The UNTOLD Things About Living in Portugal 🇵🇹

hey expats and travelers it's kaylee here from expats everywhere and about a month ago we had an interview with carl about portugal well today i'm going to sit down with his wife louisa who was watching the interview and was like you missed so many different things so today we'll talk about all the little dirty things about portugal that carl missed let's go so louisa let's start off with why were you slagging them off what happened well um carl put on your show um the one that he did with you and um i was watching it i was really enjoying it and i kept thinking why hasn't he mentioned this and i started writing a list of all the things he missed out and i was just i this really long list and was so surprised and i just popped it in an email and said carl send that to the guys send that to them because you need to do another show um because it's really easy to give a kind of idea that portugal is all good and trust me it's a great place but there's also some things to bear in mind you know especially if you want to stay here in a winter or something like that so i just thought it was the mum in me or you know the woman you know like we care about details a bit more maybe but yeah exactly i gave him a ton of grief for that which is funny because we did indeed get that list and right away josh and i are like we need to interview louisa now because there are all these things that i mean carl's interview was long but there's just a lot that you can unpack about portugal and there's you know the good the bad the ugly so today we're going to talk a little bit more about the the ugly i guess you could say some stuff that carl apparently missed so let's jump right in with the first one i think that a lot of people think of portugal and they think of sun all year round or there's some stat that says like 330 days of sun or something like that now for those of us who don't live in the algarve or don't live on one of the islands what is the weather really like well it gets cold we've been here three coming up four years and each year we've had approximately seven possibly eight months of really nice times i really in particular like march and april time and may and then i really really love september october november but halfway through november it seems that it just starts to get cold and it also starts to get very very damp now it's not the same temperature as it is in the uk so for instance the uk will go down to a couple of degrees it doesn't get that cold okay but the houses here are are very different in the way they're constructed and so the winters feel very very cold if you haven't got your heating right in portugal and um if you think about it like i i don't know what it's like where you're from cayley but like places where we grew up we only had to deal with a temperature difference of say 25 degrees you know but here we have to be able to live in a possible 40 degree difference of temperature and that makes a huge difference you know so it gets really hot in the summer and it does get really cold in the winter and in the winter it's actually often warmer to be outside of your house than it is to be inside your house yes we've definitely experienced that and it seemed like a pretty cold winter this past winter as well and a lot of people were complaining about the heating in their homes so i think like you said it depends a lot on how the heating is within your home so tell us a little bit about the differences of types of heating and what do you think is the best and what you would recommend well i'd recommend two things um the first thing is to get the damp under control so um we've lived in quite a few places and we've moved around quite a bit through portugal and we've lived in old houses traditional houses a brand new condominium type thing and we're living in an old farmhouse now in a converted flat the condo was great because it had underfloor heating which was perfect it had really big windows so it would trap the sun when you wanted it the houses over here are built to keep that the heat out not to keep the heat in which is different um obviously in the uk we we build our houses to keep the heat in but here they they build them to keep the heat out and they also don't seem to put in much to do with airflow so we have air bricks in the uk and little vents in all our walls you don't see those so much here in fact i don't think i've seen a single one in all the different houses we've been in there's no air vents and so the walls get really damp the internal walls often feel damp where we lived in one house where they have stone floors um i think they're built right onto the ground and in the winter when it rained for about a week or two solidly our floors started to get wet so stone floors these were ceramic ones they started um absorbing the underground water um as the water table rose and so our floors were wet first of all they just felt a bit sticky you know as you're just like walking around you're just thinking why is my foot and then that's why so many portuguese people have or locals that live in a kind of local way not we're not talking like living in a city at the moment we're talking about living in the country which i do recommend doing because you get to see a bit more of portugal but people have um throw down rugs and they put them all over their their ground floors and i think it's to keep their feet dry when the um when the tiles get wet but what does that do to the rugs don't they get wet yeah you have to chuck them in the wash we were just washing over and over and over and then you then you think where am i going to dry my things because if you dry the stuff in your house and there's no airflow your house gets even