Specific people, specific trips, specific durations. The texture of one working week.
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Four weeks became eight at the end of week three. Eight became thirteen at the end of week five. The two extensions had different motivations and different costs, and the difference is worth showing.
Thirteen weeks at Pomar gave me a working understanding of the three towns that anchor the eastern Algarve. None of them interchangeable. None of them right for the same kind of day.
Week seven of my Pomar stay coincided with Loulé Carnival. All I wrote down at the time is six words. The rest is informed memory.
I arrived at Pomar with a plan: work hard, workout a bit, fix my social connections. The 'workout a bit' line was the one I had given least thought to, and the one that ended up reshaping the stay.
Of the thirteen weeks I spent at Pomar, six were objectively bad weather. My weekly notes track the arc with bureaucratic precision. None of this appears on the booking pages — and it should.
Week one's note to myself contains the sentence that defined the entire thirteen weeks: 'Came to Pomar to work hard, workout a bit and fix my lack of building social connections.' Unflattering to admit. Also accurate.
A room-availability gap in week nine sent me to a Fuseta hotel for seven days. Same town, same Nanobrew, same lagoon path. The variable being tested was whether the routines I had built belonged to me, or to the place.
Three months at Pomar on a freelance contract that did not pause for the move. Monday-to-Friday rhythm, multi-timezone cohort that never made noise a problem, and a productivity arc I had not seen coming.