Re-Emerging for a Re-Awakening.....

Yes, it has been far too long since I last posted on here and I am ashamed that I haven't kept up with it in the last year.....but I must say my excuse is that I have been through a lot since then, mainly in the realm of health, work and now current living situation (looking for a bigger place to live!). These have all seemed to have occupied most of my time in both good and bad ways and continue to, but less so now. I really do hope once I move into a bigger apt and get settled that I will have more time to devote to more enjoyable, everyday things that I can express on this blog as well as on Catavino.

Until then, I would at least like to leave some of the positive things that have happened to me here since I last posted for those curious readers. And thank you to those who sent me positive feedback about my blog and story, it feels good that my experiences have both interested and inspired people, and because of this, I really want to continue posting here. Thanks again!

3 of My Favorite Things In the Past Year:
1. Finally got my Residency Card after 2.5yrs in Aug. 2010! Valid for 5yrs under my Portuguese boyfriend and I's "civil union", which I will now be eligible for citizenship this April :)



2. Visited the beautiful Serra de Estrela Mountains, the highest mountain range in continental Portugal at over 6,500ft high and the only place with enough snow for skiing. However, we decided to go in the summer for a totally different experience, though still filled with delicious Serra de Estrela cheese and presunto (cured ham)and got to see some incredibly cute Serra de Estrela puppies!









3. Had another successful Portuguese Thanksgiving dinner with friends here, the best of the three I've done so far and besides the amazing food I managed to produce in 2 days from my tiny little kitchen, a friend brought an incredible Portuguese red, a 1947 Borba from Alentejo that we decanted and still tasted really good and very smooth! And it went perfectly with the food :) The best surprise by far I've had with Portuguese wine!




Saúde!(Cheers to your health)
Andrea

2010 Has Been A Busy Year So Far, Whew!

I have been very fortunate to have things continue to progress here positively in 2010, and this has mainly been becoming a very busy worker! And that means finally making decent money again and we all like that!! I have wanted to post several videos that I've taken on my new camera over the last several months but it was only recently that I realized I had recorded them in a non-compliant format for use on computers and the net...ARGH. Sadly then, I will not be able to post them at all....but now every new video I record will be in the right format! (Sometimes we have to learn the hard way :p)

Come summer, things will probably be slowing down again for me and I hope by the end of this month to get up some new posts. Until then, check out my posts on Catavino and enjoy some photos of my recent adventures in food and travel here in Portugal :)

Cheers,
Andrea

New Year, New Decade and Still Loving Lisbon! A Look Back On How My Life Changed Here in the Last 2 Years

So didn't manage to get any new posts in before the end of 2009 as I had hoped to.... but now I am entering 2010 feeling very refreshed and energized after my first visit back home to the US after 2 years of not leaving Portugal!

Now I exaggerate a bit when I have told people I have compared myself to Tom Hanks in Castaway after being stuck in a foreign country for 2 years was like being on a desert island but there is a bit of truth in it in the process of how you feel about a place as time passes by. Originally very excited to move to Portugal when I first came in Feb. 2008, that almost immediately started to vanish when I had immense difficulty getting a job, an apt, electricity and hot water for my apt, and getting around Lisbon without ending up lost in the ghetto. Then as things started to smooth out and I was settling in, the whole issue about legality reared its ugly head and I was in fear of getting kicked out of the country! All of a sudden I wasn't as unhappy about the difficulties of settling here and after all the work I did to get where I was, I was desperate not to have that all taken away. So I lived in fear and almost in "hiding" while searching for the right information to fix my situation. This lasted until the end of 2008 when I found out how to fix it and got started with the process in early 2009.

But my new-found relief and happiness was short-lived when the economic crisis started to really sink in here and I had very little to no work for the first 4 months of the year........I was again living in fear, but the fear of not having enough money to survive now that I could stay here! Every time I got down, I kept asking myself, what the heck are you still doing here?? Is this really worth it? Am I just doing this now because I don't want to admit defeat? Maybe at that time, that was the only reason....but then work started picking up by mid-April and by May and throughout the summer, both my work and my residency process were moving along quite well. I think this was the first time I was starting to really feel that I was finally fitting in here, especially since by then my understanding of Portuguese had gradually developed over time from a thick fog of bewilderment to seeing it starting to clear and being aware and comfortable about what was going on and being said around me. I didn't feel lost anymore, both in speech and finding my way around Lisbon, in fact I know the city better now than many natives!

