‘It’s not all cocktails and swimming pools…’
- Michelle Lester
- Feb 4, 2023
- 6 min read
Preamble:
We read all the tales of woe about Portuguese bureaucracy months before we arrived here, but we were not daunted … we’re teachers! When did we ever let paperwork get to us?! We’ve lived boring lives on regular salaries, and now we have pensions to prove it. We have nothing to hide, and folders full of evidence to prove it. And, truthfully, our experience to date of the processes here has gone remarkably smoothly, aided in no small part by the incredible helpfulness and good humour of the people administering them. I don’t know really, in fact, how much this is about Portuguese bureaucracy specifically, but rather – maybe a bit like Brexit – about the process of untying yourself from a whole adult life spent living under one governmental system to try to start all over again in a different one. I still curse Brexit for making things harder now for UK citizens to move to and live in an EU country, but whenever we find ourselves needing to register for something else, or procure a new piece of paper to prove we are who we say we are and can claim a right to be where we are, I just think of all those people who find themselves in a new land, without a Google Drive full of information, or neat plastic files full of copies of key documents, or a bank account with regular funds going in. We’ve chosen this, and we are being made so welcome, and – even when it’s raining! – there is a quality to our lives in our daily discoveries of new, small beauties, or laughing at our follies, or enjoying the camaraderie of new friends. Nevertheless, in the early hours, especially, it’s hard not to fall down a labyrinthine rabbit hole of all the ‘what ifs’ and sheer bloody unknowns that presumably beset any attempt to start over in a foreign place.
I recently re-read Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’ from her anthology Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head. It’s an extraordinary poem, so powerful and raw it physically hurts to read it. While we’re still feeling ‘between homes’, we know we at least have a choice. For millions, this isn’t the case. So, for perspective, here’s a snippet from Shire’s poem:
I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home unless home is a voice in your ear saying – leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.
What follows is a post I wrote in the midst of the January cold, after a lovely Christmas and New Year festivities with our boys as well as with new friends here, when health and ‘red tape’ conspired to tie us up in the blues. I’m sharing it because it offers a counter to the ‘travel porn’ photos I might share on FaceBook and Instagram which revel in our new landscape and surroundings. These offer one truth, but of course no life change on this scale can possibly go without hitches. But it’s always about balance, isn’t it? And perspective, and – bottom line – we have the resources to solve the problems we’ve encountered (so far, at least!) and that makes us incredibly lucky, I know.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of weeks to bring in the new year, and our first January in Portugal. The day we dropped Joe back at the airport, Ade came down with what would turn into a heavy, chesty cold which I picked up two days later. At the same time, the rains set in and the temperatures fell, apart from a couple of days when we were actually able to sit outside in the sun like convalescents in a period drama. It was nearing midnight, just a few days before a trip to Lisbon to secure a document to kick off the import process for our car, when I realised, with that blow to your stomach you get, that our paperwork didn’t add up, and we would fall at the first of many hurdles in a process everyone we’ve met here has warned us against even embarking upon. A car that has served us so well, like a loyal, trusty steed, for the past 12 years, has to go back to the UK on the back of a transporter to who knows quite what fate.
Heads pounding, bodies freezing in a house that doesn’t really offer up any semblance of warmth until the evening when we can light the fire, turn the lights off, and wrap up in blankets and duvets, fighting over who is going to cuddle Monty as a furry hot water bottle, we were confronted with the brutal reality that we will need to put a considerable percentage of our savings and our teacher pension pots into buying a car here. Even secondhand cars in Portugal are really expensive, and mileage is often very high, too, as they do seem to be driven forever. We’re not car people, although I have learned that Adrian has perhaps spent more time reading Top Gear reviews and keeping up to speed – boom boom – with the latest Skoda models (and now its upstart rival the Dacia) than I had ever realised. In the way that we have found ourselves doing increasingly, we woke up the morning after the ‘realisation’ both in sync with the same ‘fuck it’ idea: let’s buy a campervan! Yes, it would use up our lifelong savings but it’s always been the retirement dream, and maybe – we reasoned entirely reasonably – it’s just the universe’s way of telling us to get a bloody campervan, for heaven’s sake.
Ade had found a site where ex-rental campers were being sold. We found the one we wanted. We phoned them, and got through to Miguel who fortunately for us speaks fluent English. So far so good. But. And isn’t there always a ‘but’? The company is currently trying to decide whether to keep these campers up for sale or hold onto them for another rental season… they will hopefully know in ‘a couple of days’. A couple of days later, we phone again. ‘By the end of the month’. Now our clocks are ticking. We’re spending a fortune renting a car, which we barely use but have to have just to get us off this bloody mountain (it’s a beautiful mountain but when you feel trapped on it, well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?). The rental period runs out this coming Monday, so we’re going to have to renew but most likely with another, cheaper firm. AND then I realise that I can’t remember my credit card PIN and most companies won’t accept rental bookings with a debit card. It’s like a Tim Burton film set – every wooded path you embark on, the trees close in and their branches become sticks to beat you with and spears to spike you with, and there’s always a crazy woman with hair that is wild like a birds’ nest…
We’re in a car-angst limbo, where there’s a lack of car and a lot of angst. We’re trying to book ourselves a trip back to England to see family and friends in March but right now there’s just a big car-shaped void we’re falling into. It will, necessarily, be resolved because in the end cars are for sale and we have the funds, however begrudgingly they will be spent. And we are fortunate in knowing lovely people here who are rallying to our sides with support and advice and contacts. And as my dear friend, Chelvi, messaged me last night: the first year is always going to be the hardest. Listen to your friends, not FaceBook, which is awash with other newbie expats sitting by pools, drinking cocktails, staring at the sunset. Picture instead a damp house in a hollow, with two newly-retired folk huddled under blankets, sipping ginger tea and cough mixture, scrolling through website after website wondering how the hell they’re ever going to be able to get out of there…hang on a minute, is this Groundhog Day?!
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