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BitaTruble -> Adeus Portugal (1/5/2010 8:25:55 AM)
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Well, it's official. We are leaving Portugal.
Himself has been offered a major promotion within his company which he has accepted and we are moving to Milan. The target date for him to be in place is April 1, for a minimum two year stint to try to 'fix' what ails their offices in Italy. When we first got to Portugal, the offices here were doing about 5 million in net profit revenues. He started in Oct 2008 and now, end of 2009 they are sitting at 18 million net profit revenue. That was enough to impress the PTB to offer him COO of Italy so .. here we go again. My Italian is passable but I'm by no means fluent but Italy offers a lot of advantages to me, personally, over living in Portugal including the opportunity for a dual citizenship which means, if Himself will let me, I could actually go to work. Since we will probably only be there for two years I don't know if I want to start that as a process, but I might. There are still a lot of logistics to work out and given the clusterfuck that accompanied the mere 8 days we went over there in Nov of 2009, I am not at all delusional that April 1st will be the actual date we leave Portugal but I'm hopeful.
We are scheduled to make two trips together as well as Himself making several trips without me prior to that time so our trip to Egypt is officially on hold until the whole thing gets settled.
Italy will come with it's own set of issues for him. For one thing, the Portugal offices were actually operating in the black but the Italian branch is starting off 30 million in the red and losing more every day but they are looking at Himself as something of a miracle worker and given him all the power and backing he needs to try to get things turned around. He's figuring one year, minimum to get them to stop bleeding money.. another year to start erasing the debt they've already incurred and, maybe, actually start seeing a profit around year 3. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but basically, this is win-win for him because they don't *expect* that Italy can be saved and are ready to dump it. If he saves it, he's going to be the Golden boy and can probably write his own ticket &if he can't, it's not going to reflect on him because PTB don't expect anyone can actually turn things around but they are willing to try.
In any event, I'm feeling pretty good about this move even though I didn't care much for Milan as a place to actually live. I'll miss Cascais, the people and the incredible weather and scenery here and I'm not crazy about losing yet another hour in the time difference between here and California but at the same time, it's the opportunity to be able to discover part of my own Italian heritage and explore, in depth, the country which my great-grandparents and grandfather called home.
So, adeus Portugal and ciao Italia!
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