Towards the end of 2009, it looked as though yet again, I would not be able to leave the country to finally go home and visit my family and friends. This was the hardest for me the year before, as I still felt like a complete foreigner, an outsider who had no business being there and didn't have the support of her own people to get her through the lonely days. This past year I thought it would be just as hard on me but it was actually quite different.....I now felt like I was a part of the Portuguese community, I worked, I had my own friends (not just my boyfriend's friends) I could carry on a conversation in Portuguese and my neighbors actually knew me and knew I was American, not the Ukranian (hooker) they may have once before regarded me as :p I felt that, despite not being able to come home for the holidays, this time I felt comfortable, content and in the end I was so used to living here this long that it was enough for me to enjoy the holidays still.

But then 2 weeks before Christmas I went on a whim to SEF (immigration) to check on my status and found out that I actually could leave the country! Of course I didn't believe it at first because they had been telling me the exact opposite the whole time but after confirming it with 2 other sources, I quickly got online and bought my plane ticket back to the US for a two week trip! In a way now, I was glad I found out at the last minute because I ended up spending Christmas both with my "family" in Portugal and left the day after to go spend it with my real family in the US, so I got the best of both my worlds actually :) It was still scary though to fly on a plane for the first time in 2 years (and the day after the attempted terrorist attack along with my 8hr flight being quite turbulent!) and when I got into Newark, my first stop before another short flight to Washington DC, I came to realize just how long I had been away! I almost felt like a foreigner in my own country; my clothing style had become distinctly Euro when I saw how differently I was dressed to Americans and I was also turning my nose up at some of the ways Americans were behaving that I used to do before! But I think my biggest change was having to stop myself from saying "excuse me" in Portuguese if I bumped into someone going into the restroom :p

Though I liked the way I had developed "culturally" in my time away, I still loved being back at home, enjoying my mom's cooking and lots of fresh-baked Christmas cookies :) But there were other outside American things which I used to love that ended up not being so exciting, especially when I knew I could get almost the same thing in Portugal at an even better and at a cheaper price(even with the exchange rate!). Don't get me wrong, there are many things I love about America, but when it comes down to certain things that are very important to me, Portugal has it better in my opinion. For example, it is so much safer here than in most of the US, with TV news shows actually reporting about things other then murders, suicides, accidents and everything else horrible that American news shows report in gruesome detail non-stop. And Portugal may not have perfect health care but it has certainly been better to me financially than in the US!

Overall it was still a much needed vacation home but by the end of my two weeks there, I was already ready to come back to Portugal. And when I got off the plane here in Lisbon, even in the pouring rain, wind and fog, everything seemed sunny to me and I felt like I truly belonged here. All the little things that I loved about this place which got overshadowed by stress and hardship, came shining through and I I appreciated them once again and much more. I was so happy to be back at my home away from home. Yes home will always be where my family is but now I can finally say that when I come back to my apt everyday after work here, I am coming home as well :) I know now that I made the right decision in coming here 2 years ago, and I am looking forward to things getting even better this new year and on :)

Hey There Stranger! Highlights From The Last 4 Months!

The American in Portugal has been busy and tied up with things in the past 4 months, but now that things are starting to smooth out again, she has ventured back to try again!

It's not that I haven't had anything to talk about, life goes on here as usual and thankfully every day gets better as my surroundings become more familiar and more at home for me. And that's what it's got to be for me since I am still "stuck" here for almost 2 years now and continue to wait for the residency approval that will allow me to leave the country without penalty to go back HOME to visit family and friends and FINALLY allow me to go tour some of these other lovely European countries around me!

