Welcome and thank you for clicking on our About page!

Finding your way around

We posted pretty much twice a week from June 2022, when we arrived in Lisbon, through the end of 2023 when we cut back to Mondays only. That’s a fair amount of content to wade through. To make things easier, we’ve organized it into a Table of contents.

If you’re looking for a quick way to get a sense of what we do and how we operate, we suggest you try any of these posts:

Our philosophy

Our goal 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 musings 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, Eurovision, or politics).

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 want to hear from you

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.

Stay up-to-date

Subscribe (go on; it’s free) to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update (we do our best to publish most Mondays); every new edition of the newsletter will go directly to your inbox.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.

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).

If you want to reach out to either of us directly, feel to Drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!

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

People

Is moving to Portugal without having visited the country first nuts? Sure! But I did it anyway.
I'm 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 hasn't been easy. Was it worth it? Read along and find out with me.