Our goal here is honesty. While we love it so far in Lisbon, it’s also very hard to relocate to a new country. We don’t want to sugar coat this. We also want to try and talk about everything from the big picture to the nitty-gritty details of experiencing life in Portugal. So much of what we read and watched before moving made everything sound wonderful. This is the blog we wish we’d had as a resource.

Topics range from the (hopefully) informative (e.g. we write about our appointments with the Portuguese immigration service and how we exchanged our US driver licenses for Portuguese ones) to our observations about how life here is different from what we knew (holidays like Halloween and Christmas, for example). We’ll occasionally post a series of brief missives that aren’t particularly connected to each other or we’ll take a multi-part deep dive into a Big Important Topic of the Moment (like football or Eurovision).

We also aim to showcase original photos. Unless otherwise noted, every photo you’ll see posted has been taken by one or the other of us.

We do our best to respond to comments and if you receive our posts by email, hitting reply will send a message to Scott’s email account. You are also welcome to reach out to either of us by following instructions on our Drop us a line page.

Also worth noting, most posts are better-viewed in your browser or the Substack App rather than your email application (clicking “view in browser” above/right of the tiles at the top of your email will get you there). Occasionally, a post of ours will run longer than the maximum length email will accommodate; but mostly, you’ll have an easier time viewing the formatting (the photo captions look like photo captions, not actual paragraphs, for example).

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Subscribe to Love from Portugal

Our nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty truth about living in beautiful Portugal.

People

Amy Redfield
Is moving to Portugal without having visited the country first nuts? Sure! But I did it anyway.
Scott H-K
I am an American who gave up a perfectly comfortable life in St. Louis to move to Lisbon with my spouse and dog in June, 2022. It has not always been easy. Was it worth it? Read along and find out with me.