Since it's been so long then, I thought I would give some little snippets of the most interesting things that have been going on for me here:


Evora and Some Interesting College Traditions:
I took my first visit to the town of Evora back in June for a graduation dinner of a friend of my boyfriend's. Evora is right smack in the middle of the country-like Alentejo and in June of course it's already SWELTERING HOTTTTT. I didn't stop sweating from the time I got out of the car there until nightfall. Fortunately though this beautiful old town's sights and monuments made it more bearable to walk around and explore and then dinner was thankfully in a well-air conditioned restaurant. The dinner was definitely the highlight of my visit, it was a full, 4 course traditional Alentejo meal complete with tons of appetizer plates to start off with which included pickled pigs ears mmmmm hahaha :p And of course there was plenty of good, STRONG Alentejo wine to go around, which can put you to bed quite quickly if you know what I mean ;) We were entertained during the meal by the college graduates themselves, who also happened to be in the school's tuna so there was lots of music and singing and chanting, with the most amazing musician and singer being a blind graduate! All college students have a traditional student's uniform (same as the Tuna uniform, see past article) that they dress in for important ceremonies like graduation and this particular Evora college went even further with some interesting looking "staffs" that students carry around that are hung with tons of little "congrats" ribbons given by friends and family. But the oddest tradition that this college has is the late-night ceremony after everyone has dined where they gather in the school's plaza where there is a wading pool set up in the middle and each graduate is ceremonially carried by his family and friends up to the pool and thrown in! Once all the graduates from each major had been dunked, they huddle together in a circle and do this primitive-like chanting and dance. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before! Glad that wasn't my school's tradition haha :D


Caramulo Vacation:


In July, my boyfriend and I took a 3 day trip up to the Caramulo mountains, about a 3hr drive north of Lisbon and an hour off the coast. We stayed at the only real hotel up on the mountain in the actual town of Caramulo, called Hotel do Caramulo which is a 4 star hotel and spa with the most SPECTACULAR VIEWS of from the mountain overlooking the valley. Knowing this, we reserved a suite which had a balcony overlooking the valley and I must say, I could have spent my whole time out there just enjoying the view :) There's not much in the town or surrounding towns but it's a great area just to drive around and admire the beautiful views and tiny picturesque villages. But if you drive a little further, you can check out the city if Viseu, which was nice. The crisp mountain air is also the best, the place actually used to be the center for pulmonary lung disease treatment so you know that's some good air. By far, it was the most relaxing vacation I've had :)

Clams in Alcochete:

We frequented the little town of Alcochete this past summer as it is right across the river from Lisbon (on the side where the Vasco Da Gama bridge is) and is known to most people as where the huge outlet mall is located. We decided to explore the actual town one day and liked the cuteness of its old part and nice views of the river which has made us return a couple more times.
But the best discovery in this town was a cafe we went to in one of their squares that had THE BEST clams you could get for your money. Yes, 12 euros is a bit expensive for a plate of clams but these were completely worth it at they were drenched in fresh garlic, butter, lemon and parsely, with fresh bread to mop it all up after! They were so good, we had to order another plate of them :p And now, we'll definitely have a reason to come back to Alcochete!


Day Trips to Nazaré and Tomar:
Sundays are usually our only complete FREE days here right now, so to quench our adventurous spirits, we've been picking a new place on the map to drive to for the day where we have lunch, walk around exploring the area and see what interesting things we can find! So far, we've been to the beautiful coastal town of Nazaré, about a 1.5hr drive north up the coast where they have the COOLEST funicular I have found that goes straight up the mountain there! And of course the view at the top is incredible :) We also went to Tomar, a 1.5hr drive northeast; it's a World Heritage site as it was the home of the Templar Knights.
The old part of the town is a bit small but just got up the hill to visit the Convento do Cristo and we easily spent 2 hours in there exploring this huge Templar monastery with some fascinating tilework and art.


BBQ!!!!
We finally decided now was the time to organize a BBQ that we had all been saying we wanted to do. So last weekend, 10 of us gathered at Parque de Campismo Fort do Cavalo, just up the hill from the town of Sesimbra where we found a grill with built-in picnic tables to party on :) We grilled homemade burgers by me, some chicken, small, Portuguese sausage called linguiça, the fatty pork parts called entremeadas and febras as well as some fresh sardinhas brought from the docks down below mmmmmmmmm :)
At the end, I introduced all our Portuguese friends to the American campfire treat of s'mores! Yea, can you believe that most Portuguese have never tried or even heard of marshmallows, let alone s'mores?? So I demonstrated how to roast the marshmallows perfectly then put the s'more together and they loved it! I think everyone had at least 4-5 s'mores on their own :D It was a "once in a lifetime" opportunity for them, as you can't find marshmallows or graham crackers in any supermarket here! Thanks to my mother, I had had them shipped to me ahead of time :)

Long Time, No See......New Posts?

