The Atlantic ocean is about a ten minute walk from our house. Well, at least the cliffs bordering the ocean are. It’d take another four or five seconds of falling straight down to actually meet the ocean.

We’re on a peninsula of sorts; on one side of us are the cliffs and on the other side, about a seven minute drive away, is the very long sandy beach where we relax, watch the waves, and count our blessings.

But for walks, we head toward the side with the cliffs. There is virtually nothing but shrubbery and silence there, interspersed with numerous trails and dirt roads. Who made them, and when, and even why, is a complete mystery to me. But I’m grateful for them because they give us plenty of options to explore while taking walks.

Sometimes I walk the trails alone, and I’m constantly amazed at how quiet it is. Not even many bird sounds. Just the occasional drone of a distant boat, or the buzzing of an insect, or the wind whooshing by your ears. If it’s not a windy day, it’s as silent as a dream. After walking just minutes from our house, I can easily feel like I am the only person in the world.

On my latest journey, I noticed some stairs had been cut into the cliffside. I thought it was pretty amazing because there are no drivable roads that come anywhere close to that part of the cliffs. Some of the trails that crisscross the area are essentially roads in that they’re wide enough and have obviously been occasionally driven upon. But you’d need a Humvee or an ATV to get around most of them, and I have yet to see one try.

I assumed someone had cut the stairs into the cliffside to provide access to a secluded beach or a great fishing spot. I continued my trek over the next hill, and when I looked back in the direction of the stairs, I saw this:

At the bottom of the stairs, which you can no longer see from that vantage point, is a house of some sort. The only access must be by boat, or I suppose an ATV followed by a trek down the stairs. It’s hard to imagine a more secluded place to live. I zoomed the camera in closer hoping to view more details when I got back to the house.

It looks like there’s a large deck on what is for all intents and purposes a house. It doesn’t look much like a structure for fishing. In fact, I couldn’t see where you’d even tether a boat. I can’t imagine the logistics of building such a place.

I’ll need to either bring binoculars or a zoom lens to decipher further what it is. I’m not too keen on finding my way down to the stairs and walking down to knock on the door. It could be where Hannibal Lecter takes his victims, or perhaps its a hideout for drug runners. Is it a coincidence that I saw the Portuguese navy patrolling the waters right around there?

I did decide to take the image into Photoshop and see if a digital zoom would reveal anything further. Lo and behold I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I do believe that’s Luke Skywalker practicing with his light saber! Who would’ve thunk! Luke’s hideout was in Portugal all along!

Okay, just kidding about Mr. Skywalker. I’m pretty sure his hideout is on another planet in another galaxy far, far away anyway. But it is a remarkable house, and I hope, over time, I can find someone who can explain it to me.

UPDATE

I found someone who could explain it to me. Our good friend Luis, who provided excellent painting and light hanging services for us, told me that it is a private building built to provide support for fishing. I still marvel at the construction in such a remote place, surely everything had to be boated over. Anyway, mystery solved. Guess I won’t be knocking on the door to find out anything more!

Here pictured is the first cherry pie I’ve ever made. The other day, I passed by a street vendor who had dozens of flats of cherries and strawberries. I decided to stop by to sample his wares.

He didn’t speak a lick of English, so we struggled with the pricing somewhat. I have gotten to the point where I know my Portuguese numbers through 100, give or take. But when the Portuguese say anything, it whizzes into one ear, bounces around the empty space in my head and then exits before I can process the first syllable. As a result, I couldn’t make out whether he was saying 25 or 250 or what. He only had larger bills, so we struggled to make it all work. But he didn’t want my 20, so we were stumped until he fetched a pencil and paper and wrote out what the deal was. Turns out one flat of strawberries was 2.50, so we made it two, and when added to the very large flat of cherries for 10, we had a cool 15 euros to deal with, which we could both handle cash-wise.

