It’s been a Minute… But Wait, I can Explain…

I know, I know… It’s been a minute.

Actually, it’s been about nineteen months, and this post has been in draft status for over a year. But here we are…

I was so excited when I did my last post in June of 2022 because we finally were able to install the medallion I had acquired four years prior. And along with that was a renewed excitement of working on getting our living room finally finished. And then crickets…. And I mean crickets…. Not just here, but on my Instagram accounts, and elsewhere. I’ve even had folks message me to check if I am doing okay (for the record, I am) which totally gives me the warm fuzzies.

Nineteen months later…. The house is virtually unchanged from where I was, but absolutely everything about life has changed. The living room is exactly the way it was when I wrote my last post. The picture rail is not yet complete, the painting is only half done, and until a couple of weeks ago, the scaffolding was still tucked into the corner. My priority for getting it done completely changed less than two weeks after my last post. That is when everything came to an immediate halt in the house. You ask why?

At the end of June, 2022, we made a major life altering decision for which we had previously considered, but passed off as too crazy to do. Well, for the past nineteen months, we have been planning and preparing take a gigantic leap of faith in July when we hope to physically make a long distance move…

Delicious café and Pastéis de Nata for only two Euros.

I’ll get to the nitty gritty in a few moments, but suffice to say that in the short term, we moved out of our house last spring into a rented three bedroom apartment around the corner. I have spent eight months sorting through our stuff as we downsize and get rid of excess possessions. The scaffolding was moved out of the corner at the end of November, and the following day, a lovely family moved into the house. And, as of a few weeks ago, the house is no longer ours.

While I have been focusing on preparing for the move, I have simultaneously been diving deeper into my creative self. I have been exploring new mediums including cyanotypes, mix media collage, and painting (with encaustics, cold wax with oil, and acrylics), all in pursuit of finding my true artistic voice. I am still on this journey, but I am becoming more and more excited as I discover things about my artistic self I had never explored before. The voice inside is starting to take form and I cannot contain my excitement. More to come on that…

Okay, now for the BIG BIG BIG NEWS!

We are preparing to move to Porto, Portugal this summer with the intent of this being a permanent move. July is our target for the move, there are still many variables which could throw us off, but at this point, it is looking pretty good.

Porto Portugal, December 2022. I took this shot while we were on our second visit of 2022.

Why Porto, Portugal? When we went for the first time in 2018, we fell completely in love with the city. We found ourselves relishing the idea that we could retire there and live comfortably. That conversation continued after we came home, and has been brewing ever since to varying degrees. We are not yet at retirement age (I am currently in my late 50s, and Yoav is about five years younger) but we aren’t that far off.

A mere ten days after my last post, a few things came into play that caused us to halt everything and reconsider what is important in our lives. What did we want our lives to be? How did we want to live? That was when we decided to move our plans up by a decade or so and make the move now. Ultimately, it comes down to having options.

Over the years we both had done some research on places to live outside of the US, but after much research, Portugal checked more boxes than any other country. Here are just a few of the bullet points of the why:

• Portugal is the seventh safest country in the entire world (the US ranks 131st).
• Portugal allows gun ownership, but it is controlled, and the rate of gun violence is a tiny fraction of what it is here (kids don’t have to go through metal detectors to go to school).
• Healthcare is on par with the rest of Europe and private insurance is a fraction of what it costs here.
• Cost of living overall is lower than here. Housing will be about the same as Philadelphia, but many things are substantially less (groceries are 25% less).
• Like all democracies, Portugal has plenty of politics. But they still work together to get things done and the level of toxicity among the parties is virtually non-existent as compared to here in the US. (It was a dictatorship until 1974, and the memory of that still lingers in much of the population)
• Our rights to be married to each other are written into the constitution of the country and are not at risk of being taken away.
• We will be able to obtain temporary residency right away, and can apply for permanent residency after five years followed by citizenship. If all goes as we hope, we will have dual citizenship within seven or eight years.
• Citizenship in Portugal would enable us to live in any EU country in the future should we decide to go somewhere else (which we don’t actually plan to).

It is that final bullet that brings us back to the options I mentioned before. Our intent is for this to be a permanent move. Once citizenship is achieved we have the option to live anywhere else in the EU we desire. By going through the process now, we expect to be citizens by the time I begin to collect my social security. As these past few years have shown, the world can be a scary place, and the opportunity to have options of choosing where to live, provides peace of mind.

Praça da Ribeira (the historic district) is Porto’s biggest heart-stealer. It’s a Unesco World Heritage maze of medieval streets zigzagging down to the Douro River.

Of course, preparing to move to a foreign country isn’t exactly a simple task. There has been and will continue to be much upheaval in our lives, and we have been preparing ourselves for what will be an entirely new level of life change. We will first and foremost be learning to speak European Portuguese (fortunately the government offers free classes to learn to speak, read, and write in Portuguese). We believe that will be our biggest hurdle when we arrive. We will also have the opportunity to experience living life at a slower pace, and having our patience tested on a regular business. The bureaucracy is notoriously bad (only Italy is considered worse in the EU) and painfully slow, but somehow things do get done. Just not on the same timelines we have come to expect in the US.

So, where does that leave this blog? Excellent question…. I have one additional post I am planning to write to sum up the past seven years since I launched the site. But I expect that is where this blog will come to an end. That said…. I plan to continue writing.

I have just launched a new blog newsletter called An American in Porto via Substack, where my focus will be on our experience of preparing for and then making the move, to be followed with reflections on our new lives in Porto.  You can click on the image below to start with the first post I did last week. I do hope you will opt-in to get email notifications for new updates.

Till next time. . .

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