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Vis-a-vis visas

Okay, if you’re going to stay in a foreign country for an extended period of time you’re going to need to get a visa. An extended stay visa (duh). In our case whats known as a “Shengen” visa. As I understand it a shengen visa allows you access to all the countries in the “shengen” zone which is essentially the European Union.

We had to go to the closest Portuguese consulate to our residence in the US which also happened to be in New Bedford (convenient for our shipping situation). The ladies there were super nice and extremely helpful. They laid out a pretty simple and concise list of the things we would need……

  1. An FBI background check
  2. Proof of sufficient funds to cover our stay
  3. Proof of ongoing income for the future
  4. Current ID’s (of course)
  5. Plane tickets booked to Sao Miguel
  6. A list of places we had booked to stay at
  7. Passports
  8. Separate passport photos
  9. Travel insurance.

Not too bad, right? But let’s break it down a little.

  1. For the FBI check you need to get fingerprinted at either a nearby FBI office or your local police station. Not all FBI offices do fingerprinting and many require an appointment so that can be a pain but the upside is that you know the record will be in an acceptable form. After looking into that route we decided to try our local cops. In Abington they use the electronic image system which we assumed would be perfect but the officer who did it wasn’t sure it was the correct format for the FBI so we also had him print out paper copies in case they were required. You apply online for a background check (form I-783) with all the required ID information (cost $18.00 US each). You then have to send the report that you receive from the FBI to a company that will generate what’s called an Apostille. That company takes the report that you got from the FBI, sends it back to them, they have to confirm that they (the FBI) generated that report and when they do the company sends you your Apostille which is the officially verified copy of your background report. Makes sense, right? The government generates a report that’s not official until some other company sends it back to them so that they can verify that it’s official? Of course! We used a company by the name of US Authentication Services for our Apostilles because they hand deliver to the FBI so it’s much quicker than others. The cost was $57.20 US for each Apostille. The consulate stressed that the Apostille is the single most important document that you’ll file so treat it like Gold!
  2. For proof of sufficient funds we gave them copies of statements from all of our bank accounts. We also gave them a copy of the purchase and sales agreement on our house to show that we would have enough money to purchase a place in our new home.
  3. For ongoing income I submitted my projected Social Security distributions starting 6 months in the future and we told them our business plan to open a “B and B” in our new house.
  4. Drivers licenses
  5. Plane tickets to show when we intended to go.
  6. We gave them a list of the five “B and B’s” that Susie had booked for from 4 to 10 days each in different spots around the island and they made us show emails from real estate agents that we had made appointments with to see houses on the island.
  7. Passports (which they held onto until the visas were ready)
  8. Extra passport photos.
  9. International travel insurance.

The entire process, from visa applications to picking them up took around two months. In the mean time they asked us a couple of times for more info including a letter from my boss proving when I retired (don’t know why) and why we would want to move from the US to a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Finally they came barely one week before our flight date!

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Barrels ?. . . .Really?

So we decided to get rid of everything. New life, new wife, right? Hey , wait a minute, that’s not right! (she’s going to kill me, but I just couldn’t resist the rhyme) No – new life, new stuff, that’s it! With so little to send we had to find a more economical way. Turns out it’s barrels. Yeah, like the barrels you see them dispose of bodies in gangster movies. Those kind of barrels. We found a guy in Fall River, MA who ships barrels full of people’s belongings to Portugal all the time! Who would have guessed, right? We’re only bringing with us our clothing, some personal items, and sentimental stuff that it will be nice to have with us in our new place, so we bought a few barrels from the guy, lined them with 55 gallon trash bags, wrapped our things in more plastic, stuffed them in the barrels, sealed the trash bags, and, voila!, ready to ship!

We bring the barrels to a warehouse in New Bedford, they put them in a container and put that on a ship. Easy-Peasy! The lids are held on with a locking metal ring that has a hasp for a small pad lock for security. When the load gets to Portugal customs can X-ray the barrels and if they don’t see anything suspicious they don’t even have to open them. $30 US to buy each barrel, which we should be able to recoup when we’re done with them, and $50 US a piece to ship. Again, we can’t be sure if there are going to be any other fees or charges to receive the stuff on the other end but with any kind of luck they’ll be minimal.

