Rachel and I arrived in Portugal a month ago today. We have been so blessed with the opportunity to settle in to our apartment and have orientation time with our team and we started full-time language this week. From the first day we arrived, we have had a non-stop whirlwind of touring the city, spending time with our teammates, and figuring out the metro/busses. Each day for the first two weeks was planned with getting our cell phones, tax ID numbers, bank accounts, and even doing a Hop On/Hop Off bus tour to get us oriented.Our team is wonderful and they have been extremely helpful with getting us to IKEA and helping us find where to shop and where to find some American products when we need them. We have a total of 9 units including us on 2 different teams in and near our city.
Our apartment is on the 13th floor in the Park of the Nations/Expo area of Lisbon. This area is where Lisbon held the 1998 World Expo and they built this area of the city for the expo. We can see the Teju (Tagus in English) river from our balcony and the train runs right by our apartment which can be loud. We are a short walk from the Aquarium and a beautiful boardwalk type area that has many restaurants and shops near the river. We also have a mall down the street with a very large grocery store in the basement. Across from the mall is a large bus,metro, and train station that can take us almost anywhere in the city and the trains can even take you to other cities in Portugal. This is great because we do not have a car and depend on public transportation to get mostly everywhere.
Our apartment is more spacious than we expected. It is two bedrooms, two bathrooms, with a spacious living room and kitchen and lots of closet space. We have a balcony that is not for the faint of heart (again 13th floor) off both the living room and the guest bedroom. We don't have heat or air conditioning and even with space heaters it still can be chilly. It was very sparsely furnished (we are ISC) but we couldn't live with the ugly orange couch that was here. With a few trips to IKEA, a used furniture store, (I got a great old brown leather man chair) and some other hardware type stores, our apartment is finally feeling like a home.
One funny-finnicky thing about our apartment is that our electricity can't handle more than one thing on at a time. If we run a heater and our stove at the same time, we blow our fuse box. If we turn on our washer and our condenser (sort-of dryer) we blow the fuse box. If Rachel runs her hair dryer and anything else...well, you get the picture. So we've blown the fuse box about 50 times. We're hoping to talk to the people about bumping up the electricity as soon as we speak enough Portuguese.
We have been surprised by how hard it is to get around without knowing Portuguese. We can sometimes ask if people know English, but sometimes, especially when you really need them to, they don't know what you're talking about. Even mailing a letter was a difficult ordeal. This does cause us to have frustrating days (we call them "I don't like Portugal days") and does make us pray to have supernatural ability to learn the language. We will be studying at the University 4 days a week for 4 hours a day starting next Monday.
The Portuguese are horrible drivers, and they do things much slower and less efficient than we Americans would like. We opened a bank account 4 weeks ago and when I asked about our debit cards today they said "Maybe next week." We are experiencing the typical response and nonchalance of Portuguese non-customer service.
We do hope to get involved in a Portuguese Baptist church, but the one we like is an hour and half away by metro and train. We will be helping choreograph a dance number for Easter and I will be speaking/giving my testimony for a men's ministry meeting this Friday. It is all in Portuguese so we don't know exactly what is going on, but they did sing a Portuguese version of "Shout to the Lord" and we just felt so blessed to be worshipping with these precious believers.
We were surprised at how turned off some Portuguese are to the gospel or even the name of Jesus. We did an Amazing-Race Lisbon challenge that our team set up for us where we had to go all over the city and accomplish different tasks. One thing that we had to do was give our testimony and try to hand out three Portuguese New Testaments. I was surprised by how many people told me no and closed me off immediately when I asked them if I could tell them about how I came to Jesus. It seemed like there was an instant wall that went up. I was able to have a profitable conversation with some college students and when I gave one of the guys a New Testament he was like "This is the stuff!" So we are praying for more open opportunities like that.
Will post more later!
