shivering
I woke up shivering and absolutely shaking from being cold. The last time I could remember being this cold was on a camping trip.
We had landed in Porto earlier in the day, after flying overnight from Dulles to Lisbon, then changing planes. I slept maybe an hour on the flight and my husband got a whopping zero minutes of sleep, so we were exhausted and not thinking clearly.
We took the metro into the city and were in our Airbnb by 10 a.m. We walked to a nearby grocery store for supplies, ate lunch in our apartment, and then my husband crawled into bed for a nap. Meanwhile, I read on the sofa until I fell asleep.
Two hours later, I woke up shaking so much that my teeth actually chattered. I got up and put on another sweater, then made coffee. A layer of wool and coffee helped, but I was still shivering.
My husband woke up, poured himself a mug of coffee, and commented on how cold he was. Y’all, he is never cold, never. He's one of those guys who wears shorts* year-round.
(*Cargo shorts, of course.)
Exhaustion was impairing our thinking, but we eventually figured it out: A lot of Portuguese homes do not have central heat, but instead use different smaller systems that are not left on constantly in the winter.
What this tiny apartment did have was a wall heater in the living room and it was not turned on. Pete turned it on. Within 15 minutes we both were much more comfortable.
We stayed in two other places during that trip in 2022. In Nazaré we rented a wee three-room Airbnb that had a space heater in the ground-floor kitchen and another one in the second-floor living room, both of which did a really good job of heating those two rooms, plus the bedroom on the top floor. And in Lisbon, we were in a small two-story apartment that had a combined living room and kitchen on the lower level and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs. The Lisbon place had radiators in three spots.
In all the places we stayed in Portugal, the hosts asked us to turn the heat on when we needed it and to always turn it off when we left for the day. Utilities are expensive in Portugal, so heaters, fans, and air conditioners are only used as needed and are not left running all the time.
So when we left for our day's adventures, we would turn off the heat — and in the Lisbon place, this meant also turning off the water heater, as the two systems were connected — and when we returned late in the afternoon we'd turn things back on again. After the shivers from our first day, we remained warm and cozy for the rest of our time in Portugal.
We've also encountered this in other places, including New Zealand, which surprised us, given how cold it gets on the South Island in the winter. But it works and I'm not going to criticize the system when as an American I know that my utility use is much higher than much of the rest of the world.
I will say that the next time we're in Portugal during colder months, I am absolutely going to set a reminder on my phone to remember to turn on the dang heat when we arrive.