more damp yeah it's dry but the walls get damp so it's a continuous thing um i noticed when we were living near lisbon that during the day especially in the winter people were opening their windows and putting their duvets out over their balconies and i just thought oh that's really sweet that must be a traditional thing i realize now that if you don't do that your bedding gets wet and um where we've got a bed that's really low on the floor we actually lift our mat we don't have to do it now because it stopped raining but it was raining for about three months where we're living if we weren't putting our mattress up every day um to kind of dry it out then the damp just gets into your bedding and and your mattresses so if you're living in an old traditional house you have to i think have a dehumidifier that's essential like we were running one for about three or four hours every day for the last two months and pulling out two litres of water from the air oh my gosh we hadn't pulled that out that would have just been absorbed by our clothes and our bedding now do you think that newer places need this as well not so much but i have been in quite a few airbnbs so like use airbnb a lot and um airbnb airbnbs often have like any cupboards that don't get any airflow they go mouldy so um where we've stayed in places we've seen lots of those little um dehumidifying kits you know those ones with um silicon in and and they literally just sit in your cupboard and they suck out the the damp right so i recommend it like if you're buying a place if you're staying in a place for six months or so get some of those little kits and put them in your wardrobes because your clothes will start to go down especially in the winter just because they have such a huge temperature shift and nowhere for the dam to go right and then you see mold yes yeah yeah the other big the other big thing we've done is we have um a spray bottle that we just put neat white vinegar in we often spray around the windows um around the tops of the walls where mould forms around the door frames and things like that the moment we start seeing mold that's it we get the vinegar spray out i would test it if you're going to do it on your sofas but we haven't had any problems with um you know using vinegar it works it clears it up really quickly okay that's good advice so that's probably for maybe like three or four months of the year that it's this cold rainy that you need to be aware of and the rest is more of that oh sunny portugal right yeah yeah but the other thing is it does get really really hot and we're not in the habit of um closing down our windows and putting down the shutters and we couldn't understand why when we're driving through all these villages they all look like they're shut down and we think wow there's all these villages and they're all deserted well they're not all all deserted you know some of them actually they just put the shutters down to keep the houses cool because if if the sun's going in it just bakes so we've we've started to do a bit of that ourselves so we do a lot of shading um if i was to buy a place i would probably on a sunny wall grow some really good runner beans or something or something that is there in the summer and then not in the winter that's a great idea a really nice green canopy of fresh edible things or something really pretty and that smells nice to give yourself some extra cool and then i'd get rid of it in the winter and then just have the lovely view because that's the thing you come out here for the lovely views you don't want to shutter your window do you right yeah it swings roundabouts you've got to learn how to manage your heat um okay so then one more question about the temperature and we'll move on do you have radiators do you have built-in air cons like what do you do for the heat and the cool yeah that's such a good question um a lot of a lot of airbnbs have their built-in air conditioners and they work really well and i think they're quite um cost-effective to run um however they cost quite a bit to buy initially we have little plug-in heaters because we just want to sort of heat the room that we're using at the time we've also had like wood burners and they're really great but then you have to learn how to distribute the heat around the house we lived in a house and this is i think something that a lot of portuguese people are doing now is they have boilers at the back of their wood burners so they have wood burners and some kind of heat conversion i just don't know what it's called i'm not technical so if you have anyone that's technical you have to work that one out for yourself but they they um convert the heat from the fire to a boiler and then off to a radiator system and that works well and the wood here is cheap it's cheap to buy okay so that's an option and it's really expensive like you could we got a really big bill for electricity of something like 400 euros one month wow and that's that's when you start saying okay i i now know why a lot of portuguese people don't put on their heating in the winter and they sit under duvets without like their dressing gown you know it's cold yeah it's cold and then it gets expensive right okay so that kind of segues us into the next question which is talking about electricity bills trying to run a bunch of different things at the same time what is that like here um well uh it's interesting because we didn't realize how the electric bills work um it took us a while i mean it's a bit like you sign up decide which service you're signing up for and you pay your bills there's no problems there what i didn't realize was you can sign up to have a higher flow of electricity or not and says like bands or graded bands and when you go to an airbnb