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.