The key thing is it ticks all the boxes

Posted on May 16, 2013 by aliciasunday

Yes finally, we’ve made our choice after four months of house hunting. A difficult task that, finding a house that wouldn’t keep us looking back nostalgically to the one we’d left behind. Ducks, orchard, village life…..aah, I love you with my rose tinted spectacles. Our roller coaster ride ends on Monday with the signing of the papers. Stress city stops here. What have we finally chosen?

English village life; royal wedding in the rain

The children had their hearts set on a little farm we’d shown them, oranges, figs, lemon and vines growing up the middle with a field big enough for two ponies, a courtyard, two barns and a lovely view from the garden. It was the sort of place I’d dreamed about so why had we not bought it?

We first approached this house when rain was bucketing down our necks, the view was clouded in mist and we couldn’t make it to the end of the garden without water leaking into our boots. A definite no. We went back again to show the children, the sun shone and they flitted around the outhouses happily. A definite yes. Meanwhile the estate agent rattled the door trying desperately to unlock it. Neighbours looked on, heads shaking, and a parrot next door peered over the wall from his cage. The agent then sent for a friend who turned up with the Portuguese equivilent of WD40. Still the lock wouldn’t work.

The children never did see inside. If they had they would have walked down a long, dark corridor with four small bedrooms on either side, a miniscule living room and a long kitchen. All perfectly acceptable but preferably after knocking some walls out, attic extensions and barn conversions. We are already in the middle of one renovation so NO WAY do we want to do any more work. In a new area. Where we have no contacts.

Good views

So what have we bought instead? No barns, no orange trees, no figs. Yet. A view of the countryside, tick. Space for the long dreamed of pool, tick. Space for a pony, tick. Light and spacious rooms, tick. No knocking through of walls needed or major building work, tick. The children don’t know all that yet though because the day we took them to see the house the locks had been changed and the agents didn’t have the key.

Anyone for basketball?

Sure, they’ll soon love it. Meanwhile, we are on the look out for an English speaking electrician, a painter and a glazier. Oh and someone with a digger type thing to remove the brambles. Definitely a firm to fit new shutters. Ah, and replace a couple of windows. Install a pool. Recommendations anyone? We are near Lisbon in central Portugal. Half an hour from the beach. What children wouldn’t love that?

Obidos lagoon for an after school swim (courtesy of alternative-aquitaine.co.uk)

Puppy Love

Posted on May 8, 2013 by aliciasunday

This morning I went to fetch the ‘Horrid Henry’ book from the car. My neighbour was standing in the road holding guinea pigs. Oh no, wrong, not little guinea piggies, my brain did a double take; they were actually two gorgeous puppies. I wanted to grab them and shout ‘mine, mine’ like a child. They were maybe a day or two old, eyes just opening, hair silky and soft. I ‘aahed’ and cooed, and she clearly got the message that puppies are my thing because she went and fetched, yes, another four, eyes still shut, even younger, from a different mum. Oh heaven. She motioned me through big green gates into the yard opposite and I saw the mothers, two cute terrier type little dogs with long hair looking happy and contented as new parents. Oh my goodness, there’s nothing like a puppy to make your heart sing.

I then checked my emails. After a long and tiresome wait we’d had a call from an estate agent on Saturday night about the house we had offered on. Good news, the original buyers coudn’t get a mortgage. Bad news, someone else had exceeded our offer and did we want to match it? Yes we sure did. So that was that until this morning, that’s four tense days of waiting later.

Now then, to throw some chaos into the picture we also have another house in mind because this first one already had an offer on it. Whichever one we got first, we figured we’d go for, good old fate would decide for us. So I open an email and hurrah, we have been offered the second house at the price we want to pay! Then I spot another email that had come in a couple of hours earlier. Hurrah, we have been offered the first house at the price we want to pay! Now what do we do?

There was nothing for it. I closed the laptop and went outside to have another look at the two puppies. A sleepy looking black and white one and a bright eyed tan and white one. My husband was so taken with them he suggested we buy one. It is very tempting. I expect we would each favour a different one though, then what would we do?

Just Puttin’ the Kettle On and Waitin’ For an Answer

Posted on May 2, 2013 by aliciasunday

Portuguese countryside

Today I am waiting for the email with the news that will change our lives. That will make us jump around the room with glee. Hurrah, open the beers, put up the bunting! Our plan will finally go into action. But wait….we’ve not had that email yet.

