I wrote about my plan for how to do what we needed to do for phones and watches and everything already. But now it’s come time to actually do it. Hasn’t quite gone to plan. I started from a worldview where I figured all phones and everything all use the same chipsets at this point….
SEF Appointment: Done. Sorta.
Today was our SEF appointment, which will give us a Portuguese residency card. This will, among other things, give us access to the health care system in Portugal (which is a whole other blog post that we need to write), local resident rates on things like parking and car rentals, and so on. The residency…
First Few Days in Lisbon
We made it! We’re tired as hell, but we’re finally in our apartment in Lisbon, with an SEF appointment tomorrow to apply for our residence cards. We’ll meet our immigration lawyer right before our appointment so hopefully all should run smoothly. The exit was a little rockier than I’d have liked, as my sister came…
Packing Advice: Order of Operations Matters!
We leave to move to Portugal in just a few days now. Obviously, tensions are high and we’re raging stress beasts, which is to be expected. One thing I have realized is that if we had planned this a little smarter, the order in which things are happening could have been a lot less stressful….
Portuguese ATM Exchange Rates – Just Say NO
When given a prompt about whether you want to ‘protect your exchange rate’ or some shit, say ‘NO’. You might get a scary looking “Are you sure?!?!?!” prompt – double-down, hit NO. There. That’s the entire post. (JK, lemme explain below) So my understanding of that weird prompt you get on Portuguese ATM’s is that…
Moving Specialty Items (Like Swords) to Portugal
If you decide to have professional movers handle your stuff (which as we’ve mentioned elsewhere is expensive and time consuming, but it *is* an option) in your move to Portugal, you should be aware that there are certain items that will cause issues with customs. I assume this goes for all countries, but we didn’t…
Telecom and Mobile Number Porting from the US to Portugal
First things first. The 5G infrastructure in most of Portugal is great. The fiber service you can get in Lisbon is awesome. And everything, relative to us estadunidenses (Americans), is dirt cheap. So one of the first things we will do when we get there is sign up with a Portuguese cell phone provider. We’ve…
More Car Woes
So as I mentioned in my previous post: How To Move A Car to Portugal – it’s generally not a good idea. However, there was another “brilliant” idea I had about how to deal with it that seems to have also been a very bad idea. So let me share that with you so you…
Our first “regular” day in Lisbon
This is something I keep looking forward to. Right now there’s lots of stress, lots of waiting, lots of forms to fill out, and lots of expense. It’s all….awful. So the main thing I keep trying to look forward to is: what’s our first low-stress day going to look like? I’m imagining this will be,…
SEF Reschedule: No Joy
As I mentioned previously, our immigration lawyer helpfully tried to change our SEF appointments to NOT be at the exact same time in two different places, I presume because she didn’t want to have to pay for two different translators for us – but accidentally scheduled the appointments for the same day we land in…