Hello to all of my readers, my apologies for not having any new posts in the last month, I have been very busy taking care of some important issues that I have been waiting a long time for and keeping my fingers crossed that they will all turn out ok and be accomplished very soon!

I have also embarked on many a new social endeavors so I plan to post some of these interesting experiences within the last couple months on here as soon as I find more time to write more than this tiny snippet!

Please stop by and check around in the next month and I hope to grace you with some more entertainment then :) Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
Andrea

Cegonhas!

That's Portuguese for Storks! And as much as we Americans hear about them in the very misleading tale of "How Babies Are Made" when we are children, I don't think any of us have actually ever seen one in person! That is, until I came to Portugal and was out driving through the southern regions of Ribatejo and Alentejo and spotted these giant nests on the huge power lines! I asked Miguel, "What dumb bird decided to build a nest on these??" And he replied "Those would be the Cegonhas Andrea, or you may know them as Storks." Wow....glad they really don't deliver babies if they like to live on power lines!! But he explained that the nests that I see around there now are actually made on non-electrical perches that the government decided to add on after they kept having the Storks dying while trying to make their nests on there. So apparently before that, they would find tons of barbecued Storks on the side of the road.....geezus those birds sound pretty retarded!


But of course they don't know any better, you see because storks like to make their nests on really high perches to protect their young from predators. They do find sometimes find other less dangerous places to nest but unfortunately the power lines are usually the highest they can find here. So the government also built some of their own high perch towers for them, along with adding them to the power lines so if they did still end up coming there, they would hopefully reduce the risk of them electrocuting themselves! Poor guys hahahaha, thankfully though you can enjoy seeing these magnificent looking birds safe in their nests now all throughout the area :)

"Writings On The Wall"- Lisbon Graffiti In Style

When I first came to this country, I was surprised at how much graffiti there is around Lisbon and most cities. To most people who aren't affiliated with graffiti in some way, it usually is a symbol of a poor or rough neighborhood and shameful that they are vandalizing and defacing public or private property. But as I've passed by a lot of graffiti here many times and began to look at it more closely, there is a significant amount that is not bad at all and actually quite artistic. When you think about it, there are so many extremely old buildings and walls here that are brown and gray and disgusting with age that they really could benefit from some color!

Take this one long wall near my neighborhood in Lisbon, that starts right after Amoreiras Mall and winds up into Campolide; this wall is where it seems the "Style Wars" take place. Or at least that's what I've come to conclude from what I've observed over time. Every year the wall is painted over and various graffiti artists or groups come and take a large section of the wall which they do up an impressive work to "represent" their people. Each one is like a puzzle, trying to figure out the hidden message or symbol of their words and illustrations with what is going on in their world. Some seem to have references to world issues while others represent loved ones that were lost or something completely abstract in itself. As I strolled down the sidewalk along the wall checking out each section and taking photos of some of my faves, it was like walking through an art gallery....with the best part of it being free! Below are some of the most memorable from this year's wall, some are a bit silly while others are quite moving:

Cool Dragon



Not sure what these little guys represent but I found it funny that the railing hit just the right spot from where I was standing to take the photo to censor a certain part on one :p
Somehow I believe they meant "humor", which is common to find misspellings here when people try to write in English..... though I could be wrong since the face does resemble a bit of a known Simpsons character (but with 3 eyes?)

The Shell gasoline sign caught my eye in this one
I like the bright colors and the shininess of this one.

"Poison" This was the largest mural on the wall, an obvious memorial to a member of this team who died....

“Even far away, you continue to be present, you woke up who was sleeping, to see the future that was in front. You drank from your own name and raised it so high that you have become impossible to reach….”

“Down here we continue to wait, we scream really loud that I wish you could be here! But what is time after all? Small fragments of life, at any moment everything could end. You lived it well, to everyone you touched, your magic lasts, your voice won’t shut up!! Thank you Miguel”


Well done and well written guys.