what we noticed was um that especially in the winter if we put on their kettle and we were making something like putting something in a toaster or cooking something in the oven and then we had the washing machine going because we've got three kids um so the washing machine's always going then all of a sudden the power would just trip what's happened because this doesn't happen in the uk we have power cuts but we don't tend to like lose our electricity and so first thing i'd recommend if you're staying in an airbnb in portugal is have a torch and learn when the electricity box is right from where i go because i'm pretty sure when i say that most people in who are running an airbnb will be signed on to the lowest rate of energy so if you're if you're making too many demands on it it will trip out you can only use certain amounts of appliances but if you want to have an electricity kind of flow that's higher that allows you to use more things at the same time then you need to pay more per unit of electricity so you need to sign up for a higher band so if you're staying in a place or renting a place the chances are it's signed up to the lowest bracket mm-hmm yeah so then you have to figure out uh what works and what outlet and what can run we've been there it's actually quite good because you start to realize how you're using your electricity so you realize okay i must turn the kettle off and you know and so it's been interesting with carl and i because we both work on the internet often doing live things and so we don't use um any kind of appliances when he's online okay it has happened um yeah it makes you think differently you're a lot more grateful for what you've got yeah yeah oh man that's funny though that yeah when you're going live of course you have to think okay don't turn the kettle on it's like that and one thing we did was actually we got a thermos flask so we made a lot of tea and just kept it in a flask so we didn't have to do that you do become more resourceful yeah good little hacks to learn along the way right yeah okay so for all the ladies out there and husbands who just need to be prepared about this when you go to portugal what's the clothing like what's the shopping scene talk to us about that there's a lot more independent shops like when you're in smaller towns you won't see so many big brands and so you're not likely to get what you're used to wearing and when i've been to local shops what i found even though i'm not particularly tall i'm only sort of like mid height by english standards when i buy clothes here unless i buy them from an international outlet like say h m or similar uh or united colors of benetin or something like that then what i find is that the sleeves are always too short you know like my arms are too high everything's three quarters the trousers are just like skimming your ankles but they don't really come down to where they should um so that's something to to learn um like i've got average size feet in the uk but over here my feet are slightly bigger um and so when i think oh i'm just going to go in there and i'll be able to find a pair of shoes especially during the sales you think oh sales on i'll find something you won't because you're probably just a bit bigger so what i would recommend if you want to go and buy some some good stuff is go to a forum you realize there were forums in portugal they're not particularly portuguese because they are all brands but um in every major city there's a forum which is basically like a big mall and there you know exactly what you're going to get how you're going to get it it's open from say 8 o'clock in the morning till midnight i think most of the time and their shops really cater for children so there's play parks and little cars you can put your toddlers in and strap them in without them being able to escape and the other thing um which i wish i'd known when i got here was um footwear it's different i couldn't work out why people um well you can tell tourists because or people that don't live here because they often have fancy footwear whereas portuguese people tend to wear trainers or sneakers or very very plain and very kind of flat shoes and it's because the the pavement here which is called calcada is really hard to walk on if you're not used to it and it's fine in the summer when it's dry but in the winter it's really slippery and when we're in um have you spent much time in lisbon kaylee yes have you pushed the push chair in lisbon no so i actually haven't been there um with the baby we've been there before so since we've moved here with covet and everything we haven't been down to lisbon just yet because we were trying to go we've actually had to reschedule a trip several times now but so we were trying to go um but before when we used to visit here we would go to lisbon a lot but that was pre-stroller yeah well when we first went out there we had a five-year-old and a one and a half year old who was toddling and so we wanted to put her in a push chair but lisbon's streets are like this they've got loads of hills and i had dm boots on like dr martin boots which you'd think you'd be able to walk in because they're really they've got really good treads um and so we had a we had a stroller we call them push chairs and i just couldn't get up the hills i mean they were impossible i had to get carl to do them because my my big dm boots were just slipping and so i would say it's kind of inaccessible for people with strollers it's much better to have them in a sling while you can it's it's it's not a very accessible city i would say like if you're a wheelchair user or something like that you want to go to somewhere like belang you know like where it's really really flat um but like downtown lisbon is right