The process for getting residency in Portugal is: you do a bunch of prep work, you apply for your visa, you come to Portugal, you go to your SEF appointment, you wait, you get your Residence Card. That card means you can come and go at will. It means you can sign up for the…
Category: Moving
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…
Telecoms Redux
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….
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…
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…