In our English country garden

It has been nearly a year since we accepted the offer on our house in England and moved away from our pretty English country cottage with genuine roses round the door, piled into the car and pointed it towards Portugal. We miss our old home, mainly because we are living in a house we are renovating at the same time and brick dust is everywhere, plumbing is random and the electricity has only recently been updated. Yet we have found two delightful houses near Lisbon, we have offered on both, we should have been given the decision on Tuesday but life is stretching itself out, until maybe I will go mad with anxiety. The click of an answer phone when we call to chase an answer makes us boil over. Time for a cup of tea. Or ‘cha’ in Portuguese. Not ‘char’ but ‘sha’ as the lady in the village shop corrected me when I went to purchase a packet.

Cork trees, olive groves and gorse

Spring vineyards

In the background my husband is removing another jarful of ticks from the dog, despite the collar. I can hear the shouts of mock delight as he pulls off another one. She had muscle spasms the other night and I thought she was going to die. She was leaping around the next morning. Was it caused by ticks? Had she eaten something strange? The dog will eat anything vegetable or mineral. Or that is tiny and runs. Or flies. Let’s put it this way, I didn’t need to bother with fly spray last summer. I am pinging back and forth to my emails while writing this. Still no news. The list of what we are waiting for is endless. Houses, tax codes, schools.

I’ll take the dog for a walk and maybe when I come back…. The Portuguese countryside is incredibly beautiful at the moment. I thought I would miss English spring flowers, the daffodils that adorn the verges as you approach the village, the blossom in the orchard, bluebells, dandelions, daisies. Here though, in Castelo Branco, every field is a wildflower meadow. Wild lavender, gorse, fennel, grow wild by the tracks and line the vineyards and olive groves, taking my breath away. Bright pink flowers with yellow centres dip among the pines, delicate blue petals flutter in the light wind, and bushes spawning huge white leaves hang lazily over hedges as though bored by all the sunshine.

Spot the toad

On my walks I have seen frogspawn in puddles, toads in water holes, crickets with their babies, butterflies, trails of caterpillars nose to tail. On the last walk we stopped in our tracks. A badger stared at us from up ahead then darted into the scrub. Sheep are herded past my son’s school and donkey and carts amble through the village.

But still no email.

It’s Perfect, But I’m Just Not Feeling It

Posted on April 30, 2013 by aliciasunday

I drop the phone. My cheeks are red with embarrassment after a conversation with the Portuguese estate agent. I rang them, desperate to find out if we had the house. I had nicely worked out sentences. The phone went to voice mail. Aargh! They rang back. Our agent doesn’t speak English. My sentences went to pieces and I managed to mutter the holy words ‘I’ll send an email’. ’Gah’. All I wanted to know is ‘have we got the house!!’.

It’s a waiting game. A game we’ve been playing for four months now. Like chess. We are being out manoevered, mainly because we dither for too long until the house one of us really wants is gone. My husband’s dream home went, like a bluebird flying out the window, to someone else. The house was perfect. We couldn’t quite decide whether to go a bit higher in the negotiations, then…snap, someone else swooped in and it was gone. Someone else has that perfect view, the gorgeous kitchen, the living room with the huge picture windows. But wait, they’ve also got to put in stairs, fix up gates, install doors and flooring. Not so bad then, at least it won’t be us. We didn’t really like the village that much anyway, did we? There’ll be other houses, other views.

I can’t count the number of times we looked out over a big garden, a house twice the size of the one we left in the UK, with a good view and said ‘ it’s perfect but I just don’t feel it’. Finally we all felt it for a farm house in Torres Novas. We arranged a second view to show the children. What happened? The morning we were due to visit in pinged an email. The house had two other offers. We still went. We put in a higher offer in case the other one fell through, to make sure we were next in line. So I’m sorry, whoever you are, but I really, really don’t want you to get that mortgage. I want exchange rates to go in our favour, the euro to crash and I want banks to stop giving out mortgages until we have our house.

Why is it like chess? We have an offer on another house too just to make sure we don’t have to spend any longer living in the building site of the house we are renovating. The other house is a repossession and they are meeting on Thursday about our offer. We have to make it formal today. Tomorrow is a bank holiday. So we need to know, before five o’ clock, whether we can have house number one. We have fifteen minutes to find out.

In the wake of my failure my husband is about to phone our estate agents again. He is working out his Portuguese sentences with google translate. My son comes in and distracts him. He is picking up the phone. We send the boy downstairs. He bounces the football inside, annoying the neighbours and annoying the hell out of me, but I should be earth mother and go and play with him. Oh we so need that farm.

At ten minutes to five my husband is speaking fluent sounding Portuguese. I have to be at school at five and I hover in the background. He puts down the phone. “So? What did they say?” He shrugs tensely. “It was an answer phone”.