We haven’t seen a pie of any kind anywhere in Portugal so far. They seem to go in for tarts and mousse and cakes and pastries instead. So you’ll never hear the phrase, “As Portuguese as (insert a fruit here) pie.” The grocery stores have no pie tins or pre-made pie crusts. I’m not stupid enough to hassle with making my own crust, so we used a tart thingee and it worked just great.

So clearly, it was the best pie we’ve ever had in Portugal. Because it was the first. And boy it was delicious. I may have to stop by that vendor again, although pitting all the cherries was a bit of a pain the butt. But my mouth is telling me that it was very worth it! Bonus: Carolyn’s not as big a fan of cherry pies, so I get most of it. Booyah!

I’ve always liked the fog. Whether it rolls in from the ocean or lays its sleepy head over the countryside like a warm blanket, it conjures forth a temporary world of peace and tranquility. Sounds are muted, bringing serenity and stillness to an otherwise bustling world. Sight is also muted, granting all creatures in its grasp a momentary gift of visual equality. While in its calm embrace, it’s as if Mother Nature is gently prodding us to focus only on what’s near. It reminds me of a blanket of snow, except without all the school closures and car crashes and people dying from hypothermia.

I’ve always liked the fog.

It was just over 9 years ago that my ex-husband walked out of our home, and the life I had known for 25 years went up in smoke.  At times the pain of that experience took my breath away. I felt I was suffocating.  If you told me then where I would be now, I would never have believed it.

I said “I do” almost four years ago to the wonderful amazing man I now call my husband. He is kind, generous, funny, and smart.  He keeps me grounded, showers me with grace and love, and has helped heal wounds so deep I feared they would never heal.  I am blessed, I am loved, and I am accepted for who I am. What more can love give?

Portugal would pretty much be our paradise on earth… if they only used English as their native tongue. I’m only kidding about that; it’s our problem, not theirs, and Portuguese is a beautiful language. But the truth is, the only part of this whole experience we would describe as difficult is learning Portuguese. We’re retired, for goodness sake. We’re not supposed to have to work at anything!

But work we do. We are not only taking lessons from a tutor and playing around with some software training (via a very effective online program called “Memrise,”) , but also every time we go out, we read all the street signs and advertisements aloud and debate what we think they’re saying. When we go into any given store, we look at tons of products and attempt to decipher their purpose. Sometimes we see products unique to Portugal and can’t help but be impressed at their ingenuity.

For example, I want to buy this tube of mofo repellent before we go back to the states. There aren’t very many bad mofo’s in Portugal, but it’ll be nice to have a tube of Stop Mofo if I wander into a bad area of Portland or Seattle.

Some translations are easier than others. For instance, the sign to the left is obviously telling people to control their velociraptors. We were surprised to learn that dinosaurs are apparently still alive and well here in Portugal. In fact, not only are there signs pointing to where you can find them, as seen below, but they even have dental clinics dedicated solely to the care of their dinosaur teeth. The top sign must mean, “lots of dinosaurs,” and of course it’s easy to translate the one below it to “dental clinic,” obviously intended for the dinosaurs mentioned above.

So you see, it’s not all just about memorization. Sometimes you have to connect the dots and use your brain power to figure this stuff out. And as you can tell, our brain power isn’t suffering from any dementia yet, boy howdy.

Otherwise, how are our Portuguese lessons going, you ask? Well, it’s progressing, we answer. We have been inching our way toward a little more understanding of things. We are catching more words spoken by passersby. As already illustrated, we can obviously translate more signs than ever (although accompanying illustrations are always appreciated). And of course the more Portuguese we throw around at strangers, the more we can confuse them as to what the hell we’re trying to say.

There are days when we think we’re never going to learn enough. And then there are other days when we feel like we’re getting a handle on it, like when we can finally translate the stop signs on the streets. There aren’t nearly as many of them here as in the US, mostly due to the prevalence of round-abouts, or as I like to call them, “scream generators.” Carolyn still hasn’t gotten used to cars racing up to the roundabout just as we’re passing in front of them. So far, they’ve always stopped in time, but we don’t know if that’s due to Carolyn’s screams or whether they all understand they have to give way to anyone coming from the left.

