On Saturday Apr 5 we had a few errands to run in Ponte de Lima, including making a donation to a local street animal rescue organization. The donation was made at a little local restaurant in the historic part of town, so we enjoyed a nice lunch and craft beer there too. Charities which accept donations seem to be a little hard to find here. Maybe the church handles that sort of thing. Many people recommend just leaving your donations next to the ubiquitous recycling drop-off spots too, and people will take them home from there. We've done that a few times. It seems like a nice way to donate directly to your neighbors.
We are actually in the village of Calheiros, near the town of Ponte de Lima. It turns out that the name of the village comes from the Count of Calheiros, whose family has lived here for over 700 years. 700 years! They built a fabulous palace in the 18th and 19th century, hidden from the road, just down the hill from us. We see it as we drive in to our place from Ponte de Lima though. Here is a nicely produced video in English showing the estate, including an interview with the current Count: https://youtu.be/-OR-cg_p0e8 . You can rent rooms there too, and the amenities include a spa, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. (See https://www.pacodecalheiros.com/ ) They have many acres of vineyards on the estate, growing Loureiro grapes for the famous local vinho verde wine. How about that? Royalty for neighbors!
On Monday Apr 7 the installers from the metal fabricators arrived early in the morning and installed the four handrails we had ordered custom-made. Here is the one on the indoor stairway and the one on the outside stairway up to the water heater solar panels. They're beautiful, nice and solid too, and they really make getting up and down the stairs a lot more secure. There has been a delay in installing the lift, but that is supposed to happen at the end of the month.
Pat also got an outdoor gardening cabinet and put it together on Monday. It will tidy up a lot of the random weeders, trowels, fertilizer bags, and so forth which are accumulating around here, and get them all outside.
Fire departments here in Portugal are mainly volunteer, with volunteer support from the community which they serve. It's a great model, fostering everyone's community involvement, and every time we see a fire department in Portugal it is modern, well equipped, and well maintained. Vehicles are new and well kept also. Firefighters here are also first responders, like EMTs in the US. We have been planning on supporting the local bombeiros (firefighters) when we settled, so we made our pledge today and became "members" of the Ponte de Lima fire department. Many local businesses provide discounts to members as their own form of contribution, so we will patronize them too.
Andrew, our all-purpose handyman, came out on Thursday Apr 10 and tried the new battery-powered brush cutter Gerrit bought a few weeks ago. After some confusion with the harness they got it all going. It is amazingly quiet; you can hardly hear it 5 meters (15 feet) away, and there are of course no two-cycle engine fumes or gasoline to worry about. Andrew reports that it is lightweight and comfortable too. Very nice! We will donate the old gas-powered cutter to our neighbors by leaving it at the local recycling depot.
We have seen a little mouse in our house. We chased him out, but there are likely more. Pat found a clever mousetrap you can make with an empty wine bottle. (Well, there's a problem right there. Where would we find one of those?) Tip it up a little, put some cheese in it, and when the mouse crawls in after it he can't get out up the slick glass sides. Gerrit cobbled one together out of cardboard and duct tape, somehow finding an empty wine bottle. We're not sure what to do after we actually catch a mouse like this, but Pat did not like Gerrit's suggestion to just tip the bottle into the jaws of a waiting cat. We'll probably find a lovely mouse refuge somewhere about 160 km (100 miles) away, gently drive the little creature there, release it with a loving wave, and return to find that his whole family has moved in and turned ALL our cheese into mouse droppings. Plus bred a half-dozen replacements for their deported relative.
We also have Iberian Wall Lizards which come in the house all day when the doors are open, to pay us visits. We often catch them napping on the back of the sofa. They're cute and harmless so we mostly ignore them. Their droppings are harder to ignore. Living in nature we are.
On Friday Apr 14 we went to the city of Braga, the third-largest in Portugal, with our friends Maayan and Dan and their visiting kids for a little sightseeing. It is about a half-hour drive south from here. The weather was a little drizzly but we saw some beautiful sights in this historic city, and YES we finally took some pictures of lunch! (That currency you see spread all over the table is not our generous tip, it is built into the table top for decoration.)
Instagram wizards we are. (Starting to sound like Yoda we are.) It was not exactly traditional Portuguese, but it was tasty. We ate at Bira Dos Namorados ("Valentine's Day") a nice hamburger café near the Jardim de Santa Bárbara where we all met. Lunch, plus delicious coffee and pastries all day long, got us through.
The Jardim is where a meetup happens every Friday which Maayan has introduced us to, where you get a chance to do actual immersive Portuguese conversation on a basic level. The meetup was canceled for the day we were there, but we will start attending the following Friday.
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Braga landmark
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Our crew, less Pat behind the camera, apparently wandering aimlessly like a cloud of gnats
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Flowered promenade |
Part of the Jardim de Santa Bárbara, bordered by an ancient castle and arches
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 Dragon fountain across from the Jardim |
City of flowers
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Thanks to Ian, Gerrit's linguist son, and Maayan herself, for the help in transliterating from the Hebrew and finding pronunciations for "Maayan" and "Dan"!
(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 bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)
Dragon fountain across from the Jardim 