Braga

We'll be back (33)

The four-month anniversary of our arrival in Portugal - today, October 24 - could have been very different.

Our trip north, forced by our SEF appointments last Thursday, has been, at times, rather unpleasant. Amy, perhaps in response to our lunch on Friday?, got violently ill.

It was inevitable that we’d eventually end up with a fish on a plate in front of us. We did think it would happen intentionally, though, in the midst of friends who could show us how to eat it properly. Not our luck, however. While we managed to consume most of it, the question remains: should we have done so? Was this grilled sea bass what made Amy so sick? We’ll never know.

The constant gray-rainy skies added insult to injury. And we were generally disappointed with both Porto and Espinho - places we’d had high hopes for as potential long-term residences.

We saw roughly half of Porto, looking for neighborhoods we thought we might live in. The parks were gorgeous - would that we could take them back with us to Lisbon. But we couldn’t imagine ourselves living in any of the buildings surrounding them. It was rare we saw a building anywhere we could see ourselves in. Everything felt gritty and grungy from a combination of mold and plant growth (on roofs and sides of buildings).

Photo taken by Amy during one of the few times she could stagger away from hugging the toilet bowl.

Also, the public transportation system up here is not as straightforward as what we’ve gotten used to down south.

In our first three+ months of living in Lisbon, we had one Metro card. Recently, we bought a second card for the train to Cascais. Easy-peasy.

Lisbon: We have two cards each. The top card we use all the time; it’s easy to refill. We’ve used the bottom card once or twice. Both can be replaced by a single card down the line if we want. Simple and clean.

After a mere three days in Porto, both of us had purchased four cards, each of which required written notes on the back so we knew which one to use when.

These are the four cards for getting around Porto that Scott now has in his wallet. The blue cards are coded for different zones on the metro. In Lisbon, it doesn’t matter where you’re going: pay one price, hop on, go. Here, you need to figure out which zone you’re starting your trip from, which zone it will end in, and which zones you’ll cross through en route. If your existing ticket isn’t coded for the proper zones you’ll need to re-code it - which we couldn’t figure out how to do - or buy another one. The green cards are for the trains to Braga and Espinho. Why does each of us have two of those? No clue. It just happened.

Given it all, we nearly fled a few days early back to the comfort of our apartment in Lisbon and our snuggly puppy. (She has, at least according to the regular photos our sitter has sent, been managing OK without us.)

Josie, finding a way to soldier through in our absence. Photo by Inês Pupo, our amazing sitter.

Instead, we decided to gut it out¹ and take our planned trip to Braga and boy are we glad we did.

Braga is, in a word, amazing. We weren’t even halfway through the walk from the train station to our Airbnb when Scott exclaimed, “We could live here!” And while that was certainly a premature conclusion, the evidence has been lining up ever since.

Braga is the quintessential small European city.

It’s a centuries-old church

across a narrow alley from whatever this is.

It is modern sculpture juxtaposed against ancient architecture.

It is an Airbnb with views of tranquil gardens.

It is a dragon in a town square

and inviting narrow alleys.

It is a 12th-century castle keep standing vigil in the night.

In short, Braga combines the architectural mashup we loved about London with church bells dulcetly marking the hours that we loved about Guanajuato, Mexico.

There are also two Pingo Doces, a Lidl, and three Mini Preços scattered amongst the roughly bajillion² restaurants around town. So we’d be OK for food.

It’s no surprise to us that Braga topped a Forbes.com list of “European Best Destinations in 2021” coming in ahead of luminaries like Rome and Florence.

All we really need is to find a cadre of doctors, a board game group, a church, and convince some friends to move with us and we’d be quite happy here.

That’s all for now.

Love from … Braga,

Scott & Amy

1. Ha! Amy sick. Gut it out. See what we did there?

2. This may be a slight exaggeration.