We did finally figure out that the letters on the red signs not only spell STOP, but they mean that too. It was confusing for a long time because the Portuguese word for stop is “pare,” and we couldn’t find out what “stop” meant in Portuguese. In the end, we figured they didn’t want English speakers to use paring knives while driving, so they went with the English version to cut down on the emergency room visits.

Otherwise, we can provide an example of our progress by showing you an entry from our training book. We can actually read the below and mostly understand what it’s saying:

O Pedro levanta-se as 7:00, toma um duche, vesta-se e as 7:45 senta-se para comer. Ele toma o pequeno-almoco sempre em casa. Come sempre pao com manteiga e doce a bebe café com leite sem acucar. O Pedro e economist e entre as 9:00 e as 13:00 trabalha numa empresa no centro da cidade. As 13:15 almoco com os colegas num restaurante perto do trabalho. As tercas e quintas, as 18:00, tem aulas de ingles numa escola de linguas. A noite chega e casa e prepara o jantar. Janta as 20:00 e deita-se sempre as 22:00. Ao sabado de manha, o Pedro vai as compras e a tarde limpa a casa. Ao sabado a noite, ele sai com os amigos e deita-se tarde. Ao domingo, ele so se levanta as 11 horas e almoca em casa dos pais.

Now, if you don’t speak Portuguese, you’re probably wondering what all that means. Well, he says, hitching up his pants with Trumpian confidence while speaking in boastful tones not unlike Don Knotts at his best (albeit in a lower timbre). It has something to do with Pedro the economist who goes to work and is struggling with the ideas of eating his children and having spiders in his pants. He’s also a bit upset when he goes out to eat, because perky college students always serve him almonds instead of meatballs. So he just licks the arugula and refuses to tip. But they don’t tip very much in Portugal anyway, so despite his worrying about getting shot due to his stinginess, he makes it home safely with almonds in his shoes.

The paragraph actually doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, because there are very few guns in Portugal, so his worries are very misplaced. We just don’t think Pedro is all that smart. But hey, if your claim to fame is to have a one paragraph biography in a language textbook, how smart can you be?

The interesting thing about the Portuguese language is that if a Portuguese speaker were to speak that paragraph aloud, here’s what the entire thing would sound like:

OPedrolecon shh shh prajant sh sh sh rrrrr-limdos-doshpais.

All uttered in approximately three seconds. And we’re supposed to understand that.

It’s not really a long term problem though. Because as soon as we give them our best I’m-not-even-going-to-pretend-I-understood-one-word-of-that look, they translate everything they just said into about ten English words.

I’m not making that up. Once, our attorney was talking with a banker on our behalf. They went back and forth for fifteen minutes in Portuguese. When they were done, I asked what was said. He told me, “She says that you have to turn in the form and wait five days.” That was it? He shrugged and said, “pretty much.”

So they either use a lot of words to communicate individual ideas, or they were talking smack about me, knowing I couldn’t understand. Maybe I have to buy some of the Stop Mofo paste for here after all.

A year ago this week we landed in Lisbon, where we were first exposed to Portugal’s amazingly inexpensive yet delicious wine, the beautiful (albeit rainy, at least during our visit) streets of Lisbon, and some cramped living quarters, especially in the steep stairway of our rented apartment.

One year later, we are very much enjoying the inexpensive wine (with a bit of a taste for their “green wine,” or “vinho verde”), we’ve driven the winding streets of Lisbon and the surrounding area to the point where we hardly use the GPS anymore, and the apartment we purchased for short-term rentals has its own narrow stairway (although not as narrow as the one we rented in Belem, shown at the right).

