Brands, Brands, Brands, Brands. And AppleCare+

So I mentioned earlier that I’m still “feeling my way” around brands now that I live here. I’ve worked out some things. I also have a little vignette about our experience living here and needing to get service on our computers (which are Macs).

Coffeemaker (Espresso machine)

Everything here is espresso. You can make drip coffee, but when you do, you’re going to be buying fine-ground coffee. So it might be a little silty. I think you’re better off just going all-in and drinking espresso.

I was trying to be all European and everything and bought a “real, full-fledged espresso machine.” It meant I left a mess everywhere. And if I didn’t drink my ground coffee fast enough, it would start to go stale. The machine worked sometimes – and then sometimes would just, like, not work. Requiring lots of fiddling around. And lots of banging and clashing around in the kitchen. And making a mess, which I tried to clean up, but inevitably I’d miss something, and @snipe would get angry. No one wants an angry @snipe.

There are a bunch of different brands of ‘pod’ style coffee here. One that I was really interested in actually came from Italy, called “ESE” – Easy-Serving Espresso. Tempting, and my “full-fledged” machine actually supported it. It’s an open standard, which I very much dig! But I couldn’t find the pods anywhere here. There are a few other brands of pods which have different features – like being able to make teas or bigger drinks. Even the market-leader, Nespresso, sells two different types of pods!

My local supermarket was selling an espresso machine, which seemed convenient. But it was a weird standard. So I didn’t buy it.

I asked at my local minimercado (bodega, corner store) what they sold the most of? And it was the plain Nespresso pods. The old ones; the “truncated cone” shape.

Just get Nespresso. There are, like, another 5 brands of pods. Don’t be stupid. Just get the dumb Nespresso machine. You can get the pods at any supermarket, at any minimercado. And our local Pingo Doce even has a nice recycling station for the pods. You can sign up for their delivery thing and get a machine for free or nearly-for-free, but that means you have to wait for deliveries to show up, so I would take a pass on that option. You can pop in to your local minimercado and get pods easy.

Don’t be dumb like me. Just get the stupid Nespresso machine and move on with your life.

Supermarkets

A lot of what we buy here is at our local minimercado – because it’s close, and convenient. You pay a little more, but you know you are, and it’s fine. But when you need to properly shop, you need to go to supermarkets.

What we’ve been able to work out is that Pingo Doce has really decent hot food options (with a few great options and a few stinkers), and their fresh-squeezed orange juice is amazing. And, oh my god, their MANGO ICE CREAM! It’s exquisite! Seems to be seasonal though. Their meat and seafood section is daunting, but looks impressive. They have some other Pingo Doce branded items that we swear by, like their ham (fiambre). Always great. Much of the bacon we try to pick up there is just terrible though. I don’t understand why. We have pork here, and we’re good at it!

But as an actual, uh, supermarket. With like supermarket things – they suck. Just utterly suck. It’s, like, they’re somehow treating their supermarket business as a loss-leader for their fresh-foods business, maybe? They’ve been out of eggs for like 3 weeks straight. I went down the street to another supermarket and they had shit-tons of eggs. So, no, they just suck at inventory.

We even, sometimes, tried to order from them online for delivery. It generally showed up around when it was supposed to (with of course some modifiers for ‘Portugal time’), but every time seemed to require a phone call from the shopper, who almost always did not speak English. Which is fine; we’re in Portugal. It’s just a little more challenging. And, even then, we wouldn’t get all the stuff that we wanted. @snipe mentioned that she ordered some stuff, and nearly half was refunded because stuff wasn’t in-stock.

Continente is a far better-run supermarket. They actually have tons of stuff. Their supermarket over at Colombo is GIGANTIC. They have good bacon – “Tulip” – from Italy. They don’t (at least, not yet) have any particular store-brand stuff that pops out – but it seems like Continente is more of a logistics company that accidentally has supermarkets to distribute their stuff. So other minimercados and markets will often be selling Continente-branded stuff.

