Budget air travel is a necessary evil for expats like us who have to make frequent trips between old “home” and new “home.” After a while you get these things down to a fine art. My wife and I are the polar opposite of those who hold up security queues due to bottles of water,…
I’m always in two minds as to whether to post on Moving to Portugal when I’m in a bad mood, but it’s good to drive home the point that life “in the sun” isn’t always perfect. So, here follows a cathartic, self-indulgent, and possibly slightly controversial rant. First off, I’m going to talk a bit…
A bit of fun this week. Alyson, the author of another expat blog, www.algarveblog.net , approached me to do a short interview about the Moving to Portugal blog and my life here in the Algarve. You will find my interview by visiting this link. I enjoyed answering the questions so much that I suggested we…
For someone who has spent much of his working life in the computer industry, I can be strangely indifferent towards technology. When I am back in London, the extent to which people live their lives plugged into smartphones worries me somewhat. I think life was better when people used to talk to each other. Staying…
The Algarve is far from a sunshine paradise right now. Summer ended with a humdinger of a wind and rainstorm on Sunday night. We were woken up throughout the night by beating rain and gales rattling the shutters. When we got up on Monday morning, the tops of some of our local palm trees had…
As I write, I can see that it has been a full two weeks since I last posted here, and for that I apologize. It’s been a busy time. We spent the last week in the UK where we saw some friends and family, did some work, and, in my case, had a tooth extracted.…
It’s trivia time this week on Moving to Portugal. We’ve just come to the end of a long run of different guests staying with us, and this morning I was reflecting on some of the little bits of information about life in Portugal that sometimes come out in conversation, and are a surprise to those…
My wife and I have never really been hostel-type people, preferring the minibars and pillow menus of good hotels, even when we can’t really afford them! However, when we first moved to Portugal a couple of years ago, we lived just around the corner from the pousada da juventude, and every time we wandered past…
Those readers who follow the Expats Portugal blog will have probably seen a long recent thread about the opening of an Iceland store, down here in the Algarve. I’m sure when the original poster typed his short message to share the news of the opening; he never expected it to generate 21 forum pages of…
It rained at the weekend. Now, for those of you who don’t live in the Algarve, that won’t seem particularly interesting, but for August in these parts, it’s actually quite unusual. Given that a lot of people move to Portugal for the climate (and it certainly played a large part in our own decision), it…