We continue to settle in. We’ve got lots of boxes in our garage storage area. We’re slowly digesting them. We put our bikes back together. There’s a nice bike path along the shore, which is great, but I’m not thrilled about riding in the rather narrow and hilly streets yet. Cars do wait patiently behind bikes though. We sometimes find out that we brought things that are too old and worn out, like our bike helmets. We spent more time at home working on some of our personal projects too. We enjoyed several WhatsApp chats with friends and family back home.
I (Pam) am writing this monthly wrapup to help us remember all the things going on. Time is flying by and it’s easy to forget what we did and where it was. Less important is what day we did it.
Here’s a list of our activities this month:
7 sexta-feira
SEF appointment. We got our interim two-year residency papers! We await the official card in the mail.
8 sábado
Afternoon festival at Bairro do Pombal, celebration of Cabo Verde music, food, dance. We met a Portuguese musician and his wife. They lived in the neighborhood and knew the other musicians. He regularly plays at festivals with his group Norte Sul. We walked back down the hill to the Oeiras train station, stopping for an early dinner at A Quinta in its covered patio.
9 domingo
I think this is the day we went to Santo Amaro to check out a restaurant and grocery store. The restaurant, Fort Apache, only served a daily menu-do-dia for lunch, but not on Sunday. So we went to a nice Continente Bom Dia, a smaller store of the ubiquitous Continente brand.
10 segunda-feira
We had an online meeting with our financial advisor.
11 terça-feira
A receipt reminded me we had lunch at Bahia Beach Club, our favorite friendly
restaurant on a lawn beside the beach.
13 quinta-feira
We went into Lisboa to shop at El Corte Inglés. We checked out soundbars for our TV, bought a bike helmet for Pam, and ordered one for David. It turned out that when we unpacked and used the helmets we brought with us, they were really showing their age and the padding inside was disintegrating.
We had tapas at their Imanol restaurant and bought so many groceries that the cashier asked a couple times: Are you sure you don’t have any coupons?
15 sábado
We explored around Paço de Arcos to find the Há Prova festival, a chance to sample the local restaurants. We walked down the street in the wrong direction, and David finally checked the website and found the map at the bottom of the page. I have complained that the the town doesn’t put specific Google-searchable addresses on posters.
When we got there, we bought 20 euros of tokens and started sampling the food and wine. The square near the Palaçio dos Arcos was packed with tables. We asked to sit at some empty seats and it turned out that we sat down with some of the Oeiras municipal officials, even the mayor! We had some nice conversations combining Portuguese and English. We had a long discussion about why we came to Portugal. Lots of fun!
20-24
We traveled to Coimbra for the ANIMUSIC music conference. Inspiring, energizing, and lots of musical connections. Before the conference started, we heard a Coimbra-style fado concert in a stone chapel, repurposed to a small restaurant/concert hall.
During the conference, we heard two antique organs in historic chapels, saw a collection of African instruments at the university, and heard many papers and talks about musical instruments and their use in various cultures. Kudos to Patricia Bastos, producer of the ANIMUSIC conference!
26 quarta-feira
We walked to Paço de Arcos and up the hill toward Oeiras Parque to find our local public health care center, SNS. There, with our SEF registration papers, we registered for the public health care system.
Then we went shopping at the Oeiras Parque mall and got groceries and beach chairs, which were on end-of-summer sale. (It’s just July!)
27 quinta-feira
We went to Lisbon for a medical checkup at Serenity, the company that we signed on with as an advisor for the health system here in Portugal. Various health reasons led us to want their help. We’re old now, right? We walked across town to Hygge Kafe, a restaurant and B&B that we ate at in our September 2022 stay in Lisboa. Then we went back to El Corte Inglés to listen to TV soundbars again. David picked up his bike helmet there too.
28 sexta-feira
We went back to Oeiras Parque and bought a Sony soundbar at Worten, a Best-Buy-like store in Portugal.
29 sábado
A strangely foggy day. We even heard the fog horn on the faraway lighthouse.
As part of the summer jazz concert series at the Gulbenkian Foundation, we went to hear two concerts. At 6:30pm, Susana Santo Silva (https://susanasantossilva.com). She is a trumpet player doing great avant-garde stuff with electronics. At 9:30pm, Natural Information Society with Evan Parker. They were a band of odd instruments – harmonium and a northwest African bass instrument called a guimbri, plus drum set, bass clarinet and guest soprano sax. Their evening concert was a single long improv that had some great moments, but they missed their opportunities to end after more than an hour. Wikipedia described their style as “ecstatic minimalism”.
29-30
Pam got to work on updating her Spindrift website for many details, including contact info. No more delivery of physical items, printed music or CDs. We’re not in Massachusetts anymore!
30 domingo
We had a zoom call with friends who plan to visit this coming fall!
31 segunda-feira
A big full-appearing moon rose this evening, but the supermoon is supposed to be tomorrow.
Portuguese language note: Days of the week are different in Portuguese. They aren’t based on the gods of antiquity, but on the Catholic ecclesiastical calendar. You’ve got sábado and domingo, like Spanish. Then, Monday through Friday are the second through the sixth day of the week. I have to retrain my brain, since I always thought of the weekdays as 1 through 5.