Now all we need is an address to send the barrels to, and permission to stay in the country for an extended period of time. Hopefully forever! Want to talk about VISA applications? Ok, let’s do that. In the next post . . . .

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That’s a lot of ship…..ping!

Ok, so we’ve decided to move to the Azores. But what are we going to move to the Azores? All of the furniture we own is second hand. Comfy . . . but worth it? Our mattress is pretty new and Really comfy . . . we have a couple of cabinets and bureaus that would be nice to have . . . then there’s the bikes, we’d like to have the bikes to ride when we get there. Ooooh, then there’s the kayaks, we’ve just gotten into kayaking and those will be fun in the middle of a volcanic lake. I still have a ton of tools that will come in handy fixing up the new house and doing yard work. And then there’s pots and pans and dishes and silverware and a table and chairs and four TV’s and two DVD players and two VCR’s . . . . Hey, wait a minute, how are we going to get all this shhhtuff over there?

We’re on the east coast of the US so there’s really only one step that has to be taken. Ok, two. Everything you ship to the Azores has to go to Lisbon on the mainland first, then it gets transferred to the islands. Being somewhere in the US Midwest you will have to truck everything to the nearest shipping port to get it on its way. If you’re sending a lot of big items, i.e. furniture, appliances, a car, etc. you’re going to have to rent a 20 foot container, listing everything you have in there, including serial numbers of electronics and appliances and things like that, which the shipper may want to confirm. That means that they will want to pack the stuff for you. Which means that they will also charge you for that. When the container gets to Lisbon it may get opened for another inspection, so Portuguese customs may be going through your stuff, possibly while you’re not around to keep an eye on things. The baseline cost of this from our research is around $10,000 US using a moving company.

We also found some companies that will ship partial containers (your things will be in a container with other people’s things) for reasonable prices depending on the cubic meter volume and/or weight of total shipped. Typically you’re going to have to palletize and “wrap for shipping” everything at your residence and have it in the driveway or on the sidewalk so that they can just forklift it into a truck and drive away with it. Pickup times and dates might not be as sure as you would expect. So now what do you do with all your junk sitting on the sidewalk on a pallet if the truck driver either doesn’t show up, or shows up and finds some reason not to load your things? ….And it starts to rain….Think about it. As in everything READ THE REVIEWS! and choose a highly rated, reliable company. The Better Business Bureau has a complaints/resolutions department that shows disagreements from both viewpoints, in some cases, which may help you avoid common mistakes on your end.

We weren’t able to pin down exactly what taxes, duties, or fees apply when bringing your belongings in. It’s complicated. Some sources say that there are no charges for bringing in “household goods”, but others strenuously warn about “hidden” fees and charges that you may be hit with at any point in the process. New items, appliances, and electronics may be dutiable. The quantities of certain items may be restricted according to your “social standing”, i.e. don’t try to ship 100 pairs of new jeans or 20 TV’s or 5 washing machines if you’re making 20g’s and buying a two bedroom house. There’s a pretty good list at www.expatexchange.com but it’s from 2014 so may or may not be up to date. We won’t know til we get there and pick up our load on the other end so . . .stay tuned!

Oh . . .I haven’t told you what method we chose! Next post gentle reader.

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And So It Begins

Portuguese Halloween Costumes made by Mom.
Mom made Portuguese costumes for Halloween and drew a mustache on David.

Four grandparents, who independently left the Azores in the early 1900’s then met up in the New Bedford/Fall River area of Massachusetts, USA (very Portuguese), begat two parents who married, immediately left that area of Massachusetts to seek their fortunes in Boston and had three children of their own. None of the grandparents made it back to the islands to visit those whom they left behind. The two parents never made it over to meet the relatives that they had never known. The three children, who only had vague “wouldn’t it be cool to” kind of thoughts about going there, never really had the opportunity, time, money, motivation or whatever to go. Until… My Wife!

My name is David. I’m the middle child of the aforementioned third generation having one older sister and one younger. I met Susie, my inspiration and the driving force of this narrative, when we were in high school. We “went” together for awhile, went our separate ways for awhile, reconnected, married and had 5- yes, 5- children of our own. Su, in our 35th year of marriage decided that this was going to be our biggest vacation ever. “Let’s go to the Azores!” Coincidentally we began hearing, for the first time ever, advertising for the islands as a vacation destination. Also there were ads for direct flights from Boston to San Miguel which, as far as I know, was the first time ever those flights were available. So, plans were made, flights were booked for ourselves and our two youngest (18 & 20 at the time), we were all excited.