people wear trainers i think yeah and same in porto i mean we get that in porto as well uh it's quite hilly here and the the grounds like those little cobblestones things are just very uneven and they get very slick when it rains i mean i've noticed there are certain shoes i can't wear when it's at all wet outside because i will slide and especially trying to push the stroller as hard and when we go out generally when we hit like an uphill i let josh push i'm like okay your turn and don't you don't you wonder how these old women do it you know like when they're pulling i mean you see it's more in the country like where they're pushing wheelbarrows but they portuguese people seem to have a really good sense of balance don't they then the tiles in the houses also are really slippery as well so maybe they're just used to slippery surfaces but it's hard it is yeah so i think that maybe you have to go to more of a traditional place for shoes here because they'll get it right they'll know what kind of style you actually need as opposed to if you go to a big like international chain a big brand and they have cute shoes but they're not so functional here so that's the issue we found quite a few good places to buy homemade shoes like hand shoes and so i i'm on my second pair of handmade boots and carl's got some now um and they're amazing yeah that's exactly what i wear actually i went to a little shop and i have small feet so i don't have as big of an issue with this because i'm just a short person um but i found some really nice leather boots and i've just been wearing them out all winter because they grip really well and i really don't have any other shoes that grip so i've just been wearing those all winter but now it's starting to warm up so i just switched to some of my flats which are okay because it's not wet outside yeah it is a challenge you have to think it through don't you yeah definitely and that's tough too because like when you move here i mean we don't like to move with a bunch of stuff we'd rather just get the stuff when we get here so we didn't bring any like big boots or those types of shoes with the big treads so you have to find them here i mean they're here but it can be kind of hard especially the sizes right definitely definitely definitely okay so let's go ahead and shift a little bit and uh from one mom to another let's talk about having kids here so what's it like having kids in portugal and what are the people like with kids well they're really cool they really love them and that's one of the pulls that we had for coming here was that we could go somewhere where people like kids love kids and accept that kids are a natural part of life like in the uk um if you went to a restaurant and your kid was making any kind of noise people would be like what's going on and they kind of give you snotty looks and things whereas here it's almost encouraged you know the the people will just come and ruffle your kid's head as they walk past there's a lot of um sort of patting of heads that goes on and lots of linda linda and i was thinking who's linda yeah it was um until i realized it means beautiful and of course we had a little um one and a half year old uh daughter with us you know when we first moved and so everyone was rushing over they do a lot more of that with the girls than they do with boys that took a while to get used to but it was really nice you know people aren't so worried about um whether they touch other people's kids it's just part of the culture you know they're very family orientated and you know we we have a babysitter here who's portuguese and she's got a huge family and it's nothing for her to just babysit her younger cousin or nephew or you know they're all together a lot of the time and that's some of something that really pulled us here because we felt that there's a much bigger sort of family sort of ethic you know people like each other yeah and that's where it comes from but with that also comes mass criticism from [Laughter] some things that think they know what's going on with your kid like we had a baby here and um our kids just like to be really naked i mean obviously they're very close now because our oldest is nine but i hope be frowned upon but um you know while they can be naked they just they just want to be and we we managed to get them in clothes so we can go out for a walk or go into town and stuff but they never look like they're fully dressed by portuguese standards portuguese kids have coats on in early autumn whereas for us my kids just want to be in t-shirts and shorts so um i don't know we've got a better tolerance for cold maybe um when we're outdoors and and culturally you do get stared at a little bit you know if your kids look like they're cold and people come up and they'll touch your baby's feet and say oh frio frio oh they're cold they're cold and you have to say no no we're just english it's okay we're english you say we say oh no no we're english we're you know we like the cold but we don't but you know that's just you have to be prepared for that but one of the great things that um i've i've been um i've breastfed all my children um and it's it's it's accepted here and i was a bit worried about it because in the uk sometimes it gets a bit of a negative response when you're out and about even though there's laws protecting you from doing that or having that kind of reaction and so the first time i breastfed on this continent was as we were driving through spain and i was thinking oh it's a catholic country and then i was worried about portugal but nobody nobody's vaccinated it's it's really not like anything to do with babies they love you and accept you for it if they can see you looking after your child that's all that