We couldn’t be happier with our choice of Portugal. We were fortunate enough to find a house in Sesimbra just minutes away from a sandy beach that stretches beyond sight. We pass by a medieval castle every time we drive into town. And while we have had some of the same May rain we did a year ago, it quickly gives way to 75-80 degree days, which is perfect weather for the beach or our ever-warming pool. I describe it thusly because it’s still too damn cold to swim in. I’ve jumped in a couple of times for an immediate cool-down. But it’s straight to the ladder after the cold water wreaks its bodily-shrinkage-havoc.

A quick drive into Sesimbra town brings us into a delightfully touristy area of shops in front of another nice beach. Condos and other buildings are built into the hillside, reminiscent of a seaside town in Greece. And the wine is still as inexpensive as it was a year ago.

In addition, the area surrounding our home has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of nature’s beauty. We enjoy taking walks whereby in the first five minutes we are treated to a 220 degree vista of the Atlantic ocean. We can see the Cabo Espichel lighthouse from the upper floor of our house, and can even walk to it if we don’t mind a two hour round-trip hike.

While taking a walk recently, I decided to photograph the various weeds and flowers that lined the way. Yes, even the weeds are beautiful in Portugal!

Before you get a gander at the views I experienced when I turned right instead of left at the mailbox, here’s an image of Carolyn driving for the first time, from the narrow streets of Alfama all the way to our home in Sesimbra. She was more than a little nervous, although the pedestrians of Lisbon should have been more so. Just kiddin’. She’s a good driver, but the tiny streets, confusing street lights, and chaotic traffic are not for the faint of heart. Needless to say, we made it home in one piece. Although it took us a bottle of vodka to recover from the trauma.

The two panoramic views below give you an idea of the landscape surrounding our house. The top one is my attempt to show that, since we’re on a peninsula, we can see the Atlantic in about an 180 degree arc. It didn’t come out that great, but in person, I just stood at gawked at it for a good five minutes, which is about how long it took me to walk to the spot in the first place.

I’m not sure what this device is, but I could have sworn I heard a high-pitched, nasally voice saying, “Phone home! Phone home!”

Otherwise, just more gorgeous scenery of the coast. I’m enjoying my walks here, to be sure. The weather is perfect for walking, the occasional human being I encounter is always nice and polite, if not a bit shy, and most of the walk is completely quiet.

We’ve named our home, “Casa do Paraíso,” which means “House of Paradise.” That’s truly the way it feels…

Like most Americans, Carolyn and I had been indoctrinated into the horror stories about socialized medicine, often juxtaposed with friend-of-a-friend anecdotes about how much better American medicine was than anywhere else in the world.

So when her lower back started hurting like hell for a couple of days, and then her abdomen started swelling, and then little caterpillar thingies started crawling out of her pores (just kiddin’), we thought it might be time to plunge into the abyss. We were a bit nervous to see what voodoo these doctors would perform, especially after an expected eighteen hour wait in a room filled to capacity with people sporting newly-dismembered limbs, or with faces populated with pustules the size of hamburger patties, and sheep.

We were one of the 99-plus percenters: the 99-plus percent of Americans who have never experienced anything but American-style medicine, but had an unshakable opinion about how it compares to the rest of the world regardless.

Personally, I’d revised a lot of my opinions after reading various statistics on health care. After studying the reports, I began to wonder if perhaps America’s only medical miracle was teaching people how to twist their bodies in such a way that their heads would fit neatly up their ass. For instance, the U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in life expectancy at birth (and it’s getting worse… and don’t blame it on North America, Canada beats us by three years), and has one of the worst infant mortality rates in the industrialized world, beaten out by such luminaries as Poland, Hungary, and of course Portugal. In fact, the list below the US reads like a who’s-who of third world countries.

And there’s a lot, lot more (like we probably lead the world in healthcare lawsuits as well)… but this is also in addition to our paying the most per capita in the world. Let me repeat that: We spend more on health care per person than any other country in the world. Surely that has to buy us something?

