Woof. It’s been a whole-ass two months already. How did that happen? I know some folks have been wondering where our heads are at now, so I wanted to give you a bit of an update. Things are much, much better. Some stuff is still dumb. The toilet seat is still broken, the ceiling still…
Author: snipe
Moving to Lisbon: The Meta
We’ve been here a little more than a month now. Things have settled down a little, and it’s certainly more calm than the first week, but there is still a lot of friction. One of the most surprising friction points is, well, me. I’m a pretty worldly person, and I wouldn’t have considered myself particularly…
Moving to Lisbon: Week 4
Hello friends. I’ve been meaning to write this for a week or so, but life gets in the way sometimes. I’d like to start by saying it’s much better now. Not perfect at all, but no major meltdowns and the stress level is starting to become pretty manageable, which is all I could hope for…
Moving to Lisbon: The First Week
I had meant to write this when it was a bit fresher, but I honestly didn’t have it in me. Friends, this past week was hard. Harder than I thought it would be, and I’ve been though some shit. I had what I assume must have been a full on panic attack yesterday that was…
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….
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…
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…
North American Animals I’ll Miss
I know this seems like a weird thing to post about, but it’s something I have slowly been making peace with over the past few months since learning that hummingbirds are only in the Americas. There is plenty of wildlife in Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula overall, but there are a few favorite neighborhood regulars…