We just learned that it's actually a law in Portugal that the elderly, the infirm, or women who are pregnant or with babes in arms are to be given preferential treatment: seats on buses, places in line, and so forth. So not only are the people here just kind and considerate, but they have codified it into law. Is this a great culture or what?
We took a short trip to Porto a week ago to the bird observation park we got fogged out of last time we tried. It was a beautiful sunny day this time, but about the only birds were gulls and cormorants (ho hum). Pat got some nice pictures though, and it was a pleasant outing. We got "lost" on the way back and had a fun time wandering some more through Porto.
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A week or two ago Gerrit tried to make Bacalhau à Brás for dinner, a classic bacalhau preparation like he had enjoyed for lunch some time ago. He found some good recipes, but they called for potatoes and he was sure the lunch he'd had used rice, so he decided to substitute brown rice. He got some shredded bacalhau and the other ingredients.
The bacalhau needed to be soaked overnight to get the salt out of the cured fish. Gerrit figured it wouldn't need to be refrigerated during the soak since there was so much salt, but he figured wrong. In the morning it began to stink and the whole mess had to be thrown out. Must have been some of that salt-loving bacteria from the Great Salt Lake.
He had better luck next time. Last night, Saturday, he tried again after properly soaking the cod in the refrigerator, and also used shoestring potatoes instead of his brown rice substitute. It was excellent this time, not quite as good as he remembered his restaurant lunch, but a good recipe to experiment with.
Most of the week, though, has been devoted to house hunting. Normally in Portugal there is no real estate agent for the buyer of a home, only the seller's agent. This seems a bit peculiar, putting the poor buyer in the position of negotiating with a professional agent, especially if the buyer is not fully familiar with Portuguese language and culture. Buyer's agents are becoming more popular now though, largely due to the demand of foreign home buyers. They split the seller's agent's fee, same as they do in the US, and there is no additional cost to the buyer.
The one fly in this ointment is that there is no financial incentive for the buyer's agent to negotiate a lower price. Their fee scales along with the seller's fee, upward with the selling price. So we have decided to give our agent a bonus of double what they lose with a reduced price. If they get a 2.5% commission on the sale price, for example, we will give them 5% of the amount by which they can reduce the asking price. That's pretty cheap money for us: for each €1000 the agent gets the price down, we save €950 and they lose €25 of their fee but gain €50 from us.
To firm up our own ideas of what is important to us, we went through the "ideal home" list we made a couple years ago. Back then we thought we wanted a large traditional home on a large piece of land, but now we're not so sure. We kind of like the modern features of this apartment. We have also gotten some distance from the rooms full of stuff we had in Normandy Park and learned we really don't need that. We're not so sure we want to upsize back to that after all our downsizing to get here. We're also a little reluctant to take on all the gardening and home maintenance of a big home. We'd rather be traveling or enjoying ourselves at this point in our lives.
So we sharpened our pencils. We figured what we really wanted for our now-smaller-scale projects, what we needed for guest accommodations, and our tolerance for discomfort and home responsibilities. Our current ideal home has a modern kitchen and amenities, high speed internet, is on one floor, has only three or four bedrooms, and is on a modest and reasonably secluded lot no more than 20 minutes from supermarkets and hospitals. Oh, and a swimming pool would be nice.
We connected with a good buyer's agent in the Porto People forums and chats, had a video call with him, and sent him our most recent home wish list. We sent links to listings for properties we liked, so he could get an idea of our taste. He seems like an excellent guy and comes highly recommended, but we caught him at a bad time. He is just moving into a new flat, so he won't be able to devote full time to his clients for a week or two.
But that's okay. We're primarily using an online Portuguese real estate site called Idealista, which is pretty flexible and thorough. You put in the region you're interested in, all the filters you want like price, size, etc., and it comes back with a list of matching properties. We drew a region comprising the area in northern Portugal which has a suitable climate for us, punched in some features of our ideal home, and got back 1,200 results.
Whew. Most of those results were not suitable for one reason or another, but it still took a long time to wade through them. We have dueling laptops on the kitchen table here and one or the other of us would periodically say, "oh, this looks like an interesting one" and we'd huddle. We have it down to a list of about two dozen now, and will get down to two or three to actually visit. We can do these initial visits without our agent, while he finishes his move. (The rainy season has come, too, so we'll need to get umbrellas.)
(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.)