All set to go, waiting for the date, I went to a long overdue doctors appointment to check out some medical issues I had been having. Lo and behold, the dreaded diagnosis, cancer. It’s not my intention to go into the details of that whole unpleasant experience here (I’m beyond it, well, and cancer-free, bless God), I only bring it up to say that we decided not to let it derail our dream. In the midst of chemo I went to my doctors and told them that I was taking a hiatus from my treatments to go on this trip. They weren’t happy about it but, well, they didn’t have much choice. My body, my call.

Spent a miserable evening in Logan airport due to the physical discomforts attendant with chemo. Tried to get comfortable lying across three plastic chairs in the boarding area while dreading four and a half hours locked into a tiny seat on a crowded plane. In the end the flight wasn’t all that bad, and when we got off the plane on San Miguel. I was elated! It felt like home. The weight of the illness and the treatments and the trepidation about traveling under those conditions was lifted and I felt great. We haven’t traveled a whole lot as a family (a few flights within the states over the years and one trip to Puerto Rico years ago) so we didn’t know what to expect at the airport on Sao Miguel but it’s a small one so the process was minimal and we were soon on our way in a cab to our digs in Ponta Delgada.

Fishwife Room at Azorean Urban Lodge Ponta Delgada
Fishwife Room at Azorean Urban Lodge

Ponta Delgada is a beautiful seaport on the southern coast of the island. We stayed at a charming little hostel on the west side of the city called The Azorean Urban Lodge. Miguel and Rita were wonderful hosts who were very helpful to us with maps and directions etc. when we needed them and invisible when we didn’t. Su and I stayed in the “Fishwife” room and Tim and Kim (cute, right?) our kids stayed in the “Chimney” room. First day we slept in some, walked around the city a little, visited some restaurants and shops; got the lay of the land. Second and third days we hired Pure Azores to give us a tour of the island. Miguel Soares, the owner, and his other driver couldn’t have been nicer or more knowledgeable as they showed us the sights first on the eastern end of the island and then, next day, on the west. They explained agricultural and industrial history, told us folk tales and legends, and brought us to the best roadside restaurants and bakeries as well as showing us the scenic sights and routes to take. Miguel even took us on a little side trip into the village of Achadinha because, as we were going by, I mentioned that it was the town that my grandmother grew up in. All very relaxed and comfortable, with no pressure for time or meeting up at particular spots. Just take your time, enjoy the scenery (it’s magnificent), wander about, take pics, and move on when you’re ready.

We rented a car for the rest of the week and spent the rest of our time revisiting sights that Pure Azores had shown us and picking out other sites that sounded interesting. We even went back to Achadinha where we found a hiking trail that turned out to be a little more difficult than we anticipated but we survived and enjoyed it.

Achadinha Hiking Trail Sao Miguel Azores
Achadinha Hiking Trail

I may put more of the details of our two vacations in a separate post if anyone’s interested but suffice to say that we fell in love with the place. Before our second vacation, just out of curiosity, I started looking at prices of real estate on the island. We already had a small taste of the low cost of living there but when I found that we could buy a decent , albeit modest, home for under 100,000 euros I immediately started to do the math. I could sell my little cracker-box of a house here in Massachusetts, buy a bigger, nicer place there, and still have a good amount of money in the bank. Even better, I could afford to buy a place big enough to accommodate vacation rentals for income and still have money to fix it up with plenty left over. Talk about your “no-brainers”!

Going over and over the figures just served to confirm that realizing the crazy dream was possible. It was going to require a HUGE leap of faith, a complete reassessment of any concept of normal life as we’ve known it, and a willingness to give up pretty much everything we own and have come to accept as “our everyday stuff”. You know, the stuff you wake up to every morning and walk past every day without even noticing because its just always going to be there. Nope . . . gone . . . give it up, sell it off, give it away, throw it away, because if we’re not willing to do that then we have to figure out a way to get all this junk over there.” Ay, there’s the rub ” , as Shakespeare wrote. (look it up). For in this shipping of stuff what nightmares may come when we attempt to shuffle it all across the ocean, must give us pause, and a reason to write our next post.