
So we’re in the Algarve now. Everyone says it’s the most beautiful place on earth. But then, what do they know? Everyone in Portugal says they have a “house” in the Algarve. This goes back to the ‘80’s when Portugal…
So we’re in the Algarve now. Everyone says it’s the most beautiful place on earth. But then, what do they know? Everyone in Portugal says they have a “house” in the Algarve. This goes back to the ‘80’s when Portugal…
Living in Portugal, we’re not as intimately connected with the Hollywood scene as we used to be. We’d heard of the movie Green Book but didn’t really know much about it. Something about a white guy hired as driver for…
It’s been a year since we got our Portuguese residency permits and had our first encounter with the notorious, dreaded and dreadful Portuguese bureaucracy. I wrote about that experience at the time. We got off relatively unscathed from that one,…
It’s the rainy season in Portugal, which may have something to do with why we haven’t posted anything this year. They fooled us when we first came to the country last year because the season was unusually mild. Of course,…
The holiday season hath descended upon us. It’s time for my favorite Christmas decoration of all time – the hanging Santas. Everywhere we turn effigies of Santa have been hung from balconies by the neck, hands tied behind backs, in…
There were hordes of people in Oporto. I mean hordes. Germans and Brits and French and Spanish and at least one Estonian, we know because she told us so in very good English; and I’m sure there were other nationalities…
Portugal recently celebrated the feast day for Saint Roche, the patron saint of dogs, which is one theory why this time of summer is called the dog days. It’s certainly the slow time in Portugal. Everything shuts down in August. Our language school, swimming…
It’s been several weeks now since we took a bus from Sintra to Cascais to stay with Jules, Rita’s traveling companion and President You-Know-Who’s personally appointed ambassador to the International Animal Kingdom. After being in Sintra, Cascais felt like…
A couple weeks ago, we took a train to Lisbon and transferred to another for the half hour ride to Sintra. For those unfamiliar with Portugal, Sintra is a town on a mountain between Lisbon and the ocean, whose climate,…