No matter how good the marriage, the honeymoon has to end sometime. Or so they tell me. I am still in the honeymoon, but that’s not to say there haven’t been a few bumps along the way.
Moving to Portugal requires applying for a visa in person at the consulate office, in our case in San Francisco, followed by an in-person visit to the immigration office in Portugal. We were somewhat lucky in that our immigration appointments were scheduled before we left California and were included in our visa’s. Portugal has had a change in government officials and has changed the entire system for immigration since we started preparing for our move and many people are still waiting to get an immigration appointment even scheduled.
My husband was scheduled for the immigration office in Lisbon (the capital city 3 1/2 hours away from Porto) at 2:30 on July 10, I was scheduled for my appointment at 10 am on July 11 in Santarem, about a hour from Lisbon. Because of the language and cultural challenges we hired an attorney to accompany us to our Lisbon appointment. We traveled to Lisbon the day before our appointment so we would be sure to be on time. There we were, on time, sweating like crazy - it was sooo hot that day, but feeling worse for our attorney who was in a business suit. Made our way up to the window only to be told that all the afternoon appointments were cancelled! Apparently, each appointment is booked for 15 minutes but takes 1 hour to complete. Once the people scheduled for the morning have arrived it takes until the end of the day to complete their application processing. Highly disappointing, but we had been warned by our attorney it could happen when he met us at the immigration office. I personally can’t say it was a complete loss, the hotel was pleasant, had good AC and we discovered a FABULOUS Italian resturant nearby where we had both dinner the night before and lunch that day, it was that good.
Disappointed but not totally dejected, we gathered up our luggage crossed our fingers and headed on the train to Santarem. We hired a bolt to take us to the hotel (their version of uber) went to check in and found they didn’t have a reservation for us. I panicked just a little since they had no rooms available, then my husband realized he had mixed up the hotels - we were actually booked somewhere else. Back in a bolt…
I will say Santarem is adorable! Once we got to the correct hotel we had time to explore a bit.
The train station had tiles depicting buildings and scenes from the city and history. It was fun to then see some of them in person.
Fortunately, my visit the next day went fine and I was approved for my residency. We were warned that it could take up to 3 months for my residency card to arrive but I was delighted to receive it in the mail 3 weeks later. Unfortunately at the time I received my card, we were still waiting for them to re-schedule my husbands cancelled appointment. Which meant, I was now free to leave the country, but my husband wasn’t.
A fun thing we did do while waiting… for a new appointment, for our pallets, for our couch, was attend a craft festival in Villa do Conde a town about 30 minutes or so north of Porto and one we have talked about possibly buying a home in. The festival held in a large park, has artists and crafts persons from all over Portugal, representing the various traditional arts. Pottery, lacemaking, wool felt, basket weaving, leather work, shoe making, and more. I resisted purchasing anything I couldn’t eat. With our stuff yet to arrive and still not much furniture, I didn’t know if there would be room for anything decorative. But it was fun to look! The town boasts a roman aqueduct wall, and we went with our new, super fun friend, Gwen.
6 then 8 then 10 weeks passed and still no pallets. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I was getting very tired of the few clothes I had packed in my suitcase and didn’t really want to buy more just in time for our stuff to arrive. Also the 45 day deadline for our couch had come and gone and no amount of phone calls or emails was getting us anywhere.
It was August, vacation time in Europe and evidently EVERYONE stops working. We knew our pallets had arrived in Rotterdam, but we still didn’t know how long it would take to get them to Porto. Another 2 weeks passed and we received word that they had cleared customs and they gave us a delivery date. Hooray!
The moving company we had planned to use was of course ON VACATION, but in the perfect alignment that sometimes happens, a woman had given me the number for her moving company that morning - apparently our pallets were on the same ship! We arranged to have 3 guys to unpack the pallets and take the plastic packing boxes upstairs to either the 1st floor living area (2nd floor in the US) or the 2nd floor bedrooms (3rd floor US) and no, there is no elevator. About 1/2 the shipment was fabric and supplies for my sewing room not to mention my rather large sewing machine! We re-arranged our schedule and waited anxiously for our things to arrive. And waited, and waited. Nothing. No call. No truck. My husband was able to determine that one of the pallets was missing and appeared to be somewhere in Spain. He was afraid to tell me which one. I tried to remain calm and let him sort it out. The next morning he woke me up early saying “I think the pallets are here”. Again, no call or warning, and now we had no one lined up to unload. My husband managed to reach the mover who had been on standby the day before. The owner was literally boarding a plane to Greece but bless him, managed to get 2 guys to our house in an hour. The pallets were delivered 1 at a time so we were more or less able to get 1 unloaded before the next arrived so we didn’t run out of space on the sidewalk.
Below is my new sewing studio before and after the arrival of our pallets. It’s a bit more put together now. I’ll share that in the next blog post.
By now we had added a dresser and nightstands to the bedroom, dining table (its own Ikea adventure) a glass fronted cabinet in the living room, dining chairs as well as a desk and tables for my sewing room (some still needing assembly), but at least we had someplace to put the things that arrived on the pallets. But, still no couch.
I did point out that it would have been much harder to find someplace to put all the plastic tubs and boxes from the pallets if we did have the couch, but my husband did not find that a convincing argument. We were all tired of sitting in chairs. I would sit in a chair with my feet up on another chair and our terrier Stitch in my lap. In other words I WAS THE COUCH. It was getting very old. Finally one of our Portuguese friends took pity on us and took things into her own hands. Funny how none of my calls or emails got any results. However once Alexandra got involved I had a call with a firm delivery date within 24 hours. Not only did they deliver it on the promised day, she insisted they assemble it for us for free. (pity she didn’t get the delivery charge refunded, but let’s not quibble)
So now September 6, 3 months after we ordered it, we had a couch. Our pallets arrived August 27, 3 months after they were picked up in Glendora. It took longer than expected but we were beginning to feel at home.