The Flip Side of Patience

Several times in these pages I’ve shared the mantra I adopted before we moved to Portugal.

Portugal will teach me patience.  Portugal will try my patience.

In the nearly two years we’ve lived here, I’ve found that to be true.  Over and over again, my patience muscle has gotten stronger through regular exercise.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that patience alone is not enough.  To get almost anything done here, you have to do more than just “wait it out”.  

Two other bloggers have helped me think about this.  

Shanna Trenholm, an American immigrant living in Setúbal – about 50 kilometers south of Lisbon – wrote a piece on her blog life:examined about what she has learned from her own experience of moving to Portugal and also what she has observed in others.  

She writes about the common experience of people moving to a new country – anticipating an exciting new life, discovering how hard it is to live in a foreign country, and, for some, finding it too challenging.  But those who make it, Shanna believes, do so because of their tenacity.

That resonated with me.  I knew the importance of tenacity in my professional life.  It was part of the tag line for a consulting business I ran: Quality – Integrity – Tenacity. 

After reading Shanna’s post, I started thinking about tenacity as the flip side of patience.  To “make it” in a new country, you have to have patience because things here don’t work the same way or happen as fast as they did “back at home”.  And you also need tenacity to keep pushing toward whatever goal or objective you want to achieve.  

I suppose if you had enough money to completely insulate yourself from most everyday activities, like grocery shopping or paying the electric bill, you wouldn’t need much of either quality.  You could lie on the chaise lounge next to your swimming pool and shout at your assistants.  

But for those of us who arrived on a D7 (retirement) visa, funded by pensions, savings, and/or Social Security, we’ll just have to suck it up and grind it out.  

This doesn’t mean we don’t lose it occasionally.  On the contrary, at least once a week Mary or I find ourselves bug-eyed, with blood vessels straining in our temples, glaring at the other and practically shouting, “WHY IS EVERYTHING SO F*CKING HARD HERE!”

It’s only because of years of discipline that we both don’t shout.  You see, we’ve had a standing rule for over 45 years: Only one of us can be crazy at a time.  

But we don’t talk about this much

If you read this blog, or any of the hundreds that focus on “the expat life”, you don’t often encounter this aspect of life abroad.  Sure, there are discussion forums where people complain about the slow-moving bureaucracy, but they rarely get livid.  

In practice, we do just the opposite.  LaDonna Witmer, another American transplant also living in Setúbal,  wrote an excellent post at The Long Scrawl about how we curate our messages and social media posts to create the impression that everything about our new lives is perfect.  More perfect, in fact, than all those other folks posting about the same thing.  

(I’ll confess.  I want to write just half as well as LaDonna does.  In fact, I wouldn’t blame you if, after reading her post, as you must do, you unsubscribe from this blog and throw your lot in with her.)

LaDonna contends that we carefully craft our posts (blogs, Instagram, Facebook, etc.)  to project a specific type of message to our friends, family, and readers:

So let’s talk about it

There are plenty of stories I could tell about the experiences we’ve had that drive us to screaming fits. Here’s one recent example of patience and tenacity in action… or inaction.

Changing our transit passes

Residents of Lisbon, over the age of 65, can ride the metro, trains, and buses within the municipal limits for free.  We were already getting the half price discount offered to older folks outside the city.  But once we moved into Lisbon, we wanted to take advantage of the free ticket offer.  That would save us €40 every month.

All we needed to do was get our address changed.  That should be easy enough. Right?

We started by scouring the web sites of the metro system, the bus system, and the train system to see how to sign up for the free passes.  We found lots of articles about what a great deal this was for seniors, but we couldn’t find any step-by-step instructions.   

Update – 14 May 2023: Several readers asked questions about how to obtain the Navegante cards and the free senior citizen passes. I’ve added some notes at the end of this post.
Mike

We’ve often heard that the best way to do business in Portugal is in person, so we decided to visit a ticket counter in a nearby metro station.  But our timing was way off.  The day we went to the station was at the end of the month, when it seemed that half of Lisbon needed to make a change in their passes.  After waiting in a long line for half an hour, we decided to try again another day.  

Every in-person visit began with getting a numbered ticket that indicated your place in line.  (US friends:  Think of the ticket you get a Baskin-Robbins when you want an ice cream.  They do it everywhere here.  It’s a great system!)  

One day, at the bus company office, we were given number 202.  The display board showed they were servicing number 136.  Ugh!

After 45 minutes, they had moved 10 people.  At that rate we calculated it would take over 4 hours to get to the front of the line.  That was a test of patience that we failed – we dropped out of line to try again on another day.

On the day we finally made it in to talk to an agent, we showed him our new lease as proof of residence. He shook his head and explained that we’d need to get a Certidão Domicilio Fiscal (certificate of fiscal residence) from Finanças, the Portuguese tax authority. 

Great. Now we get to deal with the government, too!

There was a Finanças office a few blocks away. It was a nice morning, so we decided to walk over and see if we could request the certificate. But when we arrived, we found signs in the lobby saying there were no walk-ins. You have to make an appointment.

Back at the apartment, Mary did a Google search and found that we could obtain the certificate on the Finanças web site. (Fortunately, we had already changed our address with Finanças. We did that online, too, but it took about two weeks because once they recorded our new address they had to send us a postal letter with a verification code that we entered in their web site.) 

By then we had learned that if we waited until about the 4th day of the month and went to the bus station office before 9:00am, there would only be a few people in line. So finally, after 2 ½ months and 7 or 8 visits to metro stations and the bus company, we had everything in order and the guy behind the plexiglass barrier updated our passes.  

The good news is that we can renew the passes every month at one of the MultiBanco ATM machines. No lines. No tickets.