The Day I Nearly Ate My Baby

Posted on April 29, 2013 by aliciasunday

When my son first came to Portugal he told everyone he was learning ‘Porkinese’. He still hasn’t got a grip on the language and constantly makes up his own variations. To the French speaking lady next door I saw him nodding wisely yesterday and repying ‘bom, bom’. I doubt he understood a word she had said. ‘Bom, bom’ I think sounds better than ‘bon, bon’. So maybe he knew where he was going with this.

In Spain a few years ago I proudly asked for baby food in Spanish. I was really coming along with my language skills. I was insistent, repeating the sentence and all I got was a quizzical glance back. Was it my accent? Were they daft? Just sell me some babyfood can’t you?! How difficult could it be? On the drive home I realised I had been saying ‘I want to eat my baby’ rather than ‘I want food for my baby’.

In France last September I told the French bank, insistently in French, that ‘I was a bank account’ and was rather taken aback when they went and found someone who could speak English. Surely I was doing alright, maybe my accent was off? They were just being difficult, eh? Finally they gave me what I wanted. A bank account.

Sometimes the joke’s on the other foot. The other day at the riding stables in Castelo Branco I was told I could pay for three mouths. What? Oh, three months. Right.

All those things are now in-jokes in our household. Jokey shortcuts, part of our household slang and in years to come will be part of the fabric of our family adventures so that we probably won’t remember where they originated. Part of the rich tapestry of life that unites us as a family. Bom, bom.

Have you had any disastrous misunderstandings with your language skills? I’d love to hear about them.

A Tick in Her Ear

Posted on April 24, 2013 by aliciasunday

Ticks. They gross me out. “Another eight! Aargh. I just did twenty earlier!”, my husband is shouting from the hallway as I write. He is talking about ticks on our dog Milly. She has a tick collar. It clearly isn’t working.

My introduction to ticks in any big way was last summer in Portugal. My daughter spotted one on the dog. A horrid, grey, bug thingy. We were told to treat her swiftly before she got tick disease and died, so it was with a certain panic we stared at the array of tick medications in the supermarket and came away with a little tube of liquid. I pulled the insects off her, gagging. Legs sticking into her flesh. Urgh. They started to drop off naturally after the medication kicked in and we would walk around the house accidently treading on them. Bloated after being on the dog. Then a big, red splodge on the floor. They thrive on the same stuff as vampires and leeches. Yugh. Yugh. Yugh.

My husband was in London that summer, working in a pristine, air conditioned, editing studio. I couldn’t help but be struck by the difference in our lives as I pulled off the stubborn creatures in the heat of a Portuguese August and tossed them away. Although to be fair, he had already acquired his own tick when editing in a barn in Somerset a couple of years before. So we were fairly even, I guess. I hadn’t known much about ticks in England because as far as I was concerned they stuck to sheep and we didn’t have any. I read that sheep keel over and die pretty easily so that had put me off getting one to potter prettily around the orchard in a Capability Brown kind of way. We bought ducks instead.

So for this season’s style Milly now sports a lovely plastic brown tick collar impregnated with the scent of lavender. I hope it works.

This is an amateur’s eye view of ticks. If you really, really want to, there are plenty of pictures to be found of ticks on the internet, I preferred to show some nice dog pictures.

A few words of Portuguese from the text above.

cão = dog
carrapato = tick
ovelha = sheep
celeiro = barn
grama = grass
verão = summer
agosto = August
calor = heat
jardim = garden

And the Band Played Too

Posted on April 22, 2013 by aliciasunday

Spring. Portugal. I was invited to a feast. Yum. Tent in the square. Marching band. Meet the villagers. Try some pigeon Portuguese. I was there with my euros. Almost. Till those five little words hit the sentence “..and they slaughter a pig.” Oh.

Well I’m not a vegetarian. It would be hypocrital not to go on that basis. Nothing wrong with that. It took me back to hardier climes and my neighbour in England who made a living from hog roasts. I thought of the charred and blackened pig’s head on the side, sitting next to the lettuce and the rolls. The pork though was delicious and really, it’s a fine thing to be reminded of what you are actually eating. So we are not conned into thinking the meat had no more soul than a bread roll when it was pig.

Did we go? The feast included a 10km walk through gorgeous Castelo Branco countryside in the morning. Olive groves. Lavender. Butterflies. Had we known about that….. The morning after feast day we went to the cafe for ice creams and saw the poster. Too late. I would have enjoyed the walk. The spring flowers, yellows, creams and violets, floaty white petals and fresh, emerald green grass. A few insect bites to keep me on my toes. Aaah. Silly to have missed it. Next year.

If. like me, you are trying to learn basic Portuguese, then here are a few words to remember from the text above.

borboleta = butterfly
porco = pig
carne = meat
andar = walk
alface = lettuce
primavera = spring
lavanda = lavender
grama = grass
verde = green
banda = band

sandcastlesinportugal

Portugal, unsettling into a new life