Today we decided to take a day trip to Cascais to distract ourselves. A few hours after we got there we found out that we got the apartment! We are so excited and relieved. I’ll be even more excited when we get the signed lease in our hands, but the landlord told us that the apartment is ours, so we’re focusing on that. There is a lot we don’t know about our apartment, so we are very excited to get there to see it and find out the answers to our questions. I have no idea if there is a dishwasher or a washing machine in there. I do know that it has a huge living room, a huge patio, and a bathtub, so those things are awesome.

The shipping company (from shipping our pallets) needs to have an address for us by November 12. We weren’t quite sure what we were going to do about that if we didn’t get the apartment, but now we don’t even have to worry about that. And now with a Portuguese address, we can go ahead and get private health insurance, which is the other thing we need to do for our residency appointment. And we can go to the bank to change our address, and then maybe they can mail me another bank card. There is a branch right up the street from us in Sintra.

Cascais was, of course, absolutely gorgeous. I have seen videos of it and knew I would love it. People say that you don’t really need to know Portuguese in Lisbon and Sintra, and that is true to a degree, but we found it to be even more true in Cascais. There is a lot of English spoken there. We had some really good fish and chips for lunch. Things were expensive in Cascais, but all of the food we got was really good.

We walked down the promenade for a bit, and then we turned around and walked back down a busy road back into town. We walked around some of the shops for a bit. We went to two different beaches and got some gelato. The first part of our trip was more of a distraction, but the second part was a lot of fun since we felt pretty relieved and happy. There is some beautiful artwork that we see for sale in Sintra and I really wanted to get some of it, but I don’t want to lug it around if we don’t know where we’re going. Now that we know we have an apartment I can go buy some! My favorite ones are pictures of doors. I know how strange that sounds. I never used to be into doors, but I have seen so many beautiful ones in Portugal and I love them. So I am going to have framed pictures of doors in my new apartment, lol.

As soon as we find out our move-in date we are going to arrange some things and then we’re heading up to the Silver Coast! We have absolutely loved our time in Lisbon and Sintra, but we are very excited to get to know our new home and hometown.