Settling in a little?

Lisbon update #3

With the arrival of our bags on Sunday, the dominant theme of this week has been "returning a whole bunch of stuff we ordered on Saturday" because we don't need them now that we had our luggage back. These gyrations exemplify several of the ways in which our lives here are different than what we're used to.

First, we ordered a toaster oven from a local used merchandise store called Cash Converters. It's not the best website, so Oops, it's ginormous. Which is fine because Cash Converters has a generous return policy and it only cost €4,99 to have it delivered to our door. Getting it back became a bit of a thing, though. Cash Converters sent me a label and said,

"You can go to the CTT store and send your Order free of all."

(Or at least that's what Google Translate says the message said.) Problems: What is a CTT Store? Where can I find one? And how do I get this beast that I paid to have brought to me because I didn't think I'd be able to carry it to this place? All this dovetails with the general observation that everything seems to take about four times longer to do here than I expect it will. Often, though not always, this is at least in part a language barrier issue. In this case I figured out there was a CTT location not far from our flat but I'd noted it many times before because it said BancoCTT on the signs so I assumed it was a bank. I know banks used to give out toaster ovens when you opened an account but was I really going to be lugging a toaster oven to a bank to send it back to a second-hand appliance store? I figured I could a) try and call the place, b) walk over empty-handed and scout things out or c) just go for broke and take a walk with the toaster and see what happened. I opted for c (calling anywhere here is freakin' intimidating). BancoCTT operates on the fairly ubiquitous ticketing system that involves pressing buttons on a touchscreen immediately upon entering an establishment. You walk through a series of menus and get a ticket which assigns you to "B0036" or "C0008" depending on your choices. Then you watch for your number to come up on a tv screen and see which clerk you're supposed to approach. Our first encounter with this system was when trying to figure out how to report our lost luggage at the airport. We've since been at least four other places that operate on this same principle. It requires some work with the translator app on the front end to make sure you're in the correct queue. In this case I was trying to manage a bulky box at the same time. In the end, things got handled. The clerks rolled with the fact that the box almost literally couldn't fit over the counter (and the woman who was being helped and got dropped momentarily as her clerk left her post to help mine manage the box, seemed to find the entire scene amusing) and I just tracked the package and see that it has arrived at its intended destination. One return done!

Amy spent a large portion of Saturday 7/2 at the mall buying clothes. Our intention had been to go together. We left the flat together and took a new route to the mall, one which took us past a Cerelitas, where Amazon had directed us to go with our box of glass storage containers that we needed to return because one arrived broken. Amy had a bar code in her email and our instructions were to take the box to the store and show them the bar code. They would take it from there. What actually happened felt like something straight out of an Abbott and Costello routine. Amy's phone had shut down overnight and required the SIM card PIN to restart. We didn't have that with us so her phone was useless. We logged into her email from my phone and retrieved the bar code. We got to front of the line and the clerk said he couldn't accept the box because it was opened. So we had to buy packing tape (which they sold, fortunately) and step out of line to secure the box. We got back into line and the clerk asked for Amy's name and phone number which have been surprisingly challenging pieces of information to convey in our time here thus far. (Spelling out A-M-Y in English invariably results in the recipient typing "E" as the first letter. I know my Portuguese numbers from 1-9 but haven't mastered the letters yet. Pronouncing "A" as "Ah" - which is definitely Spanish - does not seem to help.) He then proceeded to take my phone and type the letters and numbers from the bar code into his cash register. Then he scanned a separate bar code with a bar code scanner. (While he was doing this, my phone rang. I have learned that it's best to just answer Portuguese phone numbers - they're not Scam Likely calls ... yet, anyway. But I couldn't answer this call. It turns out that was someone from the baggage company calling to say they'd found some of our luggage. That missed call basically killed the rest of the day. More on that in a moment.) He frowned at his computer before telling us that the bar code was reading as invalid. Um. OK. Now what? The box had been too bulky to fit in my backpack and was not easy to carry there. It was getting hot out. We retreated to consult our email and see if we were missing something. Or maybe the clerk had mis-typed the bar code? We tried again and asked if he could scan the bar code from my phone. He said it doesn't work to do that. I've had plenty of bar codes scanned from my phone. None have been in Portugal, though, and he's presumably tried to scan many bar codes on phones so who am I to argue? He very kindly gave me an email address to forward the bar code to and he printed it and then scanned it from the printout. Still invalid. So I walked home without a working phone (Amy took mine to the mall as she needed directions more than I did) and carrying the heavy-ish box. I spent the next 8 hours trying futilely to respond to the luggage handlers who not only tried to call but also sent an email that read in its entirety (and in English):

Good Morning

We found one of your luggage, we tried to contact you without success.We await your contact

Best regards

Finally, at 7 PM I gave up on getting someone to answer the phone and took an Uber to the airport. Just before midnight, I returned with our bags. 

We still have nearly all of the clothes Amy bought on Saturday sitting by the door waiting to go back to the mall. Hopefully, we can go tomorrow before it gets too hot. Temperatures here have soared and might hit 40 (Celsius - google it; we do 😄) this weekend. It's not super humid at least. We also have packaged and (hopefully) ready to simply drop off at Cerelitas - mailing labels attached, which we had to buy a printer for ... thanks, Cash Converters! - a box and a cardboard mailer both going back to Amazon Spain. These all dribbled in Monday - Wednesday or so.

Smoking

There's definitely more of it here than there was in St. Louis. Not inside - a new law was recently passed banning smoking indoors in at least Lisbon and I have not seen anyone smoking indoors at all. There is a tendency, though, for smokers to cluster just outside the doors to, say, a shopping mall which can make getting in and out of these spaces a bit challenging for a brief time. And once in a great while it's possible to end up downwind of someone while walking and the narrowness of the sidewalks and the busy-ness of the streets can make getting around the person a challenge. Mostly, though, smoking is a non-issue, which is great as that had been something we'd been a little worried about.

Food

It's everywhere. Every third store front seems to be either a restaurant, a "snack-bar," a fruitaria, a pastelaria, a gelateria, or some type of grocery store (which range in size from barely wider than a door and maybe 20 feet deep to absolutely ginormous). And almost all of what we've sampled has been really tasty and comparatively inexpensive. We haven't even been yet to the cheese shop that our real estate agent recommended, which is just over a block away. We didn't bring any pots and pans with us and our stove is of the induction variety, which is new to us, so we haven't bought any yet. Consequently, we haven't cooked anything but when we do the raw ingredients promise to be fresh and a pleasure to work with. 

We've had our first run of challenging weather with the heat but even the high temps are easier to manage without the accompanying humidity. We opened the windows last night and it was tolerable for sleeping. Our apartment, renovated in 2014, has both heat and A/C (not a given in Portugal) and it appears to be very energy efficient (closing the almost floor-to-ceiling windows in the front blocks out nearly all of the street noise).

Church

We went this morning for the first time and it felt right. We met people from Brazil, Colombia, Hong Kong, Egypt, South Africa, Ghana, France, and Nepal among others. The music is a touch lacking compared to what we're used to but the format of the service was familiar, the sermon was a great message and of the "put the passage of scripture into context before unpacking the meaning" variety that worked so well for me in St. Louis. 

Getting around

We've figured out the subway and it's terrific! I can put my backpack down without worrying about setting it in something sticky. The signage is clear (indicating, for example, which street you'll exit to if you take a particular staircase). The stations are beautifully decorated. Here's Amy waiting for a train on the yellow line (we live very close to Rato, the station at one end of the yellow line):

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott (& Amy the editor... yes, this really is the edited version!)