If statistics won’t prove our bang for the buck, what about a great anecdote that supports the idea that whenever you go to the doctor outside the U.S., you better bring a cooler with two full day’s supply of rations as well as a couple of books and a pillow?

Kevin & Carolyn to the rescue! We were prepared to restore a little glory to Old Glory, at least as far as getting medical help was concerned.

Armed with our insurance card and a Google Map to the nearest hospital, we set out on our quest to experience the underbelly of socialized medicine.

And this was to be no lightweight example. We were really testing the system by going in on a Saturday, surely one of the busiest days of the week for hospitals.

We had no idea what to expect as we drove into the hospital parking lot. It looked clean and uncrowded. We were immediately suspicious. Do they just kill everyone and steal their cars?

The Portuguese love to use number machines to set your place in line. As an example, I recently had to go to Ikea to return a light fixture. I looked aghast at the hoards of people morosely sitting in the waiting area. It was the exact picture I had in my mind as to what to expect from a typical hospital waiting room in a country with socialized medicine. I took a number from the machine. It spat out B 096. I looked at the monitor. It was at B 032. I immediately tossed the tag into the waste bin, deciding that the fixture wasn’t as ugly as we thought.

So if Ikea was that bad… how much worse would a hospital on a Saturday be?

We ambled through the front door like lost puppies, looking for the Recepção sign. Over there! But wait! There was no line, and only one employee behind the counter. We were probably in the wrong place. Maybe Recepção really meant “Reciepts,” and no one needed those.

We greeted her with our standard line: “Fala Inglês?” To which she responded with the typical Portuguese response of, “A little.” She then proceeded to converse with us in better English than my high school English teacher.

We gave her our particulars. Not once did she ask why we wanted to see a doctor. I found that refreshing. What business is it of anyone besides the doctor anyway? But in the U.S., you’re usually forced to offer up a detailed description of all the bumps on your private parts, when you last went pee and what color the urine was, plus your shoe size, all to a receptionist who takes ten minutes to find the right color yellow to fill in the little box with the accurate rendering of the color of your pee.

Our Portuguese counterpart had no such interest in those particulars, but simply took our insurance card and our address. She then said they couldn’t bill them directly. That was fine. We didn’t care. We needed a doctor. We didn’t mind if they were going to charge us two thousand dollars for being dumb enough to be an American inside a socialized medical country. We just wanted some pills or surgery dammit!

That was it. She didn’t need to know our income level, or whether we even had a credit card, or what our shoe size was. We didn’t have to fill out eight forms about our medical history and what our great-grandparents died from. She just said, “The doctor is upstairs right now, if you’ll take a seat, he should be down to see you in, oh, maybe fifteen minutes or so. It’s hard to say.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but in the U.S., when I’ve had an appointment, the wait is usually much longer than fifteen minutes. With no appointment, into something like urgent care of the emergency room? I usually plan on an hour, or maybe a week, or more. But here we were, without an appointment, wandering into a random hospital with an undisclosed medical condition, and the doctor will be with us in fifteen minutes? I knew she had to be a serial liar.

After about twenty minutes (See! Five minutes off!), he appeared, and waved us in to his office… us as in both of us. I was a little confused at first, because the only other time I’ve been allowed into a medical office with my wife was when she was giving birth, or we were receiving very bad news. However, as he showed us to our chairs, it occurred to me that it was quite smart to do so. There was no need for a nurse to be on hand with a male doctor and a lone female patient. Her husband was right by her side. Cost savings right there, kaching!

The whole experience with the doctor reminded me of what it must have been like to go to the doctor long before insurance companies stuck their nose into everything and screwed it all up, sending costs through the roof and the quality of care below the basement. He took his time asking her questions. He prodded and poked her as he tried to figure out what the problem might be. He then sat us down and explained in detail all the things it could be, what it probably wasn’t, and what we were going to do to narrow it down further. He prescribed three medications: two of them muscle relaxants and one a pain medicine. He was pretty certain it was a pulled or irritated muscle, but just in case, he said if those things didn’t work, we should come back and see him tomorrow, Sunday.