counts yeah and you have to you also have to know where your line is um and be okay with being a mum that's good advice yeah at least you can still like if you're not fluent in the language which i'm definitely not you can at least sometimes say ah i don't speak it in kind of walk away but in a sort of apologetic way so you can use the sort of cross-cultural thing to be able to get out of the situation a bit easier okay so let's shift a little bit and let's talk about cost of living prices of things because i think that a lot of people in their minds they have an idea that portugal is super cheap and a lot of people want to come here and think they're going to buy some amazing real estate for dirt cheap so let's talk about the actual prices of things i mean that was one of the reasons we came over here we were like economic migrants we just wanted to be able to live a different life and we realized that we couldn't afford to do that in the uk but we thought we could do it here and we are which is good but when we got here we had a bit of a shock um it's great that they've got lidl and they've got aldi and they've got some of the shops that we understand and so we were buying things from there and they'll sell a lot of international food and what i noticed was if you when you come over here if you're buying the same sorts of things that you would buy in the in your own country you're probably not going to realize much in the in the way of savings um unless those things that you eat in your country are very similar to the portuguese diet so for instance um you know we might have seen like you know a type of cheese that they do in the uk we might have wanted organic milk or you know you know you're going through your shopping list if you if you eat the same way as you do in your own country you're unlikely to see the the changes but as we've got to see how portuguese people live and the kinds of things they eat and where they eat and when they eat and stuff we've realized that they're the things are kind of discounted um and so we will buy a certain amount of vegetables from the supermarkets but we actually just go to a market like once a week and we'll buy a load of vegetables and you can see what the portuguese buy like um we used to buy a lot of um really sort of like nicely washed spinach and stuff and yeah it's a little bit more expensive but when you go to the market you'll get a big bag of it for next to nothing and you have to give it a good wash but it's it's really good stuff like honey for instance seems a bit more expensive here but if you're buying it from a supermarket then you're missing a trick because for the same price you can get natural honey that just hasn't been sort of altered in any way shape or form from your local market and you can buy kilo of it for eight euros and now we just think well that's a good price to pay you know like when you're going to restaurants or if you're going if you're going to a cafe observe what the portuguese are drinking like they'll have small little shots of coffee which cost next to nothing but if you want to go in there and get a big latte or you know something really you know that you associate with your home um the chances are there's going to be a bit of a premium on it so once we learnt that a little bit then our prices started to go down um so for instance we eat things with a lot more beans in now so beans and cabbage and onion form a massive part of our diet we have quite a lot of rice um so we just changed the way we eat a little bit and the the prices come down there are some things that just seem more expensive when you first arrive and i think part of it is that um we might be used to getting all our shopping in one place so since i used to just go to one supermarket and buy pretty much everything i needed and it would have um a pharmacy within it and i would just know where to go and part of the problem is knowing where to go um for instance if you are into herbal things or stuff that you might get from a health food shop you can find some of them here they actually sell lots of herbs in supermarkets like proper big packs of herbs for making specialties and things like that but again you have to kind of be like a portuguese person and understand that so if you're if you're wanting to drink nettle tea yourself and you buy a fancy packet of it that's ready made then you might pay quite a bit more but then if you go down the end of the aisle you'll see that the portuguese actually just buy it in a in a big loose pack and it costs next to nothing and it's organic so yeah it swings around about the same with wine you want to buy the portuguese wine not something that's imported or i should pay sure yeah so i guess the best advice is just when you come here observe what the portuguese are doing and do as they do yeah definitely it's the same with restaurants as well like if you're trying to buy something a la carte like if you're wanting them to create something for you then you will pay more for it but if you just look at what they're eating you'll see that most people just have like some standard dish of the day and it nearly always comes with chips and rice and salad which was really strange for us when we first arrived it was like whoa double carbs and a salad yeah steady on there with the carbs come to enjoy it now and if we don't get our rice and our chips and our salad we're like oh we've been shortchanged but it's seeing what people do um and then as you start doing it their way and start buying from their shops like they will go to different shops to get different things like if you eat me the butchers are much cheaper than than going to the supermarkets often and you you get a good cut they'll get to know you and and they'll