The basics

Lisbon update #4

My original plan had been to make this the first of our updates. In fact, I started working on it at least a week before we departed with the intention of sending it out before we left the U.S. Things don't always go according to plan. The information is still relevant, though, so here goes:

All of you probably know some of this. Some of you probably know all of this. The goal here is to ensure all of you have a chance to know all of this.

Portugal shares the Iberian Peninsula with Spain. It is home to the Westernmost point in continental Europe. At 35,603 sq miles, the country is slightly smaller than Indiana (36,418 sq miles). For perspective, 6.697 million people live in Indiana while 10.31 million call Portugal home. 

We are living in Lisbon, Portugal's capital, which has been occupied by one or more groups of people since the Iron Age, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. (It is also the second-oldest capital city in Europe behind Athens.) This is likely due to its location. The above map shows it's roughly 1/3 of the way up from the southern border of Portugal.

The second map illustrates its spot in a protected harbor where the Tagus River meets the Atlantic Ocean. This combination of fresh water with easy access to the Atlantic Ocean made Portugal a center of the Age of Discovery. Portugal has a monument to its great explorers which you can read more about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padr%C3%A3o_dos_Descobrimentos

(Names you may be familiar with: Henry the Navigator, "regarded as the main initiator of the Age of Discovery"; Vasco de Gama; and Ferdinand Magellan, among many, many others.)

As can be expected with a nearly six-century empire, there is an equally lengthy record of colonization, displacement, disestablishment, and enslavement of the natives of the lands the Portuguese "discovered." While the government was originally slow to acknowledge their role, they have been coming about of late.

I am, however, straying from the path I'd set out for this missive. So back to the basics.

In Portugal, we:

• are getting used to the metric system. (At her doctor's appointment, Amy was asked for her height in centimeters and weight in kilograms. There was a pause while she googled the answers.) 

• measure temperature in degrees Celsius (brief moment of panic upon first seeing that our stove tops out at 250).

• have learned that two kilometers is actually not all that far to walk (though the hills can increase the cardiovascular workout tremendously). 

• pay for our purchases in euros; right now, the exchange rate with the US dollar is as good as it has been in decades, nearly one for one. (When we first started researching our move, I figured we'd lose roughly 12% of the value of any money we converted from dollars to euros.) 

• are currently on Western European Summer Time. Lisbon is in the same time zone as London, five hours ahead of Eastern time, six ahead of Central time, and eight ahead of Pacific time. Noon here is 7 AM in Boston, 6 AM in St. Louis, 4 AM in San Francisco. Which basically means if we want to have a live conversation with anyone in North America, the best times for that are early in the day for you as we are usually in bed by 6 PM St. Louis time (midnight here).

• are on a 24-hour clock. So the way we'd see the last sentence of the previous bullet here would be "We are usually in bed by 18h00 St. Louis time (00h00 here)."

• are staying up much later than we used to in St. Louis. Most Portuguese restaurants don't really open for dinner until 19h00 and though we haven't actually eaten in a restaurant yet, it's not unusual for us to eat food after 21h00 or so, which is about when we'd be getting to bed in St. Louis. Also, we recently had a package delivered to our door at 22h00.

• are still available by email and our U.S. cellphone numbers still work (thanks, Google Voice!) so feel free to send a text whenever you'd like! In short, anything that relies on the internet for data transmission (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Zoom ...) all work as they did before we moved. We do have Portuguese cellphone numbers and a landline as part of our cable/phone/internet package and while we're happy to give those out if you want them (mine's actually in my signature below), they will be neither the easiest nor cheapest ways to keep in touch.

We're reading all of your responses to our emails! Thank you! We haven't had a chance to write back to everyone and we're sorry. We hear you want photos of our apartment, the views out the windows, and the area around us. (And we hear you want more photos in general.) We'll get to that ASAP, we promise. 

Other news in brief:

Josie continues to conquer Lisbon. For some reason, these experiences happen more when Amy is walking her than when I am but I continually hear reports of people making kissy noises at her and petting her. A couple of days ago, a man broke off a piece of his sandwich and just handed it to her while a flabbergasted Amy looked on. Before Amy could react, he did it again! Needless to say, our extraordinarily food-oriented pup had her mind blown 🤯. It's going to be a challenge for a while to get her not to rush toward every human being we pass on the sidewalk 😄.

She's also loving the floor-to-almost-ceiling windows that were a strong attraction for us as well:

Finally ...

We had a rather intimidating-looking letter arrive in the mail recently.

After some sleuthing with DeepL, we learned we had a package held up in customs and CTT (the Portuguese postal service) wanted to know what it was. Odd. We couldn't recall ordering anything outside the EU (packages from inside the EU don't go through customs) so we had nothing to tell them. More sleuthing. Eventually we found that yes! we had ordered a dog tag! And it's coming from England. Mystery solved! After registering with and reporting the item to CTT, they charged us 6,50€ to allow the 12 GB pounds (18 €) dog tag to make the final leg of its journey. Because that's customs. Lesson learned: Zero packages from outside the EU!

We've also gotten a few items that have been mailed to us from the U.S. These have taken two weeks from postdate to reach our mailbox here, just in case anyone's wondering.

That's all for now.

Love from Lisbon!

Scott & Amy