[Note: we offer this advice because we know people are asking. This is absolutely not the space to argue good/bad about anything in US politics, gods know you have enough places for that.]

I. The Golden Rule

The absolute, number-one-most-important component of moving abroad, here or anywhere else, is the will to do it. This starts with the idea that you want to move, but the will to see it through is a stronger thing. Everything else about immigrating is administrative and bureaucratic in nature. If you went through a college application process, or bought a house (or even a car that required financing), you’ve succeeded at tasks as complex as anything you’ll do to make this happen. It’s not rocket science… but it will test your resolve and attention to detail.

II. Grading Problems On a Curve

How important a problem is when weighing your options can vary in relation to your sense of urgency. There are deal-breakers for people in normal times that maybe aren’t so deal-breaking when the stakes are high. Take, for example, “moving investments to Europe will really mess up my tax situation.” That’s the kind of thing an American ponders when thinking about living here. In some times, the penalty for doing that would be reason enough to leave your accounts as they are. This may be a point to reconsider if you’re feeling particular unease about the stability of your home country. Learning the Portuguese language with sufficient proficiency to pass a qualifying test for citizenship might seem like a huge task, and sticking with residence permits can be easier. Weighing that hassle against the value of secondary citizenship (and a passport) may look different to you these days.

III. Don’t Kid Yourself

The reason why “the will to do it” is up top is because you will be tested. If you’re only thinking of moving now because of a recent state of unease, you may be glossing over things like:

• the language barrier: Yeeeeeesss, you can get by without Portuguese language skills, but for starters the places here with a large % of English speakers are the more expensive places to live. If finances are zero worry for you then great! But if we were any good at drawing graphs we’d demonstrate that the correlation between “cost of living” and “attracts English speakers” is basically a 1:1 line. Lisbon = lots of tourists, so lots of English speaking Portuguese to work there, and its THE most expensive place to live. Porto is less than Lisbon but still has high tourist traffic, plenty of English spoken, and is somewhat cheaper but still high cost. Braga (where we live) begins to enter the mid-zone of being industrial enough that English is valuable for some locals, and so there’s a decent English-uptake (though not enough to count on), and the cost of living sits kind of mid-high for the country. You can absolutely live cheaply in Portugal, but it’ll be further from cities. The cheaper you want to be, the more you need to invest in language lessons; outside of the cities most people there don’t speak English.
• financial risk: if you’re worried enough about the States that you’re seriously thinking of leaving, closely examine your financial plans to see how much reliance you have on government programs. For example, how much do you rely on Social Security? How paranoid/concerned are you about its stability? I’ve heard more than one of my friends say “if Social Security goes away I absolutely will have to find a job.” And speaking of jobs…
• a new employment reality: if you’re still working, that isn’t a deal-breaker for coming here, but even if you satisfy any requirements (i.e., bringing desired skills to the country), make super sure you understand what the compensation (and taxation!) situations are here. You may be looking at salaries half (or less… sometimes much less… ) than what you’re used to; suddenly that low cost of living you heard about isn’t quite so sexy.

We’re not suddenly against living here; not at all. It’s just that things are sufficiently different in Portugal that you absolutely should not ready-fire-aim on this idea if it’s the first you’ve thought about it. If you’ve been nibbling around the idea for awhile now, and traveled on “the continent” a fair amount already, you probably already have a decent grasp of some of this.

IV. It’s Absolutely A Thing You Can Do

So many people that live here begin their immigration story by talking about how they came to realize it was even possible. Most Americans don’t give any thought to living abroad. But you take a school trip or a semester abroad, maybe, and then you understand that the same kind of people are living the same kinds of lives, just with differences. People start to ponder the idea that millions of humans emigrate/immigrate every year for untold numbers of reasons. Clearly it’s a thing that people are capable of, and if they can figure it out then why can’t you?

V. First Steps / Next Steps

• No matter how much you have sworn off Meta as a corporation, we highly recommend that you hold your nose and get back on facebook for the “Americans and Friends in Portugal” group. Don’t join and immediately ask questions, they aren’t the friendliest bunch sometimes but that’s ok, you aren’t joining to make friends. Sit quietly for awhile, use the search feature for your questions first, and devour their files section – it’s the foundation for so many successful immigrants in Portugal.
• For pete’s sake, if you don’t have a passport get started on that, you’re not going anywhere without that in good working order. If you’ve got one, check its expiration date and start the renewal process if you’re anywhere vaguely close to time.
• Vocabulary test: make sure you know what “VFS”, “NIF”, and “AIMA” / “SEF” mean. Search engines are your friend.
• Conversely, remove “picky” from your vocabulary for awhile. If you really are anxious, don’t get choosy about (for example) your first apartment. Don’t get caught up in deep dive price comparisons on phone/internet services – sure there are differences but they all do the same thing and the prices aren’t that different. Do you want to leave or don’t you?

VI: Our Last Bit of Advice

Are you genuinely anxious about your situation in the States but genuinely overwhelmed by moving to somewhere like Portugal? Totally understandable. If that’s the case, don’t come here. Go to Ireland.