help you out it's the same you know wherever you go just try and find out what the locals are doing okay and then you've moved around a little bit out of portugal so any advice for those looking for housing because i think that a lot of people think that housing here is super super cheap and maybe if you're out in the country it might it's cheaper as opposed to a city but i mean we've seen housing prices for buying in lisbon and porto can be crazy so yes yeah um it's an interesting one because there's lots and lots of property for sale here and there's lots more property that's not for sale and the portuguese are really really rich in property so much so that a lot of them can't even maintain the property that they've got you know they've inherited stuff and also there are a country of people that tend to go out you know their net migration they're at a loss you know more people are leaving portugal than more people than people are coming in so i think they're quite grateful for having um people wanting to come here because you know you need people to have a an economy don't you so you know there's all these houses that might have been left and the um people are due to inherit them might be one of them might be in south africa another in canada another in france and so it makes buying a property it'll be difficult if there's you know a shared inheritance involved so you want to be careful with that but what i've noticed is a lot of the cheaper ones there will be in the middle of nowhere and they will be in quite a bad state of repair and if if you've got the skills and the time and the know-how of how to rebuild a place then it's great but and we did have the dream of buying you know a place that we could you know bring back to life and love it and all that you know it was a real sort of like dream you know it was obviously a dream because it's not a reality um and the the fact is we've got children and we're both building our businesses and you just don't have time to do your houses so i think if you're coming over that dream you need to know that you've got a the money to be able to do it because there's nothing worse than being in a portuguese house that needs heating in the winter you can't afford it we did spend quite a few months with no hot water we were boiling water with a kettle so we've experienced all levels of habitation since we've been here and it's through you know we're not victims of it you know we were we had an exciting project that we were getting involved in and it was a little bit more well it was a lot more than we could deal with it was way too much for us and you know it's important to know that and there's so many expats that come over and they buy a place that they don't have the time or resources to do so what i would recommend is is look for a house sitting or um do some volunteering on a farm or something and move around portugal you know spend some time if you don't have kids and you you're a remote worker then it's it's perfect because you can find dig somewhere for a reduced amount of money and you get a chance to spend time looking around there's some really great places that we've seen we love queen bro i haven't been to porto i think i'd like that tamar is beautiful and amazing we really like the triangle between queenbra tamar and fundau sort of really central so you've got some really beautiful views and hills and things when you're driving i think come out and experience it and speak to somebody that can guide you through the process and spend some time with other expats um and and then make your decision when you're out here okay so on this list uh that you think that carl missed you talked about the festus so what are they good and bad tell us they're amazing the festas are so good and we've lived i mean we've lived in some great places and um in the evening sometimes you'll hear music starting up about 11 o'clock at night and you know i might be putting my kids down to bed hopefully by then they'll sleep but here's this kind of music and you think oh someone's having a house party down the road you hear this kind of boom boom boom and then you expect it to stop and it does and then it goes on for a bit and then you realize it's festive season um and that's the thing to be aware of um from maybe may until maybe late july maybe even august each town or village has its own little festas um or festas and then they all get together and they they put up you'll notice if you drive through portugal that they erect these stages all of a sudden there's bunting you know like streamers in the street and lights and the whole community comes together maybe one night or it might be three in bigger places they'll they'll have proper djs and proper sets but it's a really good place to go and try local food and local wine a lot of the locals will bring their own dishes and share them out and stuff anna dia where we're currently living near they have a five-day festival and it's incredible like they have um loads of bands over five days it's almost like a music festival so you know you just get a load of different places to go to i'd absolutely check it out because you get to see how portuguese people live and socialize and stuff it's great but it's it noisy noisy it is noisy um and they start late they tend to especially some of the local ones like the anodia one starts at seven or eight at night and it might go maybe to one o'clock in the morning um i might be wrong on that but roughly um but some of these local ones they might go until two or three in the morning sometimes even later but you know it's they're just for the local environment you know and sort of everyone's in agreement so they just have this kind of street party almost yeah that's good to be aware