26

We have been waiting for our lawyer (advogado) to get us a meeting with the SEF (Servico de Estrangeiros E Fronteiras) to get our residency cards. We asked him to contact them back in December waited and waited and everytime we called they said they were working on it.  We were getting close to the end of our 4 months and still nothing.  We took the matter into our own hands and called the SEF ourselves and got an appointment for our residency, but not until May.  We were worried about our visa

February

2018

18

We finally have some good news, we received our household goods and we have our small items that make this our home.  Photos, favorite pillows, clothes and shoes.  I can tell you that I overpacked.  I thought I was doing good only bringing about 20 boxes, not all big boxes.  I packed them with lots of wrapping paper and what I thought was light, but unpacking the boxes, I definitely brought way too much.  I know I got rid of a lot of clothes and shoes, but unfortunately I packed in stages and

February

2018

13

This is our first year for Carnival in Portugal.  You need to remember that we lived in Louisiana and Rob lived in New Orleans for 18 years, so we do have high expectation of what it should look like.  Well, it is no Krewe of Endymion and was very low key, but it was nice.  First of all, there are no beads here, which we should change!! Well, they have small floats, which is a necessity because the streets are very narrow. There were a few food and beer vendors.  The Floats went around the small

February

2018

09

We are still waiting on customs to release our goods, yes the same customs that held up our car and wanted to charge us $20000 in taxes to release it to us.  We  decided to send the car back to the United States and sell it there.  We are going to wait to buy a vehicle until our residency is finalized, hate to buy a car and then some problem with our residency occurs and we will have to leave and now we will be stuck with selling a car for a loss.  We already took a beating on sending our car

February

2018

05

Sorry it has taken so long to write, but we have been on a Merry-Go-Round.   We are still waiting on the car, but received very bad news. We were given a tax on the vehicle of over 16,000 Euros.  We were under the assumption that if we came to Portugal we would be allowed one free tax free car, that is what we read on the Portuguese website.  Well not exactly, we were allowed some tax deferment on the vehicle.  But no one told us this we believed that the car would be tax free, also the American

February

2018