One Year In…

We set foot in Portugal around June 1, 2023. So our one year anniversary was June 1, 2024 – a few months ago. We’ve had a lot of stuff going on since then, including our first major software release of our product being performed while some of us are overseas. That was…rough. Lots of stuff went well, lots of stuff didn’t go as well – and @snipe wrote about it. But this blog isn’t about that.

We knew when we were moving here that there were going to be easy things and hard things. And we knew there were going to be unimportant things that weren’t going to bother us, and there were going to be huge, big things that were going to be really, really hard to adjust to. I thought it might be interesting to look at the stuff that didn’t line up quite how we expected.

Also I’ll throw some weird notes at the end of just some stuff that hasn’t earned a full post on its own.

Stuff we thought would be “hard” that was “easy”

Finding Friends

Finding friends has been surprisingly easy – for us. We have the advantages that, a) we are a couple already; we don’t need to meet new boyfriends or girlfriends or anything, just friends. And b) @snipe is very charming and very funny. And I do OK too :P. We don’t have as many Portuguese friends as we’d like, but we do have some. We know lots of folks from other countries. We don’t know any Americans yet, but that’s not something we were specifically looking for. If we do find some that we liked? Great! No problem. Just hasn’t seemed to happen yet.

We happened to meet up with the Portuguese PHP group and were expecting to meet a bunch of ex-pat folk – but nearly everyone there was Portuguese – which was awesome! It meant that all of the chatter in-between the main talks were in Portuguese, but that was a good thing! We ended up going out for drinks afterwards and had a really great time. They’re cool people, very funny, very smart, and very tolerant of our garbage Portuguese. Great find.

Feeling “at home”

We thought this would be a real challenge but we felt right at home within a few months. There was absolutely a process, mind you, and it took actual, active work to do it, but we’ve managed a lot easier than we expected. Getting to the point where you’re waving to your local CTT carrier (the local Mail service), you wave to the bar-owner across the street, you wave to Dona Ana (a local lady, older, speaks no English – and she’s wonderful) – chatting with my local newspaper kiosk guy who sells vapes (also only in Portuguese) – all that was happening within months.

I came back from a visit to New Jersey and came in to Lisbon airport, and the bathroom was out of order, and the lights were dim, and it seemed completely abandoned and janky, and I felt, “Ah….I’m home.”

Stuff we thought would be “easy” but was “hard”

Adjusting to different brands

This is the most consumerist bullshit nonsense you’ll ever read, but it’s amazing to me how much our lives are surrounded by brands. And those brands (purport to) “mean something.” And we still don’t know which brands have which connotations here. Is Meo better than Vodafone for mobile phone service? How about for internet service? I still don’t know! Which brand of ham is the one I like? I can’t remember! It’s weird, and it’s humbling, and it’s, quite frankly, embarassing. But it’s real.

Learning Portuguese

This is a weird one, as we’re proud of our Portuguese, but – learning the language. We’re both very smart and into languages and willing to put in the work. But we’re just not as far along as we would like. I can make sentences that can be understood, and can understand some things that are being said to me, but it’s the subtleties of grammar, and the ‘bridge words’ in between those nouns that I do understand that are throwing me. I went to the pet store to get our weird specialty dog food and ended up misunderstanding the questions being asked – “big or small?” and I thought she was asking the size of the bag – but she was asking the size of the dog. I apologized all over myself as she had to back to the back of the room to get a different bag, and I just felt genuinely embarassed.

I should be so much farther along than this, after a full year. But the problem is that most people here do speak pretty passable English. And having that “escape valve” means that we always hit a level of struggle where the person we’re talking to is going to flip back to English. We’ve even tried to institute “Só falmos português em quarta-feira” (“We only speak Portuguese on Wednesday”) but especially when the locals are super-busy, they need to get their interactions handled quickly, so they need to be efficient. It’s to the point where we can be excited to interact with people who only speak Portuguese, so we get a chance to try to level-up.

That being said, we’re farther along than most, and can pretty much navigate every single restaurant interaction without any English at all. We like to say “we are perfectly fluent at restaurant Portuguese” – and that’s pretty accurate. But the second a sentence pops up that shows up too far out of context – we’re going to struggle.

Portugal Jank

We knew this was coming. Paperwork is infamous here. Things take time, they take longer than you expect, forms are long and confusing. And we were ready for that…or so we thought. It was much harder to deal with. Being “stuck” here waiting for @snipe’s residence card was frustrating. And neither she nor I like being told what not to do – and having only one entry/re-entry remaining on our visas was maddening. Here we are, in Portugal, our country’s capital, with easy access to the entire rest of Europe – and we can’t leave. That was awfully tough.

We’ve also seen it with real estate, with banks, with taxes – you name it. And it’s draining to just live with that all the time. Maybe we’ll get better with it in the future? I am developing more of a “whatever, it will happen when it happens” type of response to it, but it’s still just developing.

Things break, they take long to fix. Some things are just crappy – @snipe has threatened to create a blog with “threatening toilets of Portugal.” The traffic light down the street from us has been out for more than a year now, and occasionally cops have to show up to direct traffic – it’s a very busy intersection. Our apartment had a major leak (waterfall in the hallway that was leaking into the restaurant below us) that took months to resolve.

And those are annoying problems that are pretty constant, and they take more out of you than you might think.

“Important” things that turned out unimportant

Getting paid as Portuguese residents

While this was definitely rocky, and definitely very weird, and we’re only getting our insurance set up now, and my life insurance only now just kicked in – this was just annoying, but not something that kept us up nights. We filled out the forms, and I got my first direct deposit on Feb. 1 (it was supposed to be Jan. 1, but, well, “Portugal Jank.”) @snipe got hers I think the next month (and she literally runs the company).