of though that that you know that could happen where you're living if that's a problem for you um yeah then you might need to i don't know um invest in earplugs you better to participate them if you can and then you'll enjoy them that's good advice join them yeah okay so you were talking about earlier you've got some pets you have chickens um tell us about pets in portugal strays and portugal what do you know about that uh we have quite a big experience of strays we were house sitting in central portugal and um this there was a hell of a commotion outside our house one night like a dog was being attacked and we looked out the window couldn't see anything the next day we saw this little this little um terrier um covered in blood underneath rose bush and so we kind of got her out and cleaned her up and gave her some food and she just stayed around the um the local area we were living in and um tried to find her owner um but and and we would walk her out and then we'd walk away to see if she came back or to see if she went off to where she really lived and she just kept coming back and so in the end we took her to the vets to see if she had a chip and she had a french chip so she was a french dog um who had i don't know she'd been dumped there's a lot of french visitors come to central portugal in the middle of summer because there's a lot of french and portuguese connections in central portugal and so often around those places all of a sudden during the summer there's loads of french cars everywhere and people having picnics at the same time it's very cultural um so i i think she was an abandoned dog and so we adopted her um little did we know that she was already pregnant she had um she had emergency surgery and she lost all her piece unfortunately um but at the same time in this house where we're living at it it must be like there's this beacon that goes out to the animal community that there's some animal loving expats have moved in um this this this mama cat arrived at our at the house we were house sitting and she came with three little kittens that was within a week of us arriving and just before our dog arrived this mom just dropped her kittens off and then just left and so there's these three little defenseless kittens dropped off at our house by this kind of wise mama cat and so we started feeding these kittens and looking after them we couldn't get close to them because they were feral but we were hoping one day we'd be able to get close enough to them that we would be able to take them to the vets to ensure that there's not another generation in that time i had a child another child and we just didn't manage to tame the kittens enough and one of them disappeared and two of them got pregnant and so we adopted also the kittens of the kittens oh my gosh and one of the mama cats that we managed to look after so at one point we had five five cats there's so many um animals here i mean this is a place that's animal rich and um like in the uk we all lock our dogs up and they're inside our houses mostly and then we take them out for a walk and then they come back into our house um but over here a lot of people just have um outdoor kennels dogs are outside barking all night often you know someone comes up the road one doc starts and then the other and then the other and it's like a big bark fest the barking band like you said you don't need to go and look for an animal to adopt is probably the advice i'd give if you come out here with the ideas of having animals they will come to you they will find you very quickly expats accumulate animals very quickly and the chickens are just a delight they're so easy to look after and we get fresh eggs every day that's a nice perk really lovely and in fact we're living in a small farm um and our landlady has also adopted two sheep um and one gave birth so we've got a little lamb two sheep chickens look out this window and there's vineyards just outside it's it's beautiful and we can walk into town as well if there wasn't a lockdown in place we could just walk into town so yeah so that's good for the animal lovers and actually uh we have a dog our viewers know that that we brought with us that we adopted when we lived in south korea we actually just recently put out a course for americans to get the d7 visa and we started at a special launch price and then we decided after a certain amount we were going to move it up to a price but we wanted to have some of the proceeds go to a local charity around here in porto and i love animals so we found a an association they're called meatus that is in the puerto area and they actually help with like the strays and everything because even though we're in a city i would say you don't see as many strays as you would if you're out in the country um there are some pockets of them though and we've had friends who have seen more depending on where they are but this company or this organization is really good because they also help sterilize the animals because like you said they just keep having kittens or puppies and and that's really hard then to control it and contain it right so they help with with that so we we started donating to them a lot of people ask us about animals in in portugal so it's a big thing i think that's really good and it's amazing that you're able to do that um i think if you do look after strays when you go to a vets there are some vets out there that will help you if you're helping the strays you know they'll give you a discount and you know they're kind of mindful of it which is great because i think that yeah i mean they can see that it it can be a problem and at least we're trying to help right definitely i i and i think that's a really good thing i think if you are living in another