It's been a year

a long, strange trip indeed

On June 23, 2022, we landed at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport and set our feet on Portuguese soil for the first time ever. Our already mixed emotions were considerably roiled when our luggage - six Samsonite duffel bags and two carry-ons we were forced to gate check in Toronto, holding all of our worldly belongings outside of two backpacks¹ - failed to appear on the post-flight baggage carousel.

Almost everything we took with us to Portugal.

It’d be awesome if we could say things only got better from there. The first few weeks, though, were rough. The first few months settled into being merely very hard. Getting back on a plane and returning to the US was absolutely on the table for a while. By the time our six month wrap-up rolled around, things were looking better but staying here long-term was not yet a given. Which is one reason we left that post without a conclusion.

Today, as we prepare for the first of two parties we will host to celebrate both the 1-year anniversary of our arrival and the warming of our new home, the outlook is quite different. We bought property here. We know too many people to fit into one party. We feel more settled. We’ve decided to stay.

It’s been a year, to say the least.

It’s also fair to say we have a conclusion:

There are many challenges to living here, but the benefits far outweigh the difficulties.

We are thrilled to be here.

Now feels like a good time to step back and review where we are and where we would like to go next.

How We’ve Changed

It took quite a while to adjust to Portugal Time and Pace of Life. We now go to a restaurant with a friend and spend a few hours gabbing. We know we will not be hurried. We know the table is ours as long as we want it. The last time we did this, around the 2:15 mark, the restaurant brought out these fabulous mango ice cream cubes. Gratis, naturally.

Part of that is embracing that it’s simply going to take a long time to wait in line. The other side of that coin is when it is our turn, we have as long as we need, be it a quick question or a 15 minute transaction at the postal service.

We’ve learned to roll with life a lot more than we used to, and to drop (some of) the type A traits. Things will get done, how they get done, when they’re done. And we’re (generally) ok with that.² In fact, it is incredibly freeing to not always be gaming which cash register line to stand in, to not be fighting to get absolutely everything due to us, to not have life go perfectly. “Good enough” is actually better.

We weren’t prepared for how some of our interests would change. Amy has been a life-long gardener. A big concern moving here was how would she find a place to garden. Her life is so different that her need to garden has gone - nothing she could ever have dreamed of. Scott has always been a bit worried about traveling in a country where English is not the main language. We got off the plane, and he threw himself into trying to speak Portuguese as often as possible in as many situations as possible. Neither of us would ever have guessed these deep changes might occur. We suggest you hold yourself open to the unexpected within you.

What We’ve Learned

• It’s going to rain all fall and half of winter. So just get a dehumidifier, and an under sheet heating pad, and plan some indoor activities.

• Portuguese is hard. Harder than we thought it would be.
  Advice: Figure out what will work best for your learning style and begin with that method. If you need 1:1 instruction, find a tutor.³ If you learn best in a classroom setting, register for one. There are in-person and online options available for all budgets and skill levels. The earlier you start experiencing some success, the better. If you begin with a class that’s too advanced or with a tutor who doesn’t fit your personality, that’s a recipe for frustration, which will only make a challenging task more difficult.

• When the going gets tough (and it will), find something safe and familiar and suck up to it big time.⁴ Super squishy pillow from Target? Ours has brought loads of comfort at a time when everything was new and overwhelming.

  

• Want to pack everything up, jump on a plane and go home? That’s normal.⁵
  Advice: Pick a date some time in the future, maybe six months off. Commit to waiting until then to make a decision about leaving and table any thoughts or conversations that involve re-litigating your reasons for moving. Shifting your mental focus from why did I come here? to what do I need to do to get through today? will give you your best shot at making it.

• Roll with the bad stuff. Life will be different from what you’re used to. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.

• Reports of it being outrageously inexpensive to live in Lisbon are not necessarily true. It may be so for those who come from high cost-of-living areas in the US like San Francisco or the Boston-DC corridor. For us, from St. Louis, costs are pretty much the same overall. We spend a little more in some categories, a little less in others.

• If the first bureaucrat says no, try another. Ditto pharmacists.

• Walking is easier than we thought it would be. While we’re (still) excited to live without a car, the first few months reminded us that we’d been far too reliant on our vehicles for far too long. By now, we’re used to the hills that seemed almost insurmountable at the beginning and taking the Metro only 2-3 stops seems like a waste of money.

Goals

Up until now we have been very reactive (trying to survive the first six months) and then very to-do list driven (deciding to stay, where to stay, where to buy, buying everything we need for a completely unfurnished home). Now we get to move into a different phase of our lives.

The overarching goal is …

Learn Portuguese
We suspect that will be our mantra going forward for a depressingly long period of time. Scott worked with a tutor online for several weeks last summer and joined a Speak group last month. Amy has recently given in to the expense and started working with a tutor she really likes. Both of us are making progress. And it feels a bit like the more we learn, the more we realize how much we still have in front of us.

