Expat Portugal

I am reading and highly recommend “Portuguese Language Life & Culture” by Sue Tyson-Ward to all expats and visitors to Portugal. It more than lives up to its title and is a really good introduction to all aspects of life in Portugal. It’s a cheap paperback in the Teach Yourself series (really cheap, the paper is OK but the pages are falling out of my copy).

For those of you interested in the less developed parts of Portugal, a two-volume work called “Wild Herbs & Happiness” by Ruth Banks will be a nice read. She and her husband moved to an isolated village in the inland mountains of the Algarve, and the books are a record of what Portugal was like before modernity intruded. It’s a bit Rousseauian for my taste, full of the "noble savage" philosophy, but still well recommended. It might be hard to find, but lots of shops in the Algarve seem to carry it. I picked my copies up in a garden shop of all places! Since we live in the hills north of Faro away from the famous Algarvian beaches I found it very interesting - although the exact location is kept a secret to protect the privacy of her neighbours, I think that we live roughly half way between the Banks cottage and Faro.

The site http://portugal-info.net/ is one of the best I've seen and it's full of info, so it is worth taking a look. It isn't always as balanced as one might expect - just look at all the listings for Almancil! - but that is a minor quibble.

For a while I used this blog is to let readers know about nice restaurants and other spots of interest. Normally I am reluctant to do this since who wants to share his secret finds with the rest of the world (as Yogi Berra put it, "no one goes there any more, it's too crowded"), but so few people are likely to read this blog that my secrets are safe.

I now have a set of blogs dealing with dining in Portugal which are at http://expat.silvert.org/food/ so this site is obsolete and I will no longer post food-related material here. You can still go to http://expat.silvert.org/food/ for my personal views, but the best place to look is at the new Expat blog site, http://expat.drzeus.net.

If you take Portuguese courses, make sure that you are learning the language that is spoken in Portugal. Most courses and language aids teach the Brasilian dialect, which is a bit like learning to speak Texan so that you can get a job in England (except possibly in Tony Blair's cabinet).

Welcome to Expat-PT, the Blog spot for expatriates in Portugal. News, tips, useful (and sometimes useless) comments. And note my website, http://expat.silvert.org, for more organised information.

The kind of stuff I will post here is mostly off-the-cuff comments of general interest, but anything that really matters will go on the website. The material here will be casual comments about places to visit, nice restaurants, that sort of thing.

Any questions or comments? Feel free to write me.