Wildfires and House Hunting

Last Friday some rain came and helped to dampen the wildfires in the area.  There was a strong burned eucalyptus aroma in the air from the smoke and the rain, from all the burning eucalyptus forests (see our earlier post here).

It's shocking, but probably a number of the fires were arson, too.  14 people have been arrested on suspicion of setting fires.  The Portuguese prime minister alluded to this, and a criminologist explained that there could be economic incentive to sell burned timber or to devalue land for purchase.  There's always plain old mental illness to explain arson too.  More than 5000 firefighters have been involved, over 50 people have been injured, seven have died including three firefighters, and tens of thousands of hectares have been destroyed.

On Saturday the air had cleared considerably here in Gaia just south of Porto, but fires continued in some of the areas we're interested in so we didn't do any road tripping.  We've started doing some house shopping in earnest now, and we spent part of the day looking at real estate ads and learning about buying a house in Portugal.  We have been attracted to the cities of Braga and Guimarães so we'll see what is available in those areas.

On Sunday the fires in that region were contained and safe, so we set off on a circular trip to see Barcelos, Azurém, Fafe, Celorico de Basto, and back home, about four hours of driving time.  At least that was the plan.  We didn't get going until noon, the Waze mapping system sent us on a different route than Pat had specified and we had to get synched via slow cobblestone roads, and by the time we'd made it to Barcelos and had lunch it was three o'clock.  Sigh.  

We did add to our list of excellent lunches in small restaurants with friendly, helpful, and energetic waiters though.  We split an order of oven roasted pork and sausages, creamy boiled potatoes, grated cooked spinach, rice, and tossed salad.  Our broken Portuguese and the waiter's one English word ("pork") got us through though.  Tipping is not generally done in Portugal, but we try to leave a little bit.  This time all we had was about 12% of the bill in our smallest currency note, and our waiter was so overwhelmed he almost refused it.  He was genuinely grateful; he and Gerrit shook hands and parted friends with effusive well-wishes.  In Seattle we would have gotten a dirty look for 12%.

Barcelos is a nice small city, but we happened to hit it when an enormous market or fair was underway.  Lines of cars were entering the city, even at three o'clock on a Sunday.  The town center was jammed with visitors, cars, and vendor's booths of all types.  We saw some coats of arms and other indications that it was partly a Renaissance fair.  We tooled slowly through the traffic, and then made our way out of town by the back way.  This church was on the way, just another like you find in almost any small town in Portugal.

At this point we headed to nearby Braga for another insufficient drive-by of this beautiful city, and took the fast highways home.

Monday, yesterday, we broke up our house-hunting to take a little early afternoon drive around the downtown neighborhoods of nearby Porto just for fun.  The weather was nice and the city is so beautiful.  We're getting to the point where we only use Google Maps (or now we prefer Waze) for part of the trip, and we know our way within a few kilometers of home.

That brings us to today.  It's been raining pretty steadily all morning, nice to see.  We got email this morning from the lawyers who are handling our immigration confirmation process, saying that the responsible agency is now soliciting email contact.  So Gerrit copied & pasted the prescribed email message from the lawyers and sent it off so we can hurry up and wait again.

Home