…

What? They speak English there, which will make about a thousand of your problems easier to deal with. I’m not saying that, long-term, it’s any easier to settle in Ireland than it is in Portugal. In our calculations a few years back it seemed to us that a lifestyle we would enjoy living would cost us more there than it would in Portugal. That said, if more than anything you just want to be somewhere else, right now, you can go to Ireland as a tourist – you don’t need any sort of visa to enter the country, and you can start on your paperwork at the dining room table of your little Irish cottage. Don’t try to go to a sexy city you’ve heard of before, because those can be spendy. Throw a dart and find a village or small town and, if it’s got a grocery store and isn’t too far from health care, find an apartment and get crackin’. Besides, once you’re there and maybe can settle your nerves some, you can reassess your options for a more lasting relocation. You’ll encounter plenty of rigamarole in Ireland, too, but if you feel like your seat is too hot to sit in for much longer… go to Ireland.

Hold to your butts, like ole Samuel L. told us. We get up friggin’ early, go to the airport, and fly to Edinburgh on a plane smaller than Lisa would have liked. Bless her heart. We get there with no real troubles and hoof it to the rental car joint. Yes, Dear Reader, this is where John begins two+ nearly-uninterrupted weeks of driving in foreign lands, complete with misshapen vehicles with steering wheels on the wrong side like we’re on the Island of Misfit Toys… which may not be too far wrong, come to think of it. Anyway, none of this day is about Edinburgh; never fear, we shall return. Instead, we immediately haul ass for the highways and head south for England, just like King James. (HISTORY, BITCHES!!) The plan is to dip below the border, then turn west and cross basically the entire island, with a couple of historical pitstops along the way.

EXCEPT!! As we’re driving south, we see the well-preserved bones of a gigantic cathedral-like building. It was amazing. We stop. There’s a tourist center. We ask the lovely Scots behind the desk what happened here. “Henry VIII is what happened here!” says one cheerily; I’ve clearly walked into a well-honed quip, but I giggled nonetheless. Seems that as part of his… wooing?… of Mary (Queen of Scots, yes, her) he had this old church destroyed. I believe it was the opening line of his version of “lovely country you have here, shame if something happened to it”. Turns out this town (Jedburgh?) is where Mary lived out her exile, and so we stopped for a briefer time than the town deserved for some quick sightseeing. Fascinating history or not, we actually had a couple of deadlines looming that forced us onward. Onward, to sheep!!!

Seriously, I won’t say it as often as it deserves or this will become an all-sheep, all the time blog, but friggin sheep are everywhere starting today.

So we dip down into England, and head west, on our way to Housestead. This is the best example remaining of Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall. Now, I cannot tell you why I am fascinated by the Wall in particular; it’s neat, but so are a thousand other things. Tough crap to the thousand other things, though, for Hadrian’s Wall has my heart. And so there we are, having followed, basically, the Wall itself across the north of England, arriving at Housestead. It lasted for more than a century, and the foundations of almost all the buildings are still there, including gate houses, barracks, the captain’s house/drill hall, temples, baths, etc… outside the walls of the fort they are still finding evidence of surrounding buildings that indicate the civilian infrastructure that grew up just like at modern U.S. military bases. Well, no pool halls, but basically. And then, of course, you can stand on the wall there, just like a centurion 2,000 YEARS AGO, plus or minus, and look out at the vast barbarian-filled wilds to the North… in other words, nothing has changed. /rimshot Seriously though, it was the same gray, green, untamed wilderness that the wall was set to guard against. Jeez… by the by, getting to the fortifications required walking through a gift shop/ticket booth thingy, and then through active sheep pasture. See what I mean?

So we get done with Housestead. We have another historical landmark on the itinerary we’ve built, “Vindolanda.” I hadn’t looked into it much, just saw that it was marked on the map as another Roman site and that it apparently had some surviving written pages from back in the day, so neat, right?

Hoooool-eeeeee crap. Lisa has heard me tell this story, TO HER, several times, but here we go. We pull up. Lisa is reeeeeaaaally tired and decides she’ll just hang out in the car because I won’t be all that long. All you see if el generico tourist office. I go in. It’s just the ticket place. Ok, I pays my money and takes my chances. Through another door, across a little courtyard with faux Roman statues splashing water, and into another little building. It has one of those diorama things showing what the site would have looked like millennia ago. Nice. You can even push buttons and spotlights shine down while a voiceover explains various structures. OK, nice value add for a few old ruins and a display room for the pages. I go out the door, onto a path. The path crests a hill. And there you have the ongoing excavation of an entire Roman town.

No, seriously. A town. They’re still digging it out, but it’s houses, and temples, and businesses, and fortifications, and and and… I mean, I get that places like Pompeii and Herculaneum still have intact buildings and such thanks to lava (thanks, lava!), but short of that I can’t imagine how this could be better. I mean, it is MASSIVE. I try to take it all in, but frankly a full day ought to be spent just here and Housestead, not a drive-by. I did my best (don’t even get me started on the breeze through the multi-thousand-year-old documents)  and we moved on.

We ended the day back up in Scotland, where we stayed at a lovely, if not especially ancient or interesting, B&B, and ate at the Caven Arms, a recommended restaurant/pub jammed to the gills with locals (as everywhere else in the world, it’s a good sign if residents can’t get enough of a place). The food was “classic” fare; fish, mutton, veg etc… and it was quite nice. We were especially exhausted and hit the hay post-haste.

Tomorrow, I take up residence as Lord of the Manor. Seriously, my wife won the birthday throwing contest pretty much for all time.

DISJOINTED MEMORIES

* Aw man, I don’t know. The whole day was one awesome bit after another. I’ll tell you this much – driving in Scotland and England is a deceptive piece of cake. I was being suckered into false comfort before the terrors of Ireland.