Lisbon on a Vespa...with "Le Couz"!
- Nov 26, 2017
- 4 min read
Journal entry number Three | 25 November 2017 | Lisbon
Here we were, two days after landing in Lisbon. Nuno Elbling, now my friend and owner of Lisbon Vespa Rentals gave us a full hour of his time to share a wealth of information about Portugal and the Portuguese people, even before asking for a single Euro!
I had never witnessed such a thing. Showing up at a car rental company in America, you half expect the service to be cold and disinterested: you show your passport, your driver's licence, of course a credit card and you proceed to signing and placing initials in countless places on a contract printed in font size only the hubble telescope can make out. It is as if you were buying the frigging car. But Nuno just carried on to generously share his love of country, of Lisbon and of its people, their culture and their deep history. At times he even used Google Maps on his computer screen as a visual teaching aid. That's when I took the full measure of just how so very nice the people of Portugal really are. I had heard before that Portuguese people were warm and welcoming. In fact, I had never heard anyone speak of a foreign country by making mention at first of just how nice its people are. Thanks to Nuno, now I understood why that is with the lovely people of Portugal.
Nuno finally accepted our Euros after glancing sideways at our Quebec driver's licence and proceeded to show us the two Vespas (125cc) we would be riding through the streets of Lisbon over the next four days. That is: one for me and one for Le Couz. You see, Sébastien, Marie-Michèle's cousin joined us on the whole trip too. Sébastien is a 39-year old bachelor with a slim body and a warm smile. He says he is like un chien de chasse (a hound dog) as he hunts on Tinder. But most importantly for Marie-Michèle and I, he is a well traveled foodie and a true wine connoisseur. We figured that on a trip to a country where outstanding food and genuinely unique and underestimated wines top the list of life's essentials, we should take an expert along with us. Little did we know that Le Couz had never driven a scooter before in his life!
Negotiating the busy lunch hour streets of Lisbon without a GPS made for an interesting ride back to our apartment. Le Couz probably broke a sweat on his first Vespa trip but thankfully landed safely in front of our temporary home in Graça. His ear to ear grin told me he was in for more Vespa adventures!
The afternoon program was filled with our first meetings with the professionals we would hire to navigate us through the process of securing our Type 1 Visa. Lots has been written on the (in)famous Golden Visa which allows foreigners to obtain a resident permit in Portugal (in fact for the 26 countries forming part of the Shengen zone). That visa requires its holder to spend no more than one week per year in Portugal, so long as he or she makes a meaningful investment in the country (placing €1M in a Portuguese bank account, or investing €500k in real estate, or betting €350k in a Portuguese venture capital fund). Our goal being to actually live in Portugal for at least 183 days a year (and why not?! - with the weather, the food, the wine, the low cost of living (compared to Canada) and the lower taxes), the Type 1 Visa (traditional application for long term residence in that country) was therefore the proper route for us to take and did not require us to make the sizeable investments contemplated by the Golden Visa. Enough now for the public service announcement...
And so, at 4:30pm that same day, after parking our Vespa across the street from her building, we entered the offices of Gilda Pereira, Founder and Managing Partner at Ei!, I had read about Gilda (pronounced like Jilda by the way) in an expat forum. Earlier that afternoon we had met with some other law firms offering immigration assistance but found them to be inadequate in our experience, especially given our needs and expectations; the carpets were indeed plush and their espressos were excellent, but we went for the brains, not the fluff. Gilda was therefore an instant winner in that department and we decided right there and then that there was no more time to waste: we engaged her services.
The following day Gilda delivered our Número de Identificação Fiscal or NIF - the Portuguese equivalent to the Canadian social insurance number or the USA's social security number. It seems as though the NIF is required for next to everything you do in Portugal, including of course opening a bank account. Opening a Portuguese bank account is in fact (odd as it might appear) the first step to take in securing a Type 1 Visa. Gilda kindly offered to help us with that as well - first class service if there was ever one.
We chose Millennium BCP bank.
Now: Millennium taught us our first lesson on the virtues of patience when dealing with Portuguese red tape...39 emails and 4 months later, we finally got our debit cards!
Back in Graça, we found Le Couz on the terrace, sipping a glass of vinho verde and tracking the fresh scent of love on his favorite hunting ground!
More on that on our next post...
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