The new world order.

Wow!  How the world has changed since my last post!  Sadly, like just about every one else, we are in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and find ourselves in an undreamed of situation. 

I will not writes loads on the subject of the virus, as I think there is already massive information overload, but will give a little detail on what life is like here for us during the pandemic.

We have been in full lockdown now for over two weeks, with big restrictions on movements and other significant measures prior to that.  As Madeira is a small island, with a population of around 270 thousand, I think it is easier for the local government to keep things under control than larger places, and feel that they are doing a pretty good job of it. They have acted decisively, sometimes before the Portuguese government has done so, and are actively keeping every one informed of the status. As of yesterday we had 43 confirmed cases of the virus, with only two in hospital and neither in intensive care.  The source of every case is known and all of their contacts are under surveillance and have been told to isolate themselves.

Since the middle of March all arrivals on the island have had to go into mandatory quarantine for 14 days.  Originally people were allowed to go home or to their hotels for this but it was quickly changed to them having to go to a specific location.  The first location was a 4* Resort, called Quinta do Lorde, which has it's own harbour, beaches, restaurants and shops at the Eastern end of the island away from any other houses.  It had been in financial difficulties and was empty so an ideal place to ship all arrivals. Clearly the guests don't get to enjoy the facilities as they are confined to their rooms, with meals delivered three times a day, but it is still a relatively pleasant place to be.  A further four or five hotels have now been commandeered for the same purpose but they have also now limited arrivals to 100 people per week.

We made a trip back to the UK at the end of February and beginning of March and fortunately returned before the quarantine rules were announced so could go home.  Sadly a visit by my sister due for the following week never happened, and goodness knows when visitors will be allowed to come again.  Just about all tourists have now been repatriated to their home countries so the tourist industry, the prime source of income for the island, no longer exists.  Also all but essential work has been stopped and people are being questioned by the Police if they are travelling around without fitting that category.  Restaurants are all closed except for for take-aways, and the only trips allowed are to buy foods, medicines or for essential workers to get to work.  As you can imagine, Funchal is almost a ghost town and I have great fears for all of the people who now have no income.

The online support networks for visitors and ex-pats here have gone into overdrive and have done a fantastic job of helping people to return home (whether here or elsewhere), keeping us informed of all of the developments (especially as there is a huge amount of information coming out which is, of course, in Portuguese) and generally keeping everyone in touch.  As always happens in times of crisis, humour is a brilliant way of helping people to deal with things and that is also a big part of the support.  I do not know if this bodes well for the future, but the man who will be out next door neighbour when our new house has been built has become the self-appointed online joker and has been inundating the site with an endless supply of terrible jokes and videos.  He clearly has access to the worst sources of "dad" jokes around.

We are keeping fine in our house and have enough to occupy ourselves.  I have numerous hobbies and, if anything, struggle to decide which to do at any one time.  I am delighted to say that I am putting the stuff I learned on my Bespoke Bra Making course, given to me as a leaving present by my work colleagues, to good use and am trying to make a perfectly fitted bra.  That is certainly a challenge. I also play the guitar, bake (with dire consequences for my waistline), practice my Portuguese, do the odd exercise DVD and generally keep myself busy.  We have even broken out the jigsaw puzzles! Also, Dave and I go for a local walk nearly every day (today is the first exception in ages as it is raining).  These walks are not always that far, maybe 2 to 3 miles, but due to the topography of the area, they always involve a lot of hill climbing.  Yesterday our walk was 1.7 miles long, but involved an upward elevation change of 600 ft, the equivalent of 60 flights of stairs!  The picture below is the view we got at the top. Sadly driving to the countryside for walks outside town is banned, and all of the public walks, including levada walks, have been closed to avoid people congregating.

I can see my house from here

Anyway, that is a snapshot of life here at the moment.  We desperately miss our daughters who both live and work in London, and at a time like this, wish we were still in the UK with them.  The eldest has been working from home and, allowing for the inevitable frustrations that involves, seems to be getting on fine.  The younger daughter has had a more traumatic time of it as she works in online retail of personalised accessories.  A large part of her work has to be done at the premises so she cannot do much work from home.  Her boss refused to let her do any at home so she has had to continue to go into work every day.  In general this was fine as she cycled in, respected all social distancing and hygiene rules, and minimised her risk to herself or others.  Unfortunately that was not enough for her landlady, who refused to let her go to work in case she exposed herself (and therefore her landlady) to the virus.  Therefore her stark choice became to lose her job or to lose her home.  Despite the protections that have been put in place for employees and tenants, very little was of help to her and both parties went to great lengths to point out the legality of their demands.  After an extremely difficult few days, and numerous set-backs, she has finally moved out of her house, temporarily, and into a friend's flat which was empty.  She is now settling in but has to motor-cycle to work which comes with its own risks.  Ironically, it may only be a matter of time before her boss has to cease trading if the government introduce more stringent measures like we have here in Madeira. I think it is very sad that the one thing lacking in the way she was treated by both parties seemed to be compassion.  As we all know, crises bring out the best and worst in people.  As a counter, she was given some fantastic support, especially by a couple of her friends, and we were also helped by others, with advice and suggestions, as we tried to help her through the situation.  And I am enormously proud of the way she held up, adapting as the situation seemed to change by the minute, and drawing on her inner strength to keep in control.