The short-term goal is to be able to get through life a little more easily. It would be great if the phone wasn’t so panic inducing!

Long-term, we need to pass a CIPLE exam at the A2 level⁶ in order to obtain either permanent residency or citizenship.⁷

Fortunately, there are a few other things on our radar as well.

• We recently had our first (short) travel-for-fun trip. And it was awesome. Doing more of that would be wonderful.

• As would taking time to be tourists in our own city. We’ve been a year in Lisboa and done very little. There are rumors of museums devoted to tiles and carriages. We’ve seen castles … from a distance. And there’s a place called Sintra that’s supposed to be nice to look at.

• We’d also like to settle in to lives that are more what we’d planned initially for ourselves – exercise, dancing, hosting board game nights, parties and life groups. Exploring interests we’ve long been drawn to, like drawing or music classes.

• We both feel we were led here by God. He has something He wants us to do. It’s time we find out what that is.

Challenges We’ve (Mostly) Overcome

• Things are different. It sounds silly and obvious, but moving from the US to Portugal and then trying to replicate the life we’d left behind wasn’t a winning formula. We may not understand precisely why a particular experience is different from what we once knew, but we are better at accepting what is rather than trying to bend the culture around us into something it isn’t.

• Feeling like outsiders. We had friends visit on a couple of occasions last summer. At that point, we were still barely keeping our heads above water. We weren’t really in a position to recommend things to do or to know how to get from point A to point B. Two weeks ago when we met visiting friends for lunch, we overloaded them with tips and advice on everything from basic Portuguese phrases to how to use the Metro to things to see and eat.⁸

• Handling life when we feel overwhelmed. If we survived that first five months? We can handle and adjust to pretty much anything.

And Those We Haven’t

• We’ve not mastered food here. We eat more vegetable forward than many – Scott is a (sort of) vegan – and we’ve found Portuguese cooking to be fairly meat and potatoes oriented. And Scott still struggles with his “I’ve got 20 minutes to gulp down food before my next meeting” mentality. Sourcing ingredients for recipes we love is a huge challenge.

• We’re not late-eaters. Restaurants often close around 16h (4 PM) and re-open at 19h (7 PM). As people who eat around 18h (6 PM), this limits our options.

• We’re still early-to-bed types in general, often turning out the lights before 22h (10 PM). Dinner at the restaurant across the street from our previous apartment was served until midnight.

• The medical system still feels opaque. Perhaps it’s more our insurance, but it feels like we’re paying more for medical treatments, prescriptions, and doctor visits than we expected to.

Things we miss

• Knowing where to find stuff, both from within a store and which store at all. It’s tough to track things down here. In the grocery store, for example, brown sugar isn’t in the “baking” section.⁹ There is no baking section. There’s a section for flour. And, a few aisles away, a different area for sugar. Baking powder and baking soda are scattered about. The number of times we’ve had to go aisle-by-aisle scanning every shelf for a specific item is uncountable.
  More broadly, trying to figure out where to go for a particular product or service isn’t always easy, either. There are Facebook groups that help tremendously, but gone are the days where we just know where to go.

• Having a routine. Scott doesn’t miss the day-to-day work of his job, but having a place to go, people to see, and Things To Do was nice. We need to work at that more here, we’re finding. Which we can do.

• Our libraries. We’re still connected electronically to both the Municipal Library Consortium in St. Louis and the St. Louis County Library.¹⁰ Being able to borrow and read books from these amazing resources has been a lifesaver. We used those libraries for far more than e-books before our move, though, and we miss having that access.

And things we don’t

• Driving

• Road rage

• Guns

• Political anger

• Walking at night with house keys protruding between our fingers in case we need a weapon

  

  Haven’t needed to do this in a year.

Finally

We’d also like to thank all of you who’ve reached out in ways big and small. From comments on our blogs to responses to our reader survey, to meetings both random and planned, having the connection to you has been invaluable. There were times in the early days when putting up our next post brought us joy when otherwise there was none.

Muito, muito obrigado.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott

1. and Josie, who traveled separately

2. Exception: MEO

3. And don’t be afraid to switch tutors if the first one doesn’t work well for your learning style.

4. Related: bring those comforting things with you when you come. A few such strategically chosen items can make a big difference.

5. It’s also not something you see a lot in social media feeds, so it doesn’t necessarily seem normal.

6. There are also classes that, if we can pass them, will exempt us from taking the exam.

7. This is four years down the road, but it’s on our minds.

8. Is there a happy medium between, “Sorry, no clue” and “Here are 5,000 pieces of information, some of which might be relevant to you in the next 48 hours?” Yeah, probably.

9. Brown sugar isn’t even brown in some cases. It’s yellow. But that’s a different story.

10. For now. Our library cards expire in less than a year and we’re terrified.