Now that we have all our Seattle goods in boxes in the garage, waiting to be unpacked, we have decided to paint the house interior first. Good grief, you'd think we would have planned that a little better. We guess that the recent wine explosion all over the walls and ceiling gave us a little extra impetus to paint, but also we realized that it would be quite a bit more difficult to move everything out of the way for the painters once we'd loaded the place with our stuff. Right now the china hutch is still wrapped up beautifully for shipping protection, for example, so all we need to do is slide it out from the wall to paint. No tarps or fragile china rattling on the glass shelves involved. And the new cupboards and shelves we'll need in the rest of the house are still figments of our imagination, which are easy to paint around.
Pat keeps up with a large network of support chats, and she found us some local references for painters right away. Gerrit will follow up with them in the next few days.
On Tuesday Feb 3 Gerrit had an appointment for his free tetanus vaccination in the public health clinic in Ponte de Lima, so we both headed down there. When we got there the entire lower floor of the clinic, where vaccinations were given, was torn up for construction and the whole building was being refaced. We didn't know where to go at that point, so we went upstairs and began getting a ticket to ask someone. A kindly security guard approached Gerrit, and from Gerrit's halting Portuguese the guard learned what we were there for. He verified our name on a list, directed us to another room next door, told the nurses we were there, came out to tell Gerrit "one minute" in English, smiled, and touched him on the shoulder as he left to help others. It's another example of the kindness of the Portuguese.
After the appointment, on the way home, a phone call came in for Gerrit. It was the plumber he had requested just the previous day. Gerrit told him he spoke only a little Portuguese, and for the first time he kept his head and asked the caller to repeat, more slowly. The plumber did, Gerrit did a passable job of understanding, confirming, and responding, and he completed his first actual phone conversation totally in Portuguese. (The phone is the worst. It's in real time, the audio is often bad, you can't see gestures, expressions, or body language, and you can't watch their lips as they speak. It's a communication nightmare.) In twenty minutes we were home, with the plumber waiting there as Gerrit had asked.
He was there to fix a clog in our garage bathroom drain. He did a great job, and he even mopped the floor afterward with disinfecting cleaner. Gerrit was able to communicate and make small talk with him pretty well in Portuguese most of the time, too.
On Wednesday Feb 4 we went to Viana do Castelo, about 30 minutes from home, to the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles so Pat could complete the transfer of her driver's license. (For some reason Gerrit's is held up.) It was in a slightly dingy governmental-looking building with a dozen people waiting. Typical DMV, in other words. Pat was called within a few minutes though, but the clerk spoke no English and had some complicated questions. She recruited the next-door clerk, and as soon as the English-speaking clerk was free Pat moved there. There was something wrong about the appointment Pat had made, we couldn't quite make out what it was, but the clerk cheerfully said she could process Pat anyway. After a few minutes with the friendly and helpful clerk Pat handed over her Washington license and received her interim Portuguese license. (Transfers like this require that you hand in your existing license. We could have gone through the long expensive process of a complete driver's ed course, written test, and driving test, but opted to just do the transfer instead. The Portuguese license will still be usable in the US.) All in all, it was about the best experience either of us has had at a DMV in any country.
As of Thursday Feb 5 the rains have been heavy and continuous for most of about two weeks. The
Lima river is seriously flooded. The parking lot adjacent to the river is under about 3 meters (10 feet) of water, and water is even over the new walking path (the yellowish stripe in the foreground here) by about a half meter (1.5 feet). Everything is fine up at our home's altitude, but water gushes from every culvert and drain pipe between there and Ponte de Lima and floods everything downhill. It's like little rivers in the road in places. This flood is nothing compared to some historical ones though. There are arrows and dates on the sides of buildings in the center of town showing flood levels a meter or two above the street!
(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.)