Internet

Vodafone is a British mobile-phone company, and they have presence here. They’re pleasant to deal with, and run a good shop. Signing up for Vodafone was one of the first things we did when we got here, and it took an in-store visit, but we got it done. (Worked fine for US-purchased phones). They’ve generally done right by us. They also worked when I went to England! And no surprises! Just worked! Though when I went back to the States for a visit, they sent a message saying “Hey you’re roaming, you have (some microscopic amount of) data, or you can text this message somewhere and get more.” And then, within minutes, sent me a message saying “oh, and now you’ve spent your mobile data allowance. Whoopsie.” That’s fine, though.

But there’s also Meo, which is the national provider here. Also known as ‘Altice’ (why have two brands? I have no idea!) They work inside our local Pingo Doce, whereas our Vodafones get nearly zero reception there. They’ll also work inside our house, where we barely get one bar from Vodafone. They are a touch pricier, and have a chonkier, clunkier customer experience. But once our Vodafone contracts are up, we’re probably going to switch – the in-home experience in terms of reception is reason enough alone, but having reception when I (reluctantly) go to our local Pingo Doce is really pretty important as well.

Meo is also our local cable provider – fiber. Our bills are extremely reasonable. It generally works. We now even have cable TV – which, when we watch, is good for helping improve our Portuguese. There are a few other providers, and I bet they’re gonna be super nice, and they’re probably going to be cheaper. But I suspect they won’t be as good, in terms of reliability (which is *most* important to us) nor bandwidth.

Banking

Banks here suck, period. They’re all shit. Lots of people here use Revolut – and LOVE it. But every time I look at it, I keep thinking “Why does everyone love this so much?” It’s not particularly compelling to someone who has any US-based bank account. But Portuguese banks are such worse shit that it looks better in comparison, which is terrible.

We started with Millennium bank here, and they’ve been great to us. They’re a Portuguese bank, so they’re definitely going to be shit, but they’re pleasant enough to deal with. Forcing me to take an Uber to ‘my branch’ to update my address? GREAT. (note: it’s not great). Giving me a shitty credit card that I don’t want? Also great! Bleeding out a few bucks every month? Love it! No interest rate on the money I leave in my checking account? Awesome!

But these things, which suck, also suck at every other bank here. And other banks can be even more obnoxious to deal with. My passport expired – as they are wont to do. And my Caixa Geral do Depositos (CGD.pt) account became locked out when that happened. WTF. Required a visit to the (thankfully) local branch to fix, and they were nice – but I had to do the transaction in Portuguese, which added a little bit of stress. But I did it, and was proud of myself.

So they’re a state-owned bank. And, again – chonky, big, clunky, but reliable. And annoying as fuck.

But, the rates on their mortgages were in a completely different league than the ones that Millennium were offering. Not even close. I feel like Millennium is doing their consumer banking business as a loss-leader to try to push their terrible, terrible mortgages on people.

It’s a weird experience here, but it feels like the apps on the phones are vastly, vastly superior to any experience you get on the websites. I could’ve sworn that some of the Caixa web pages had “.aspx” endings to their URL’s. Não bem 🙁 (“it is not good”)

The login systems for these things are the worst Rube Goldberg machines you could possibly imagine. One (CGD) that has a randomized pseudo-keypad that you have to ‘click’ the buttons on, which show up in a different order each time. One (Millennium) has fields for putting in different digits of your “Multi-Channel Access Code” – example “Put your first, fourth, and fifth digits here.” This does not work with any password managers.

Generally, stick to the apps – they’re way less unpleasant to deal with, and you can do just about anything you need to from them. Once you go through initial hell of setting them up, they usually will use FaceID or TouchID or whatever to make it pretty painless to use them for regular day-to-day stuff. It’s relatively painless once you’ve got it going. Unless, of course, your passport expires.

Restaurants

Going to your local coffee shop is a no-brainer. It’s always going to be dirt-cheap, it’s going to be delicious, and it’s going to be very hard to have a bad time. There are plenty of other options around the spectrum, but don’t sleep on these simple, fast, cheap, pleasant, and local options. Our favorite pastel de bacalhau was at a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop across the street from the immigration office. Our favorite Chamoças (basically, Samosas) are at a pretty regular miradouro (scenic overlook).

AppleCare+

This was the most shocking outcome for me here. One of the last times we went to the Apple Store in San Diego (at Fashion Valley, a kinda high-end mall), we brought all of our old Apple gear with us to try to get credit for it.

