Settling in, slowing down

Stillness of the Tamega, Marco de Canaveses

Monty in his element

It’s felt like a week where we’ve been starting to settle in and adjust to our new surroundings, questioning and maybe even resisting them a little less each day as we discover new pieces of the interlocking jigsaw of our new landscape. The drive – that at first seemed so treacherous – into our two local towns, one in either direction – now seems normal, helped by the fact that I finally got back behind the steering wheel of our car after not driving since we left the UK.

And after a fortnight exploring and trying to find places where we could safely walk Monty, we finally just took a wander up our lane, onto the road and along it through and beyond our local village, if you can really call it that. No shop or focal point, just houses spread out like beads from a broken necklace. Some are shiny and inhabited, others look like probable holiday homes with their alarms and swimming pools bounded by neat decking; others still being restored, while the rest remain derelict, their old stones gradually being reabsorbed into the mountainside. We met an old lady who smiled at us – or really at Monty – and in the first extended exchange I’ve managed to have using my appalling Portuguese we introduced each other to our dogs (hers is called Bobby) although not, of course, to each other! She chatted eagerly, defying my understanding of the shyness of rural folk in Portugal, and it was quickly clear that she didn’t have to ask us who we were. Haltingly, I told her we live in the ‘casa amarelha’ and, no, we weren’t ‘Franceses’, as she thought – ‘ingleses’, to my Welsh husband’s deep disapproval. I smiled as I told her it was ‘muito tranquilo’ at which she pronounced that I ‘sabe portugues’ and propelled herself into full paragraphs to which we listened with smiles on our faces that inevitably belied our total incomprehension. But it’s the longest, friendliest conversation with a local person we’ve had since arriving and it felt like a kind of welcome.

Visitors

Three weeks in and yesterday we had our first visitors – 2 friends from Exeter who are spending 5 weeks on a road trip around Northern Spain and Portugal. We met them in the market at Amarante, strolled along the river, past a wedding party, and then drove them back up for a lunch of soup and brownies. It was lovely to chatter on in English, especially as they weren’t people we’d had much contact with for several years, and even then it had been as parents of our kids when they were all at playgroup all those years ago. Hearing about their travels, and learning about Claire’s amazing childhood spent in the Algarve in the mid-1960s, still under the Salazar dictatorship, was fascinating and filled our day so pleasurably.

Very kindly, they’d offered to bring over with them anything we had forgotten and needed. We didn’t really ‘need’ anything – it’s very instructive discovering just how little you really need if you’ve got money in the bank to bail you out – but almost as soon as we’d arrived at the ferry in Plymouth, I’d regretted leaving behind a mirror Luke had bought me for Christmas in his first term at Sheffield uni, and I asked if they might bring that, plus two bath towels which I really didn’t want to spend more money on from IKEA! As I unwrapped it, perfectly preserved in a large blue towel by Luke, a collection of photos from the last 25 years tumbled out. One of Joe as a baby laughing manically over my shoulder; another with both boys gazing spellbound at a white tiger cub in a zoo in France; another of Luke, six years old, arm around my neck, cheek squidged against mine at a cafe in Lucca, Italy. Squirreled away in the bag with these treasures, and wrapped in the second bath towel, was a lager glass Luke had bought Adrian, for the same Christmas, I think. I’m happy to report that everything is all still in one piece.

#marcodecanaveses #newlifeinportugalamaranteportugaltamegaretiringoverseas