So, annoying, and weird, but ultimately, not anywhere near as big a deal as I thought it’d be.

I thought this was going to a nightmare, but it wasn’t that bad, just slow.

Portuguese banking

Yes, Portuguese banks suck. They pay no interest. They charge you every month just to have an account. They’re absolute trash.

And – fun fact – to get a mortgage, the ‘new’ bank typically requires that you move your direct deposits over to the new bank, which is also crappy.

But – it’s super-duper easy to pay things directly from your bank account. It’s easy to pay bills. The Multibanco system is confusing, but it can be pretty cool – you get a bill that gives you two numbers, and you can literally pay that from an ATM. Or you can pay someone else with just their phone number.

For as annoying as they are, I just generally don’t even think about it.

Taxes

We were extremely prepared to have a far worse tax burden than we had in the US. That’s the price you pay for living in a country with decent health care (as well as other things). But because we managed to get the NHR (just as it was being phased out), it didn’t turn out anywhere near as bad as we feared.

The higher VAT on regular goods you buy really doesn’t come up – it’s already baked-in to the price you pay. It stings a bit more on buying electronics – laptops and TV’s and stuff. But it’s OK.

It’s weird that our Portuguese friends can sometimes have higher tax brackets than we have, and I am always going to feel a little guilty about it. But this is what Portugal wants, so I guess it’s alright? Or I guess that’s what I’m trying to convince myself of.

US Mail forwarding

I was really really worried about this – but it’s not a big deal at all. You sign up for a nice mailbox, have them forward your mail on a schedule, and it’s fine. The only adjustment I added was to have them constantly forward my mail on a schedule rather than “once the box gets full” – this was to help us handle various US tax notifications that we need to handle with a little more urgency. But, in general – I just don’t think about it.

“Unimportant” things that turned out Important

My stupid car

I’ve already written about this, but having this stupid car stuck in the US, and paying stupid insurance on it, and having it, effectively, rot and lose value – it makes me insane. Trying to solve problems remotely with the California DMV – it’s just awful. Well and truly awful.

I wouldn’t have thought it was too big of a deal – the car is paid off already! But it bothers me, to no end. I can’t seem to shake it.

Having an address

This one never even came up – wouldn’t have even thought it was an issue. But – it very much is.

It turns out the address you have on file with the government is really important. And there are some pieces of paperwork that takes ages to file. And, allegedly, “mail forwarding” here is hit-or-miss – mostly miss.

All those things together mean that having an address, and not changing it, is extremely important.

Our landlady – who is a really lovely woman – has decided to sell the apartment we’re currently renting. That’s fine! That’s a totally normal thing to do. But that means that some things we are trying to do – like getting Portuguese driver’s licenses – we can’t do. Because it’s going to take 6 months or so for the new licenses to show up, and we aren’t going to be in this apartment in 6 months.

So one thing that we’re definitely stressing about is having a new address. And I hadn’t expected that to be a thing at all.

Ordering things online (new edit!)

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this in the first version of this post! We knew we were going to be ordering things from Amazon.es – we even tested this when we came on our “scouting trip” by ordering some ice cube trays. We knew things were going to take a little longer to show up.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is everything is inconsistent and weird. Delivery windows are WIDE – “sometime between 9am and 6pm” – meaning you’re stuck at home all day. And then, something will show up a day early or not at all. Or sometimes they’ll lie and say “you weren’t home!” (Yes we were! You just don’t like that our dehumidifier is heavy). Then you have to go to your local CTT (mail) office and pick it up yourself. But if you don’t do it in time, the package gets bounced back to the sender.

it’s so generally unpleasant that we prefer not to order online, and we just Go to the Damn Mall.

Weird Notes

• Translating for people who don’t speak Portuguese feels amazing when we can do it. Trying to translate a “Shandy” for an English person (who was, quite frankly, a little bit of a jerk) was a challenge because @snipe didn’t know what one was. (It’s a “beer and lemonade, but not cloudy-lemonade, this other more British-style lemonade.”) The closest we could work out was a “beer and sprite.” And Sprite is pronounced “uh-SHPREE-tuh.”
• Knowing shortcuts feels awesome – when you are traveling around and want to get from point “A” to point “B” and can say – “oh, let’s just cut through this mall here” or if you’re here in Alfama and can say – “let’s take this Travessa over here, that’s faster” – that feels great, and makes it feel like I really do live here.
• We meet lots of people where we get into nice conversations, and then it doesn’t go any further – usually because they’re just here on vacation. That’s great! @snipe likes to call them “single-serving friends.”
• We have tons of folks we know who travel here for whatever reason and we get to visit with them and show them the town – that always feels great, and I hope we’re being good ambassadors. Love it when we get good feedback from that advice, or even from our Visiting Lisbon blog post 🙂
• I’ve accidentally become good at Portuguese coffee.

Conclusions

There are challenges here, but nothing insurmountable. The people, the history, the weather (though, not now in August! SO HOT.) are all wonderful. The food can be amazingly good, and it can be sometimes really mediocre – but we’re learning where the good food is and we’re, on average, eating much better than we did in San Diego (but, it still doesn’t hold a candle to NY or SF, tbh). Our dogs are getting comfortable here. Moxie still does love getting pet by random Spaniards and French folks when she’s going on her walks.

I think it was really hard to get here, but extremely rewarding. I honestly don’t know that, if I knew how much work it was going to be, if I still would’ve done it. But if I hadn’t, I would’ve been way less happy than I am now. It was worth it, and I’m really excited to be here for long enough to get a passport! That will be its own weird set of blog posts, I’m sure.

Até logo!