Our experiences in Aveiro / Agueda and Friendship

Hello everyone, we are a family of 3 that migrated to Portugal 3 years ago, we are Mexicans and we are quite happy here, however, we are probably somewhat introverted and we only have superficial friendships with some Portuguese neighbours, the truth is that they have been very friendly but their main social circle is limited to their family, in fact, they don't have friendships with their co-workers which is strange for us, in Mexico there is usually a lot of fiesta and we don't see that here among co-workers.

Life in general is good but we didn't knew Portugal would be this humid, mold problems are a big issue, the only way is running a dehumidifier 24/7 in auto mode around 55% to 60% and opening windows when there is low humidity outside around 1pm. We had luck with a dehumidifier that only consumes 150w and stops automatically when desired humidity level is reached.

Burocracy here really blows your socks off but once you manage to sort all your IDs is all good, it was for sure easier here than in Algarve, here we had no problems compared to Albufeira where school was asking for some paper we didn't had.

Beaches in Aveiro remind me to Cancun, really beautiful, weather is very windy but not as bad as La Coruña.

In my case, I'm a 45 year old software developer probably not very geeky, I think that for friendships there must be common interests, some passion or something like that, in my case, I like to invent things, play guitar and video games.

I've been developing a web platform for years and I haven't really had the opportunity to socialize much, in Mexico at least almost every weekend we met with friends, all that was left behind when we migrated to Portugal.

My wife had a large group of friends who were the mothers of our son's classmates, here she has hardly managed to talk to the other Portuguese mothers, they don't seem to be very interested in socialising, they don't have much free time either, they all seem to have jobs and their life is probably centred around their close family and work.

My wife loves animals, especially dogs, she is a doglover at heart and her life revolves around her puppies, if you asked me what else she likes I would say shopping for sure.

Our 13 year old son already speaks Portuguese as if he was born here, it's amazing, he has made friends at school but every year they shuffle the groups and he loses all connection with the ones he had managed to click with, it's unfortunate that the school does this kind of thing when they are supposed to keep the same groups here in Portugal.

Among the current topics of interest in my case is construction, solar energy, business, music and technology, I would like to have a new business in Europe. For my wife would be dogs, meeting and exploring new places, romantic comedy, gardening and shopping.

Our current main objetive right now is to build a house, prices are around 1600 euros x m2, crazy high! but we haven't found a house worth buying in this area, we at least managed to buy a terreno.

We wonder, are there people in this area with similar interests?