country you should do what you can to help the local area you should sort of add to it rather than detract okay so moving away from the chickens and the dogs and kittens and everything why don't you go ahead and tell us some pros and cons of living in portugal moving to portugal just the expat life in portugal the covert thing is has kind of detracted we could just very well be in the uk right now um although we've got better views and we've got more animals but i'm sure once all the restrictions get lifted fully um we'll go back to living how we do and and the way we do it is we're able to both of us work for a few hours a day each each of us is like juggling the kids around but then in the afternoons we're able to chuck everyone in the car pack up some things to go to a river beach or go to you know the main beach or go to wherever we want actually um so what we tend to do is just go on little adventures every day and it's so easy to go somewhere else you know because everything is so nearby and this the portuguese are really really understated about their country they don't really market it that well you know there's little treasures everywhere and so our real lifestyle is is about doing as little work as we can just enough so that we can enjoy ourselves but we've got the time to go out and hang out as a family and enjoy the the nature and stuff and because it's cultural that children go to bed quite late here it's not unusual if a family's out at sort of eight or nine walking the streets and having a coffee here grabbing an ice cream there and just wandering around it's it's just a wonderful place where you we get a sense of freedom um and i i know for this sort of equivalent lifestyle in the uk we we just couldn't we couldn't both of us work part-time and have a nice place to live and be able to afford to go out with our children and eat in restaurants whenever we want and you know it is a sacrifice you know we haven't got a big house and you know all these great things yet um i know it's coming but it's it's a bit of a sacrifice when you move from one country to another like permanently but it just offers us the chance to have some freedom and to do things slightly differently so amazing yeah yeah we're economic migrants but it's suiting us our kids are so relaxed as well you know so i think the big the big advantage for us is this living here reminds me of growing up in england say 30 years ago where there was a bigger sense of community and where people did things for each other and i know that if we were still in the uk now we would both need to work really really full times like sort of extra you know putting loads of extra hours we both need to do that to be able to afford to pay for our house and and everything would be such a juggle and i think that's why people aren't so connected to each other anymore because they're in such a rat race to be able to afford the lives they've got that it's painful and yet there's all these pleasurable options that you can do around the world i mean i've lived in a few places but this is this is the one right now for us and awesome same for you guys isn't it yeah yeah definitely we at experts everywhere believe that living abroad transforms lives and you've kind of touched on a little bit with portugal specifically but you have lived all over the place so if you could just tell us in a couple sentences how do you believe that living abroad has transformed your life it's opened my eyes to things it's opened my eyes to new food smells tastes languages i guess what it means to me is that you don't have to live life in the way that your culture prescribes it so um the moment you step outside of where you grew up all of a sudden all bets are off you don't have to do like you don't have to do the same things you don't have to feel the same pressures um it offers you a new perspective and it's like that perspective is so much broader i spent um nine months in bali which i loved um it was amazing hearing the sounds of people chanting and the different sounds of the instruments and the different tastes um was amazing and being on a moped all the time which i'm sure you guys did when you're in southeast asia you've got a moped going up to a volcano you know those kinds of experiences you don't have in your home countries necessarily right i lived in france for five years lived in italy for a bit and yeah the lifestyles they they're all just different they all have their unique stamps and none of them are particularly better than the other i think some of them are the places that you need to be in at that particular time you know so like bali suited me when i was single probably wouldn't be in the place for me to raise my family but portugal was perfect for that um you know it's all swing about but it's great yeah i advise people just to travel um it's an opportunity yeah that's great if you're new to the channel and you're interested in moving to portugal on a d7 visa then look no further you have everything you need right here in this playlist and if you missed carl's interview louise's husband then you want to click right here to check that out now let's get moving all right well louisa thanks for filling in all those little gaps that carl left out left up much didn't he thank you thanks for having me

Channel: Expats Everywhere

Views: 373,324

Keywords: living abroad, expat life, living in portugal, expats in portugal, things to know when living in portugal, life abroad in portugal, brit in portugal, interview about portugal, weather in portugal, living in the country in portugal, stray animals in portugal, cost of living in portugal, having kids in portugal, shopping in portugal

Id: EH0yGnFyQlk

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021