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Dear Editor,

As a recent ex-pat (in Portugal since February) it strikes me that there are two areas where advice from other readers of your paper would be invaluable, namely bureaucracy and food. I'd like to pose a couple of question about dealing with administrative problems, and volunteer a bit of potentially useful information about finding some of the exotic foods I miss in Portugal.

I'm trying to get either a Portuguese resident visa or citizenship, and I applied for a visa last year through the consulate in Montreal. Although I was told that everything was in order and the procedure would be routine in my case, my file keeps vanishing and never gets processed. Montreal just faxed my papers through to Lisbon for about the fourth time earlier this month. I'm prepared to hand-carry the papers from office to office if need be, but I need to know where to start. I'm also supposedly eligible for citizenship, since I have been married to a Portuguese citizen for over three years, but there too I really don't know the ropes. Any advice would be appreciated.

I also brought a car with me that at some point should be registered in Portugal. The only advice I seem to get from despachantes here is that I should take the car back to Canada and sell it there, and then buy a new car here! Not very good advice in my opinion, especially since the price in Portugal is about twice what I paid. I've written to Pat Westheimer who discussed auto registration in her latest column in The News, but certianly the matter of auto registration is a complex issue that should be discussed in the paper!

Now about food, maybe I can make a modest contribution here. I love Portuguese food, but there are some things I miss dearly, one of them being sour cream. My wife however stumbled across Queijo Fresco Batido in a Modelo supermercado, and although it isn't exactly the same as sour cream (it is more like the German Quark), when mixed with a small amount of cream it makes an almost perfect sour cream - just the thing for borsht on a hot summer day! Also if you have a taste, but not a budget, for caviar, you can sometimes find lamprey eggs (lampreia) in the market, which is the best non-sturgeon alternative that I have found. [For an updated discussion of food, click here]

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