so, we intend to stick with it for a little while, if only to leave some room for some planned overindulgence as we approach our first big family Christmas in the Algarve. Rest assured though, that I didn’t move to the Algarve in order to ABSTAIN from eating cockles and clams!

That’s about it for now. Stay tuned over the next few days for the second in my series of articles exploring the costs of living here in Portugal-this time focussing on the work situation. Have a great week.

Technorati Tags: algarve beaches, altura, clams, cockles, dieting, living in portugal, moving to portugal, settling into a new country, weightwatchers

Algarve Banana Tree

As promised last week, today we have a guest post from a good friend who visited us last week. Our guest plans to move abroad some day so her visit was as much a fact-finding trip as a holiday – weighing up whether or not Portugal is somewhere she may one day like to live.

As someone who has been thinking about leaving the UK for a while now, going to see friends who have made that big leap and moved to Portugal was a great place to start. Having people who can show you some of Portugal’s best hotspots was definitely rewarding. I did look at the week as a holiday but at the same time everything I did made me ask myself, could I do this all year round?

Once I got to my friends’ place, the fact that it looked like a holiday apartment was nothing new but seeing their photos and home comforts scattered around made me realise that they actually do live here now and this is life for them.

They were telling me all the things that they had been doing and all the places I could visit while I was there as we sat on the balcony until midnight. The enthusiasm in their voices made me realise that not only were they very happy to be here but also excited about sharing this new experience with me, which made me just as excited as they were.

On the first day, as I stepped out onto the balcony, the first thing that hit me wasn’t the heat, as you might expect, but the brightness. Not a cloud in the sky (which was a brilliant blue) and the glare from the white buildings around me made me think twice before opening the blinds without sunglasses again. I did think to myself in the first two days could I live with this heat and glare? But after those two days it was not a problem and as I write this blog back in London under a sky covered in cloud, there isn’t anything I miss more.

In one week we managed to visit five different beaches, all with their own individual pros. We swam in the sea and even that was a different experience at each beach, whether it was the

Approaching Isla de Tavira

change in the water temperature or just the way the waves moved depending on the tide. The sand was different each time too and the journeys getting to the beaches were just as unique. We walked, we got onto boats and for one, we got a small train which took us across a nature reserve and stopped just at the sand. By the end of the trip it seemed like I’d been on several different holidays at once and this was one of my favourite things about Portugal.

Although my friends hardly had a bad word to say about leaving London, I did think to myself while I was here: would I miss this and would I miss that? As my friends said, friends and family are a given but you make new friends wherever you go and ones that matter will always want to come to visit, even from the UK. I have to admit that most of the people we met, whether English, Portuguese or Spanish, were so friendly and after a few years living in London this was a delight to me.

The choice in the supermarket is much more exciting abroad as there is so much you haven’t tried, while so much of things you already know and love are available too. On the last night we were there, we went for a Chinese and I thought to myself, Chinese in Portugal? But it was the nicest Chinese I’ve ever eaten and with a large choice of restaurants and bars, I was never going to miss the food from back home.

Algarve Summer Sky

One night when we slightly over did it and needed a bit of a break the next day: we watched DVDs and TV and if it weren’t for the Portuguese sub-titles I would have thought I was resting in the comfort of my own home. The Portuguese subtitles, although easy to ignore, do help you pick up a lot of the language without even noticing and that is only another good thing!

All in all, I am still keen to leave the UK and at present, Portugal is a very high contender for the top spot of places to go. It definitely helps that if you already have good friends there that will make you feel welcome, it makes it easy for me to go back anytime I need to see more and experience as much as I can before making that big decision! Portugal for me was 10/10.

Technorati Tags: algarve beaches, algarve summer, guest post, moving to portugal

As we look forward to another hot and sunny weekend, I thought I would write a quick post about the Algarve in the summer.

Busy Beaches

We have never been here in July or August before, so the last couple of weeks have been something of an eye-opener.  Trips to anywhere west of Faro are off the menu until September, after our last trip to Praia De Rocha since the tourists descended en masse resulted us using the word “hellhole” without any hint of irony.

We are lucky to live at the quieter end of the Algarve where, although the holiday-makers are very much in evidence, the character of the area seems to survive, and the bulk of the boozy teenagers are kept contained in certain bars!

At the moment, this new summer vibe is pleasing, and the holiday mood rubs off on us in a good way (except for when there’s no room around the pool downstairs!)

It is also good that our ability to speak some Portuguese separates us out from the tourists, and we are quite enjoying showing off our language skills in the butchers and fishmongers!

Weather wise – no complaints here! We had been a little concerned it may be too hot for us, and it may well get hotter in the coming weeks, but so far we seem to be adjusting very well to temperatures in the low to mid 30s every single day. It is surprising how quickly you get used to it – to the extent that if it is 35C one day and drops to 31C the day after you almost wish it was slightly warmer.

The nights are not so straightforward, and we have had some where it hasn’t dropped below 25C in the night and is back to 32C by 9am. These nights, it can be tricky to remain asleep without keeping the air-conditioning on constantly, which isn’t good for the skin or the wallet! All in all though, we are loving this new climate and suspect that by the autumn we will be joining the Portuguese in their jackets and scarves and looking strangely at visitors wearing flip-flops when it’s “only” 23C!

The jury’s out as to whether we will continue to enjoy this complete change of pace and invasion of our new local area – either way you can be sure I will let you know.

Have a lovely weekend.

Photo Credit: Planax

Technorati Tags: algarve beaches, algarve in summer, holidays, moving to portugal, portugal holidays