The guy was a little annoyed (rightfully), but he patiently went through all the gear we brought with us. We were kinda shocked, tbh, at the amount of money he was going to give us in credit! It was a pretty decent chunk. He would look at one machine and say “yeah, this one – too old. No money.” And then another one “oh, this one? $600.” We felt like we made money for free on this hardware that was just collecting dust.

So @snipe – who is lovely, smart, a wonderful singer, and very kind. But not, what one would call, graceful – managed to break her laptop screen, after a year or so of trying. We walked it into the local FNAC (Portugal does not have an Apple Store – more on this later) for a fix.

We do have AppleCare+ – we buy that every time for our iPhones and Macs; they’re critical infrastructure for us. I like the monthly plans in case I happen to accidentally hold onto some gear for longer than 3 years – which, admittedly, I don’t usually do, but I like having the option. And the slow-money-over-time thing is kinda nice, too.

So the very nice lady at FNAC (where we had our “Apple Authorized Service Provider” appointment) told @snipe (in solid English) “It’s not a very friendly number…” when we were finding out how much the screen replacement was going to cost. The standard deal with AppleCare+ is, like, $100 or something! So I would’ve figured €150 or something here – but, no.

We don’t have AppleCare+ here, at all. It’s, literally, not a thing. It was…€1,009 euros. OUCH. But, we need the spare; we can’t be in a position where we are down one machine. We need this to be fixed to be on standby in case one of us (let’s be honest, it’s going to be @snipe) bonks one of our boxes. So we have to grin and bear it.

And while we were there, FNAC does have a nice “used equipment” program – they will take your used gear and give you a little chunk of money. Seems fair, for things like watches and iPads and so on.

But they wouldn’t take any of our stuff. All of it had too many dents, or scratches, or other stuff like that. We use or stuff; it’s going to get regular day-to-day wear-and-tear! But, yeah, no luck for on that.

And it, to be frank, is a little jarring. We’ve been talking to other folks and apparently we might be able to have an option by going to Spain? It’s an hour-and-a-half flight, €100 round trip. I could live with that, but the question I’m still struggling with is: is this legal? Like, I’m used to Apple shipping me a ‘coffin’ (box) that I can ship them back my gear in, and then they ship me my thing ‘fixed’ (or, sometimes, a fully ‘new’ thing. Big Ship Of Theseus vibes.). And I don’t know that I can fill the form out with my Portuguese address or not. And I don’t know if that’s a technical issue, or a legal one.

So it turns out that Portuguese law actually requires Apple to warranty stuff for longer than Apple wants to – so AppleCare (sans the ‘+’) doesn’t really make much sense here, period. Sucks for Big Maçã (“Apple,” in português).

And I’m sure we can just get used to buying a thing, and hoping it doesn’t break, and when it does, buying a new thing.

But I really did like having that as my safety net. Realizing that I’ve completely lost that option is way weirder than a lot of the other culture shock I’ve had since I’ve come here.

Conclusion

It’s not all puppies and cupcakes (stole that line from @snipe). I don’t think it’d be fair to you, the reader, for us to make this place out to be a utopia – it’s not. No place is.

And if I’m honest, I’m in a bit of a dark place since the US election. Yay, great, the reason we left is making itself very, very apparent. Yay.

Aside: I think I’ve learned – don’t make jokes about upcoming election results. We did that in 2016 to our Dutch AirBnB hosts who offered to ‘adopt’ us if things went weird. Ha! Ha! Funny Joke! And then…and now this time, our funny joke has been “Well, if our side wins, then ‘yay!’ And if their side wins, then, well, it will make our decision to move here all the more prescient!” And I’m not feeling really fucking prescient right now. I’m just not.

So normally it’s @snipe’s job to be the complainer here and me to be the ray of sunshine. But I guess, in this context, now I get to vent. But, I do feel a bit better for kvetching a little. Thank you! And it’s a pretty good sign, tbh, when your biggest complaint is “My AppleCare+ coverage doesn’t work the same here as it does back in my home country. Wah.” So, yeah. Wah.

E até amanhã!