After shaking our hands warmly, he led us back to Recepção, and explained everything to her she would need to know to finalize our process.  He shook our hands one more time, as if wishing there was something more wrong with either of us so he could spend even more time with us, and took his leave. The receptionist then told us we could make an appointment, but since we might not actually have to come in, we should just come in whenever we felt like it, that would be fine.

The charge? 65 bucks. That’s without any insurance-anything. That’s for about a half-hour of a doctor’s time in a hospital. Women pay more for their haircuts in the U.S.

We can bill our insurance company for it, but if we forget, what the heck– it’s already about the same price as most co-pays in the U.S.!

So how about the medicine you ask? Maybe that’s where they sock it to us? The grand total was fifteen bucks. No, that’s not the co-pay. That’s the entire cost of three full prescriptions.

We can be very happy getting sick in Portugal.

So I gotta tell ya. I know people hate to change their minds about things. But if you really think the U.S. has the best health care in the world… do some research. Start with the data, the internet is very handy for that. Honestly? I’m not sure you can find any data that actually supports that premise. Now throw in our lone experience in a socialized-medicine country –and one that is a little further behind technologically than many western countries besides– and boy howdy, it’s time to give that single payer health care system some thought, don’t you think?

The temperature has been hovering around 21 degrees celsius (or for you luddites, about 70 degrees) the last few weeks. Not quite beach-going weather, but since it’s April, and we still have Oregonian blood coursing through our veins, and the beach is just about a ten minute drive away… it was time to get beachy! So we threw on our crocs, tossed the brollies into Marco’s boot, and meandered down the road to the beach.

We were told the Atlantic is a little chilly, and we can confirm that’s true. Not the bone-chilling, frostbite-inducing ice water of the Oregon coast, but chilly nonetheless. Still, with the ease of getting there, the warm sun, and endless expanses of sand, the lack of salt water up the nose was a small price to pay, and certainly an outing worth doing, especially on a Monday.

Yes, retirement is all that.

Meanwhile, our home is slowly being brought up to snuff. Still not ready for the full blog presentation; our 32 boxes from home haven’t touched down yet and we still have a couple trips to Ikea to make. That should bring it to about 18 visits, all accomplished without filing for divorce, which we believe is a new Ikea record. A couple made it to 17 last year, but then she shot him.

Just up the road from our house is our mailbox, and not far from that are the trash bins where we take our garbage. There is no charge for the latter service. I guess it’s just one of the benefits of living in a socialist-leaning society.

Another couple of hundred yards from there are the scenes you see below. It is utterly peaceful and completely quiet. An occasional bird, perhaps. Or maybe the motor from a passing boat on the ocean below, or some buzzing insects. But then it descends into total silence for a time, and all you’re left with is your own thoughts and an admiration of this timeless beauty.

And with that, we wish you a warm and safe boa noite.

Today we decided to go on a grueling road trip to see some of the sights rural Portugal has to offer. So we read up on an article from Travel & Leisure and hit the first destination on the list. Seven minutes later, we got out of the car and started snapping pictures.

The first stop was to visit an area with dinosaur footprints. We pass the sign to them every time we go into town, so we thought it was about time. Fortunately, the scenery and hike were beautiful. It’s fortunate because we couldn’t really make heads nor tails nor feet out of the supposed tracks. Right next door is Cabo Espichel, which has a lighthouse and a church built in about 1701. We had a delightful day, and when we were all done, we hopped in the car and were home in two songs!

Here are some of our pictures, in random order:

And here are the rest of the shots. Such gorgeous scenery right near our doorstep. We’re still swooning… and it’s the kind of scenery we’ll never get tired of. In addition, the silence in some of these areas is virtually complete. Just absolute quiet and solitude… the perfect place for retirement.