On Friday Dec 13 we went to a small dinner party put on by our friends Bernardo (Portuguese) and Carolina (Uruguayan). They have been remodeling and finishing their flat for several months and had some of their immigrant friends over for an "inauguration": us, a Basque woman from Spain, and a couple of other American expats from Portland now living in the city of Braga about an hour away. Everyone spoke English wonderfully, fortunately for us, and we had an excellent time and a stimulating cosmopolitan conversation. We had to come to Portugal to get our first ride in a Tesla, an Uber for the trip home, and the Portuguese driver was very curious and wanted to try out his English. It was fun telling him that we are from the land of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco, four very well-known brands over here.
The next day was a little sleepy, having gotten home at the normal Portuguese hour of about 1 AM but unable to stay asleep longer than about 6 AM, our bodies' wake-up time. We did some bleary housecleaning and some grocery shopping at the Lidl store just down the street.
Sunday morning we took a drive along the Douro river for a couple hours, just to sightsee. We'd been along much of the winding road before, but the Douro is a beautiful, grand river and we never get tired of it. We stopped at a roadside fruit stand and got a small bag of oranges, clementines, and a persimmon. The farmer was kindly and we spoke to him a little in Portuguese. There was also another customer about our age there who spoke a bit of English and said that clementine is "tangerine" in English, "like Tangerine Dream" he said (the old progressive rock band). Pat told him she'd seen them a long time ago. He then said, "I have time, like Time is on My Side" (the old Rolling Stones song). Just further support for song lyrics being used for language learning.
In the afternoon Pat went to a Porto Ladies Christmas Tea and charity fundraiser at the Hilton hotel here in Vila Nova de Gaia, sponsored by the Porto Together WhatsApp group. She had a great time, and the group raised over € 800 for a local home for disabled kids, the only one of its kind in all of Portugal and Spain.
Christmas lights have been going up all over, and it looks so festive. It looks different here though. There are not many simple strings of lights, but more prefabricated elaborate displays (all in LEDs of course). Even individual small businesses contract their own personalized light display. It makes for a really impressive overall effect. These photos here are just average displays too; the big ones are really spectacular. (And we hear that juvenile snickering. Farturas means fritters or funnel cakes, you poopyheads.) Gerrit is also relieved that we've hardly heard any Christmas music in the stores, although Pat misses it.
In that spirit, Pat has been trying to add a little Christmas cheer to the apartment too. She found just about the tiniest tree ever, smaller than a bottle of wine, and decorated it with earrings. Pretty clever! Now we need to put a tiny chimney in the apartment so Santa can send one of his elves down it.
We had the official inspection of our dream home in Ponte de Lima on Tuesday, today, and the inspector had to really work hard to find anything at all wrong with it. It's built like a rock (in fact the name at the entry gate is Casa da Rocha, (House of Rock), because of the huge boulders which it has been built around), and the original owners went to great lengths to build to very high energy efficiency and quality. The inspector said the Danish Velux windows and glass doors were the best you could buy, for example, the Rolls Royce of windows. The owners will sell the place furnished, too, which will be a big help to us furnitureless vagabonds. We like everything except maybe the beds, but those will do just fine until we find some better. (There is an entire town nearby devoted to furniture manufacturing, which we will be visiting. You can even just bring in a photo of something you like and they'll build it to your specifications.)
In a couple days we will have the inspector's formal report and the new energy certificate for the home, and will be making an offer shortly thereafter. We think we'll arrive at an agreement quickly too; Bernardo our real estate agent and we agree that the asking price is already quite fair so we'll see if we can just eke it down a bit. We will be needing to install a little lift after we move in after all.
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the Portuguese phrases in underlined bold to play the audio.)
