First House

 Man, it's humid in Porto!  Especially when you have to dry your laundry indoors in October.  It's been 75% - 85% steadily for a few weeks now.  So we broke down and did what many people do around here: we bought a dehumidifier.  It should be here the middle of next week.  It will be useful to make it more comfortable in the main living area, then when we do laundry we'll hang it in the bedroom, put the dehumidifier in there, and shut the door.  Laundry Porto style.

We're still nowhere near being able to hold an actual conversation with a native.  Gerrit is getting pretty good at simple phrases and talking to clerks and waiters (as long as they mostly don't talk to him), but Pat is still overcoming nerves and having trouble retaining her lessons.  It's nerve-racking to talk or respond in a foreign language, you freeze up and forget everything you learned.  It's like the anxiety of public speaking.  We're both doing our lessons an hour every day ("tudos os dias"), but it's slow going.  We need actual practice with a real live native speaker who doesn't mind talking to four year olds.  Fortunately they actually have those, people you can pay or exchange English lessons with for video calls on the internet.  Now we just have to work up the nerve to tackle THAT.

Yesterday, Thursday, the weather was beautiful so we took a trip to the little town of Arouca, about an hour's drive due southeast of us.  We have found a house for sale in the outskirts of Arouca which we like.  Here's a picture from the listing.  We're going to see it with our agent next week, but we thought we'd drive around the area a little to see how we like the neighborhood.  (We didn't want to pop in on the home unannounced, especially being unable to explain ourselves.)

The drive was lovely, especially the last third or so.  You approach Arouca along a wide valley dotted with villages and forest, along a small winding highway.  We went to the house itself first, at least the foot of the driveway leading up to the property.  It's a beautiful forested secluded setting, just like it shows in the ad.  We'll see more of it next week.

We spent an hour or so driving all around the small town of Arouca and its surroundings.  It's just the right size to have a supermarket, a health center, a grade school, parks, many little shops and restaurants, and specialties like optometrists, pastry shops, and so forth.  It's clean, quiet, and well-kept, with some cool modern sculptures in its roundabouts.  We drove past a city road crew cleaning leaves from the street.  With rakes!  Quiet, old-fashioned, smoke- and noise-free rakes.  What a delight.

We were thoroughly pleased with what we saw.  But if we buy the first house we look at, after moving to Portugal without even a visit, you can call us completely insane.  Or maybe it's just a really nice house.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click in the black area outside a photo when you're done.)

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