Feliz or Bom Ano Novo! Happy new year! I hope that the year will bring you joy, health, fun things, the accomplishments you are after, and, of course, world peace for us all. For us, I also hope it brings us a house.
I didn’t want there to be 4 months in between the previous and this post, but here we are anyway. When I wrote the last post, we had just signed the contracts for what we hope will be our new home. We were somewhat confident that we could update you within a few weeks after with a new blog. Unfortunately, that was not the case! We should have learned from our previous house buying and selling adventures that it’s never that straight-forward.
Still, with the new year being here, and us receiving some updates just before Christmas, I thought I’d publish a (not so) short update of where we are, and where we hope to be going this new year. Although we have done loads of cool things, discovered loads of new trails and have been to our first Portuguese beer festival, in this blog I’ll talk about the two big things that have dominated our life: the house stuff and our language learning.
The House – Snail Mail
As I wrote in the last post, there were 3 houses that stood a chance of becoming our new home. We wanted to make ‘the big announcement’ of which house it was going to be once we had the keys! We are still going to do this, but you might be able to deduce which one it is from what I’ll say here…
The first thing that went wrong was that the CTT (postal service) lost the contracts for a few weeks. Yes. Seriously. We sent the contracts off to the sellers in the first week of September, and we didn’t have the finalised versions of everything until mid-November. There was also a spelling mistake in one of the sellers’ names, so we had to resend two pages with new signatures in that period. In addition to this, the final signed contracts also sat on the sellers’ estate agents’ desk for about two week because they all thought ‘someone else had sent them already’. Great!
Nonetheless, we cleared that hurdle eventually, which meant we would get back our estate-agent-deposit, and would have to transfer the down payment. Our money is already partially with the sellers!
The house – Who doesn’t love red tape?
The big wait, however, is all about a license that was not in place on one of the properties on the land. The main house is all ready to go, as are the other buildings, so that is good news. There is however an old home that should have had a habitation license that we really want and need to be on there.
Buildings here have two titles on them. First, a zoning permit that allows the use of a building for a certain purpose in principle. Then, in the case of housing, it also should have a habitation license. You need this license on top of the zoning permit if you want people to live in the house, even if it is for guests.
As we want to use that house for family and friends to stay in, and potentially rent it out in the future as well, this license is a MUST. To speed things up, we could have said we would accept the property without the license (for a drop in price) to sort it ourselves later.
However, navigating the Portuguese red tape isn’t something you do for fun. Not anyway, but especially not if you’re not that good at speaking Portuguese yet. As a result, we have opted to just wait it out until they have sorted it themselves so they can sell the house to us, as advertised, with the license. Less hassle for us, and we have a place to live now and aren’t in a big hurry technically (although of course we would REALLY like it sorted ASAP…!)
Just before Christmas, however, we finally heard that the final application for the license is now with the council, and with our initial contract having end-February as a cut-off and option for us to walk away without losing any money, we are hopeful (famous last words) that this all is in the last phases now…!
Language Learning
The second thing that has kept us busy in our 4-month blogging hiatus is the language learning. As you might remember, we did our A1 course between April and July. This was a great start to our journey in a lovely group of people.
After a summer break we continued with A2 with the same teacher and at the same school. Unfortunately, none of our previous group had opted to continue. We ended up with a group of 4. Not as sociable as the A1 group, but we were there mostly for the course, and not the people.
The good thing was that we finally were taught the past tense. You don’t realise how much you use that until you don’t know how to say something you did the day before. The bad thing is that we were taught the past tense… and it is very complicated. Many words just look the same as the present tense, or like another verb in the present tense… And then there’s all the exceptions. The ‘magic’ words. And … wow.
A1 felt doable and, dare I say, easy. In A2 we felt quite behind at every step and struggled to keep up with the weekly new things. I think we didn’t keep up, actually, and would never now claim to be of A2 level. Sometimes I thought we should have waited one semester and got everything A1 under our belt first, but…
The thing is… We really needed to learn about the things in A2 to be able to start making sentences to practice our Portuguese. We needed to at least become somewhat familiar with these forms and words to recognise them in the subtitles we use when watching tv series, read news, etc. So even though it feels like we ‘failed’, we did do the right thing.
Language learning going forward
We will (have to and want to!) continue our language learning in 2024. But not in the same way we did the course at the language school. The 2-hour classes two times a week after work in Porto really broke us up at some point. Travel included, we’d give 8 hours a week to the course, and that is without counting homework and self study. Next to two busy full-time jobs… it was hard.
Going forward, our strategy looks roughly like this:
- We will seek a private online tutor to help us. This will save a lot on travel time, and we will be able to be a lot more specific about the things we want to learn. The course materials were very outdated!
- We will not commit to a language tutor until we have moved. We want to give this our best, and if we find ourselves in a house move in the near future, we’ll need to use our time wisely and prevent burning out.
- Until then will revise the materials given by us for A1 and A2. Specifically the rules and grammar.
- We continue to use sub-titles in Portuguese whenever we have it available. It really helps a lot in recognising words and getting more comfortable ‘at speed’.
- Find some Portuguese translations of books we’ve already read. The difficulty here is that many books will be translated into Brazilian Portuguese as that market is much bigger. We might have to ‘just’ discover PT Portuguese writers and their books instead!
2024 – Bring it on
There you have it, the update you didn’t know you needed because you forgot all about our blog. Hopefully, jinx and all that, the next one will follow sooner with a shorter gap. Of course, we have plans and ideas that we could share and could have shared; we have loads. Gardening, brewing, hiking and exploring ‘our’ new mountains. What will we do with all the buildings, the land, the trees??! But it wouldn’t be ‘real’ yet. Not until we have the keys in our hands. Not until we get to enter the house for the first time since August last year!
Until our next update, I hope you’ll have a wonderful start to the new year, and get to enjoy many things that you love doing with those you love!
Feliz Ano Novo! Best of luck guys! Hope you get your new house soon!
Thanks! And happy new year to you too!