Well, we did it! We are now in our new Lisboa apartment for a full week, and loving it.
The move itself was remarkably trouble-free. The moving team was supposed to be at the Porto apartment on the 12th at 8:30 AM. This being Portugal, I expected that meant sometime before 10:00, but to my surprise when I took Keiko out for a walk at 7:45 the truck was already parked out front and the four guys were just hanging out.
The moving men themselves were surprisingly large – the smallest one was my size, and I’m pretty big for Portugal. They were friendly, efficient, careful, and they emptied out the whole place in about three hours.
We spent a couple of hours cleaning up the apartment and loading the last of the odds and ends into the car. This was a bit more difficult than it should have been, frankly – we shouldn’t have had quite so many lose items, considering we needed to take the dog, cat, and birds. However, we managed to wedge everything important into place.
We knew we were going to lose part of the deposit because we had an accident with the glass-top stove. A spice bottle fell out of the cupboard directly above it and landed on a corner, breaking it. Although it had no effect on the stove’s operation, there’s no real way to fix this … about the best you can do is put a layer of epoxy over it, but that looks pretty obvious. I told the landlord when it happened and agreed to pay for a replacement. Other than that, we got off fairly well.
The landlord stopped by to give the place the final inspection and receive back the keys, and we were on the road to Lisboa about 5:30 PM. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s an easy three-hour trip, although we stopped halfway to let Keiko stretch her legs.
The highways all have roadside service areas about every 50 kilometers. Typically, these have gas, picnic tables, restrooms, a car wash, a restaurant or café, and a place to walk dogs. They’re all clean, and some are quite the destination – the first one heading south from Porto is always crowded, since they have a popular café serving leitão sandwiches.
What is leitão? Spit-roasted suckling pig. When it’s cooked, they chop up the meat and serve it on a fresh roll with gravy – it’s basically a Portuguese pulled pork sandwich. Visually it’s a bit weird for Americans, but it sure is delicious!
We arrived in Lisboa, navigated the thrill-ride parking structure, and took the pets and a load of junk up to the apartment. This was another small hiccup – the handyman who had installed the light fixtures had not cleaned up after himself, so there was quite a bit of dust on the floors from his working on the ceilings. We opted not to worry about it right then, since we were too exhausted to deal with it.
Since we decided not to sleep on the floor that night, we had booked a room in the Olissippo Hotel across the street. We were actually surprised at how nice this place was – I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wanted to stay in this part of town. They even gave us coupons for a free welcome drink!
We were up bright and early on Friday the 13th (yes, I know). We checked out of the hotel and headed over to the apartment about 7:30, because we wanted to get the floors cleaned up before the movers came and tracked the dust everywhere. Of course, Keiko and Lexie had already spent the night doing that … there were animal prints through every room.
However, we were once again surprised by the movers – when we got to the apartment, there was already a van from the company parked on the street saving room for the truck that was supposed to arrive by 9:00.
The truck was more or less on time, too. Two of the guys from Porto had driven it down, so they and two locals unloaded and brought everything up. During the process, a new neighbor from downstairs came up to say hello – and also, to tell the movers not to use both elevators, which they really knew better than to do (she was really nice to us, though!).
As the movers were finishing, I got a call from the City Movers office letting me know that there was going to be a change to the final bill. I had been expecting this, having dealt with movers in the past – what I DIDN’T expect was when he told me the quote was too high, so the final bill would be 250€ less!
All in all, I highly recommend these guys – they broke one cheap IKEA floor lamp, but they actually got their tools out of the truck and fixed it then and there. They didn’t keep all the boxes together on the truck, so some things wound up in the wrong rooms when they came in on the dolly together. But everything made it, and compared to other moves, this was stellar!
The internet guy was out to do the hookup Saturday morning, within the promised time window. Although he did get the system initialized, he didn’t do the installation completely correctly – we discovered we had no signal at the back of the apartment even though we have a repeater station, and the 5G band of the dual-band router isn’t turned on. This will be fixed on Monday.
The other excitement was when we ran the dishwasher for the first time – all of a sudden, we lost power to the apartment. I checked the circuit breakers and everything seemed fine, so I got on the phone to call the power company. It took a few tries to get to the right person (damned phone trees!), and in the interim I was able to get the power on again, but they sent someone out right away.
It turns out that there is a limiter on how much power is used in the apartment. This wasn’t an issue in Porto, but evidently this apartment is wired up different with multiple channels, so I had to change the contract to double the possible draw. The good news is that this only costs 6€ extra a month, so I’m happy to pay it. We’ve had no issues since, and have run the washing machine without a problem.
Next episode will feature living in Lisboa, plus pictures – I wanted to get this online sooner rather than later, so it’s really only part of the story.
A Modern Odyssey - Expatriates in Iberia 