I think that is more than enough for now.  As with all of us, this awful virus dominates our lives and leaves us thinking of little else.  I just hope that the crisis passes swiftly, and that it will not be long before we are through the worst of it and, hopefully, moving forward into a kinder world where we look out for each other more and take less for granted.  We have the opportunity to learn a lot about ourselves, as well as how to deal with a world wide crisis like this if it ever happened again, and I hope that we do not waste it.

Stay safe.

It's been a while

OK, firstly, huge apologies to anyone who has looked in hoping for an update and found that I haven't posted anything.  It was as if I left the UK and disappeared off the face of the earth.  I don't have any excuse - I just haven't been keeping my blog up to date!

Anyway, having heard from a friend that she had been reading my blog the other day, I have been shamed into finally writing an update on my life.

I left us in my last post in the hotel at Gatwick, ready to start our Madeiran adventure early the next morning so we'll take it from there. 

We got up to wet and dismal weather on our leaving day, which seemed rather fitting.  Here's the view from the plane:

The flight was uneventful, but my emotions were all over the place.  I was crying as hard as the rain as we took off, and felt as though the bottom had fallen out of my world.  An hour or so later Dave and I were celebrating over a glass of champagne.  I suppose the impact of what we were doing was finally hitting home, both the good and the bad of it.

I can see my house from here.

We were met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car supplied by the company who will be building our future house, and driven to our existing house in Funchal, the capital of Madeira. It was a strange feeling arriving there for the first time as our home, not just on holiday.

And the view from my doorstep

The next couple of weeks were something of a honeymoon period for us as we waited for our possessions to arrive.  We ate out a lot, revisiting many of our favourite restaurants, and even cooked at home a few times.  We had the advantage of the house already being well equipped as it has been our holiday home for over ten years, but I hadn't brought enough clothes and was getting very bored with recycling the same few shorts and T shirts.  Fortunately the weather was glorious so we didn't need that many clothes, and the house has a washing machine.

During the first week or so we popped into the local health centre to register for our health numbers, and commenced the processes of importing the Lamborghini and ensuring that we were correctly registered here for tax purposes.  This was the start of our experience of the joys of Portuguese bureaucracy, an experience which has had us endlessly frustrated ever since!  As an example, four months later, we are still awaiting our health numbers which should have been issued within a couple of weeks.  The car is still going through the import process, although we have succeeded in leaping over several major hurdles for that.  We only got our tax situation sorted out just before Christmas after resorting to the assistance of a lawyer, as some paperwork had got stuck in someone's in-tray and was not being processed (a recent change moving the processing from Lisbon to Madeira meant that the clerk had not had to deal with our situation before so it ended up in her "too difficult - maybe some other time" pile!).  There have been numerous other situations like these but we are gradually learning to relax and go with the flow, especially as the stock answer to any complaint is "that's just how they do it here".

Another thing we did as soon as we arrived was to get into a routine of going for regular walks.  The island is laced with irrigation channels, called Levadas, which go for miles and most have paths beside them for maintenance and for hikers to walk along.  You can often walk for hours, through the most beautiful scenery, and barely meet another soul.  Also there are numerous mountain walks which can be pretty challenging but which reward you with the most spectacular views.  We have been going for at least one long walk a week, often taking a picnic lunch, and have enjoyed a mixture of familiar and new walks since we arrived.  Here's a taste:

We also immediately got to work at reacquainting ourselves with friends we have made out here over the years. They include Pip and Dave, our British neighbours who have helped us out over the years with things like keeping the garden in check.  Another is Miguel, a Madeiran who works as a waiter in a town centre restaurant and we have become friends over numerous visits to his restaurant.  We met him at the local beach and popped around to his house for coffee, coincidentally very close to where we will be living in the future.  That was around 2 pm and we finally extracted ourselves, after several bottles of wine and a meal with his extended family, at 11.30 that night!  It was a wonderful introduction to the famous Madeiran hospitality.

It is important to us that we quickly build a social network so, as well as catching up with existing friends, we attended a few social events where we got the chance to make some new friends. The first was Trafalgar Night which is an annual event held at the "Liga dos Combatentes" (league of combatants) very much following the tradition of the UK version, but with Madeira wine instead of Port.  We also attended a British Legion dinner commemorating Remembrance, at the invitation of our Portuguese teacher, and a dinner held by a Facebook group called Madeira Active which has a big community of both Madeirans and expats (of all nationalities) who socialise, discuss every subject you can imagine and generally support each other.

As you may have picked up, we have a Portuguese teacher so, yes, we have started lessons.  We go twice a week to lessons for just the two of us at a little school in town and seem to be progressing pretty well.  We did start lessons in the UK many years ago but, lack of use and a less imperative need meant we forgot most of it.  Now we have much more motivation to learn, although we do constantly face the situation where we try to talk Portuguese and they talk back in English!  As tourism is the major industry here a huge proportion of people speak at least some English.  This means that there are some expats we have met who have been here for years and still not learnt more than the basics, as they have not needed to.  We are determined not to fall into that category.  I want to be able to converse in their language, rather than expecting them to do so in ours, and of course the challenge of learning a new language is extremely good for the old brain cells.

I'll stop here and post this now.  I have much more to catch up on but don't want my posts to be too massive.  I won't leave it so long to the next update - I promise.