We wear ourselves out every time we go shopping. It takes a long time to shop because we have to search through the store and analyze every label. For food or soap or lotions, we study the list of ingredients. We are gradually accumulating the things we need.
We found a nearby shopping mall, Oeiras Parque, to be a good source of household items with a huge grocery store. It’s a “hipermercado” with many departments beyond just food. We got our inflatable bed in their camping/outdoor department. The mall has a couple of good electronics and appliance stores, like an American Best Buy.
Solved! How to wash and dry our clothes
With my allergies, I want fragrance-free products with benign ingredients. It took a little searching to find an acceptable brand. Fragrance-free hasn’t caught on here too much, although the fragrances used aren’t as strong as the perfumes at home. The Norit brand was available in more places and seemed meet my fragrance-free requirements.
There’s a Miele clothes washer in the kitchen with lots of different cycles. We choose the one we want by how long it will take. The shortest cycle is Espresso 20 lasting 20 minutes. The longest, for cotton, is almost 3 hours. We usually reduce the water temperature to 30 degrees, but after several cycles the machine warned us to do a hot cycle to sterilize the machine. So we do towels in a hot wash. Our towels may be getting stiffer though. I hope we don’t have to get a fabric softener. There’s an option for it in the detergent tray.
Then there’s the issue of drying the clothes.There are generally no clothes dryers here. Electricity costs are high and the low humidity makes it easy to line-dry. Our apartment has a sheltered area at the back of the balcony with built-in clothes lines, but it’s shady and there’s danger of dropping socks down to the neighbors’ lines below.
There’s a typical folding drying rack that I see on many balconies. It was easy to find at the tiny hardware store in the little square with shops a block from our apartment. The store is run by an older gentleman who doesn’t speak English. There’s barely any space to stand inside. You tell him what you need if you know the right word, or you point to something. He tells you he only takes cash, so your shopping involves a walk to the other side of the square to visit the Multibanco ATM. It took a bit of exploring to find it. Every little activity is an adventure!
Note: After checking Google maps, I see that the name of our little square is Largo Alves Redol. It just occurred to me that we should learn the names of the streets nearby.