What a difference a 2.5 hour flight makes. This time last week I was shivering my way around a -3C London and now I’m back in Portugal it’s 19C outside and bright enough to give me a migraine! Our trip back to England was the usual mix of good, bad and ugly. The good =…
Tomorrow, all being well, we’re off to England for some pre-Christmas family festivities (yay,) and some work appointments (boo!) For once we are looking forward to the trip back a little bit, helped by the fact the first thing we will be doing on arrival is shopping for and cooking a full traditional English Christmas…
Whenever I speak to friends and relatives in the UK at the moment, I am asked about the Portugal economy. Usually what is said is something along the lines of “oooh, isn’t Portugal in trouble at the moment?” Given that Portugal is staging a nationwide general strike today, I thought it appropriate to add a…
Having just spent the weekend making mince pies and experimenting with Christmas recipes and home-made gifts, our excitement about our upcoming Portuguese Christmas has reached a rather high level. In fact waking up this morning to find it is still over a month away and that we both have a load of work to do…
To conclude my retrospective look at our first exciting year in Portugal, here, as promised in my last posts are our high points and respective low points of our first year in the Algarve. THE HIGHS 1. Sharing our new home with friends and family – some of our happiest times here to date have…
It is now just over a year since we waved goodbye to Old London Town, and got on the plane to Portugal, leaving our old life behind. Needless to say, the year has been one of the most eventful of our lives, and I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to work out how to summarise our…
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…
Does absence truly make the heart grow fonder? On my first few visits back to the UK from Portugal I couldn’t find a single thing to be happy about – I just sulkily longed to be back in the Algarve. Now the visits have become more routine, I am finding a few (just a few!)…
This is the first in a series of two articles exploring the real cost of living in Portugal. A couple of weeks ago, a reader of the blog asked me to write a post going into detail about the living costs in Portugal. Given that the questions most frequently asked on the expat forums tend…
Its visitors time again! We have just spent an action-packed long weekend with my niece, albeit one which was shunted forward by a day due to striking air traffic controllers, and have only had today to catch up on work and cleaning duties before two friends arrive on the early flight tomorrow. As soon as…