My Story Mike Wasinski sometimes forgets how challenging his first few weeks in a new country were.

My Story: Remembrances of Things Past

Story and photo by Mike Wasinski

I sometimes forget how challenging the first few weeks were … So, today was a bit challenging. We’ve mastered (ha!) the driving situation and directions for the most part. We’ve found a few restaurants and bars that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed. We’ve been able to purchase most of what we need to get by. We’ve surprisingly stayed pretty close to budget, except for some expected big expenses. (They deliver our E-Bikes on Thursday! Eeeeeee!) But today we planned to make our residency appointment with SEF and get our NIF fiscal numbers. Daunting tasks. The temporary residency visas we got through the San Francisco Portuguese consulate are for four months. Now we have to apply for a year-long visa at the SEF office here. I read that they are very behind and, sometimes, you don’t get an appointment until after your four-month visa expires. They say it’s not a problem legally, as long as you have an appointment scheduled; but I was afraid the appointment might run into the summer, when we plan to travel. You’re supposed to call to make an appointment (wait until the automated Portuguese language menu is done and, eventually, you’ll be connected to someone who speaks English, they said). We still hadn’t gotten our Portuguese phone numbers, so I had to call from my San Diego number. No worries. I get how the international codes work. Or so I thought. I tried several times with several different prefixes and never got connected. Very frustrating. Well, I thought, let’s shelve this for now and go downtown to get the NIFs (fiscal numbers) we need—basically an ID the government can use to track your major purchases, so they can make sure they get their share of the taxes. We could deal with the visa appointment later! So, we drove downtown, found the Finanças office, figured out the “take-a-number” system, and waited for our number to be called. I had read this was the simplest of the many residency hurdles we would face. Not so much. Everyone we had spoken to up until this point—clerks, waiters, flight attendants—had spoken English pretty well. Our streak ended. After ten minutes of trying to understand what she was telling us, we figured out that we needed a Portuguese resident to, basically, stand up and say we’re good people. Huh? It’s called a personal representative, we learned later when we went to the Afpop office nearby. Afpop (silly name, great group) is an expat organization we joined a few months ago. In fact, we’re going to their monthly luncheon tomorrow. It will be a great opportunity to meet some other expats. But I digress … We told Karina at the Afpop office about our troubles and she said, yes, we’ll need to find a resident to accept liability if we skip town or something. Great. No problem. We know so many local Portuguese residents who will vouch for us. (Yeah, right.) I guess we’ll really try to make some friends soon! Then we told Karina about my difficulty calling the SEF office. She picked up the phone and tried herself. She, too, had trouble connecting. Not an unusual situation, apparently. She offered to take our information and try later to make an appointment for us. Wow. How nice! What could it hurt? So, we gave her our particulars and moved on to our next stop: the mall. Aqua Shopping Center was quite nice. Not unlike a typical SoCal mall. We found a MEO (think Verizon) store and got SIM cards and local numbers for our phones. Kinda easy-peasy after the earlier issues. We bought a few more things, had lunch, and then went back to our new favorite grocery store (Continente) to get a few more necessities for the home. Before we finished, I got an email from Karina telling us she got us an appointment with SEF. What? Perfect! She was our angel of the day! Hmmm. I wonder if she could also “stand up” for us? LOL! That evening, we took a stroll along our local beach, Praia da Rocha. Just a 10-minute walk from our apartment. We enjoyed the rock formations, tunnels, and sunset as we walked to have a drink in the cushy chairs at what might be a future favorite, The Pirate Restaurant. Did we accomplish everything we wanted to today? Nope. But, did we take some baby steps? Did we find some much-appreciated help? Did we figure out how to buy gas? Did we learn a lot? Did we have another fantastic day in Portugal? You betcha.

Mike (L) and Frank (R)