Or … we’re moving to Portugal?
It’s hard to know at what point, exactly, you put the statement into the past tense. We’re still existing on our expired visas. We had an immigration appointment in December when we think we secured our two-year residency permits, but it’s hard to know for sure as we don’t speak Portuguese yet, and our agents (fairly enough) didn’t speak any English. We hope those cards will turn up in the mail sometime soon.
We’re renting an apartment in the suburbs of Ericeira, a fishing village turned international surf hot spot (yoga studios and avocado toast included). The apartment’s by the month, and we still have a rental car. So all told, it doesn’t quite feel like we did it yet.
We hatched some form of this plan in a hotel room in Taiwan, in the neighborhood of January or early February of 2020. Since “plans” and “2020” didn’t exactly go hand in, we’re as surprised as anyone that we actually managed to make it into the country.
I first came to Portugal over 10 years ago. I had studied abroad in Spain during university and visited the country twice. One weekend in the Algarve, one in Lisbon. We did all of the touristy things you would expect. Ran around what was, at that time, a pretty empty and magical network of tunnels and castles in Sintra. Got drunk at a Mexican restaurant in Lagos. Ate all of the pastries (an activity I still apply myself to with rigor and dedication). I remember that it felt very different from Spain. I remember meeting someone named João and thinking it was the best name I’d heard, possibly ever. I remember leaving with a generally excellent, though vague, impression.
So in 2019, having not been back to Europe since then, I convinced Tim we should spend a few months in Lisbon. We did, living in the cobblestoned and tiled center of the city for almost the entirety of our 90-day Schengen tourist visa. It didn’t take us long to love the city – who isn’t charmed by Lisbon? And there was surf close enough, so that checked a major box for Tim.
I don’t remember if it was two weeks or two months in when Tim said we should move there.
Impossible, I said.
I’d always dreamed of living in Europe.
Visas, I said.
I was normally the one coming up with outlandish, unlikely, and irresponsible ideas.
Jobs, I said.
Basically, I crushed the idea. It did seem impossible. I’d already dreamed enough about living in impossible places. I couldn’t get my hopes up about here, too.
So it wasn’t until January or February of 2020 that we realized it could be possible. There was a visa that we were theoretically eligible for, based on our remote incomes and savings. We could spend roughly half the year in Canada for our jobs (we had half-time remote work arrangements with our Banff-based employers) and half in Portugal. We began to put the wheels in motion. Researching visa requirements, fleshing out timelines. Of course, neither the timing nor the details of how it eventually played out were according to plan but, in the end, we landed in Portugal in November. We had negative COVID tests in hand and nowhere to stay as we hadn’t been entirely sure that we would make it into the country.
We picked up a rental car and jetted out of the city. Despite my enduring love for Lisbon, we wanted to test out what living outside of the city would feel like. Having seen enough videos of people in European capitals singing from their balconies through various lockdowns made us feel that having a coastline closer could be good if the coronashit hit the fan again (which, of course, it did).
A lot of people have asked, “Why Portugal.” The short of it is that it’s the only place that got us planning, not just dreaming. It was easy to envision, for a minute, life on a tropical beach in Nicaragua or Thailand. But those dreams got a bit fuzzy around the edges when you (ahem, we) started to flush them out. Of course, for some people, that dream might be the perfect reality. For us, they never quite stuck. But if they stuck for you, we should definitely do a house swap one day. Once, you know, we buy a house.
In terms of building a long-term life, it seemed like we’d found the spot for us with Portugal. We weren’t even looking for the spot, in all honesty, before we spent a few months in Lisbon. It just became clear that Portugal was it.
I can tell you all about this country but it would sound like one big cliché. The friendly locals. The beautiful coastline. The mouthwatering food. The truth is, I could describe a million places in the world with the exact same words. It just so happened that … it fits.
Like any long-term relationship, finding where you want to live is a mix of the practical and the intangible. It’s timing and magic. It’s the cost of a home and this shade of purple in the sunsets that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. It’s respectable global rankings in gender equality, corruption, safety, and the texture of cobblestones underfoot. It’s progressive drug policies and the stirring feeling I get wandering neighbourhoods adorned with endless street art. It’s the pace of life and everything, good and bad, that goes along with turning that dial down several notches. It’s this sense that we’re on the edge of a very different sort of life. And that we’re ready to topple into it.
Since we arrived in November, Portugal has been on a COVID rollercoaster, like so many nations. A post-holiday rise in cases brought the country into lockdown, and this is where we are now. We can get outside here, onto the sea cliffs and the dirt roads behind our place. Still, the restless energy of being contained rears its head daily. Our process of moving to Portugal feels as though it’s both steaming ahead and stalled.
So maybe when we get our residency cards, maybe when we find a place to live … maybe at some point soon we’ll be able to say, “We moved to Portugal.”
