As I said at the end of the previous post in this series, we started to get cold feet about Italy. We’ve looked at some weather data, and it is hot there. “No duh” you might be thinking, but it’s one thing to think “ah yes, the beautiful, sunny Italian countryside” and another to think “holy hell it’s like that all year long, and they just had a summer that they named after THE DEVIL because of how historically broiling it was. Maybe not so much?” It’s gotten worse since we first wrote this. Hindsight is 20/20 etc… but yeah, good call Us. And hey, we also really like France. Sooooo… I begin the research on visas in France. Same story as Italy, basically. I mean, look: every country is different, that’s why we have different countries in the first place. They are all going to have their peculiarities in every process or system you look at. But fundamentally, practically every country (and I only use weasel words here because I haven’t personally investigated every single one of them) has a visa process for staying long-term, and they boil down to “are you not an evil supervillain and can you support yourself?” and if you pass that test you can stay. And in all of those countries, the problem is not, fundamentally, “will you be given permission?” but instead “how big is the lake of utter horseshit that I have to swim across to get that permission?” only, you know, paperwork instead of horseshit. So what’s the difference between Italy and France, process-wise? Near as I could figure out, the Italian bureaucrats are mercurial and finicky, and you had to be light on your feet to adapt to the desires of the bureaucrat you drew that day. Whereas, French bureaucrats are persnickity rules-lawyers who start from “no” and have to be cajoled into “yes”. In either case, though, scrupulous adherence to every stitch of their policies usually wins out.

So, France? There are definitely some pluses to the French route. First of all, the geography of the country yields some climate remarkably similar to what we’ve gotten used to in Seattle. And for all that people joke about the weather in Seattle (“Why is there a waiting period before people from Seattle enter Hell? At first they’re too wet to burn.”) it’s actually bloody amazing here. Sure, it mists a lot, but Houston, Texas gets more rain per year on average than Seattle and it’s not even close. There’s no humidity, we basically never see mosquitos, and summer is roughly 4 months of sunshine and 80 degrees. So, the fact that we can find at least somewhat similar conditions in parts of France is quite a draw. The museums are, of course, first rate. The food… well, yum. We might lean slightly towards Italian cuisine if we were forced to pick just one, but it’s not exactly a chore to eat in France. Still, we aren’t completely sold. The stories of bureaucratic hang-ups are more pervasive than what we’d heard about Italy, and then there was this weird phenomenon wherein Americans living in France just seemed way more uptight than Americans living in other places. Not exactly scientific, but it got our ears up.

That last bit was a crazy-but-true data point that has stuck with us to this day. When we looked at facebook groups for American immigrants in Italy, the people in them were, by and large, a chill bunch. Obviously individuals vary, but the vibe in those groups was relaxed and even friendly. In the two different France-related groups we poked into that had large-ish memberships, they were both just cold. Indifferent. Almost hostile to newcomers in a way that felt extra rude. It may have been a dumb criterion, but we couldn’t ignore it. On the other hand… as we prepare this update in 2024, the Portuguese group that we once found so helpful has been drifting more and more towards a snarky and indifferent tone that, if we had encountered it back in the day, might have similarly turned us off. So, you know… caveat emptor and all that.

France wasn’t a slam dunk and we were still unsure about Italy, so we kept digging around for options. And it was in this state that we took a vacation to Greece. Our trip to Greece is a tale unto itself (spoiler alert: we never seriously considered living in Greece), but one key point is relevant here. At the airport, I noticed the place was plastered with signs in multiple languages, and most frequently in Chinese, touting the “Golden Visa” program in Greece and directing prospective participants to certain real estate developments that were custom-designed to fulfill said visa’s requirements. “What the heck is a Golden Visa?”, I wondered. I vaguely knew the basics – in lieu of a complicated regime of requirements for a long-term visa, you could… well, not exactly BUY a visa, but by investing a significant amount in a country they would reward you with a fast-tracked visa with fewer restrictions/requirements, especially as regards time spent in-country. You see, one of the bits about the visa process I haven’t got into yet is that, well, countries don’t like to be taken advantage of. So, they tend to have requirements that say you have to live in the country for, say, 8 months out of every 12. Hardly onerous if you’re actually looking to live in that country, but it puts a real crimp in your plans if you were hoping to jet-set across Europe on the strength of your cool new EU visa. A Golden visa, on the other hand, typically has a requirement along the lines of two weeks every year, maybe even less. They try to make it sound dignified, but Golden Visas are very much a cash-for-services transaction that gets a country an influx of foreign investment in exchange for lax visa rules. Ok, great. We couldn’t afford to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to get such a visa, but if it’s simply investing money that was going to be invested SOME-where in any case, maybe this could work for us. But we definitely didn’t want it to be Greece (again, another story for another time) so where might we try this? Not every country has a Golden Visa program, and the list changes up as the political climate shifts in a given country. Portugal, for example, closed it’s lucrative Golden Visa program at the end of 2023. The closing was absolutely politics — the program had brought something like 5 Billion Euros in investment monies over 10 years — not bad for a tiny country in a bad financial state. Anyways, . . . the following is 100% just our personal observations from back in the day. We look at the list. Spain… hefty investment that would crimp our cash flow too much. Ireland… way too hefty an investment. Germany… hefty investment, eight years before you can apply for permanent residency/citizenship. Portugal… huh, Portugal.

Portugal?

We’ll be talking about this in a little more detail coming up, but since we didn’t end up going the Golden Visa route we don’t delve too deeply. Pro tip – be very wary of Golden Visa programs in Portugal. The political climate has gotten …. feisty on the subject. As far as bringing investment capital into the country one cannot dispute the success. However, like a lot of places in the world the cost of housing has been going up, so even if the absolute numbers of GVs is pretty small, it looks bad that Portugal has rolled out a welcome mat for wealthy people to buy up property. More restrictions have been put in place and the timing is apparently molasses-slow. I’d make very few assumptions and consult a knowledgeable professional at the very beginning of your investigation if it’s something that you’re thinking about, just to get the facts straight.

Welcome to the second part of our annotated look back at the process of us moving to Europe. Hopefully, it’s an enjoyable read for you; we’re certainly enjoying going over the process and thinking about what we did well and what we could have done better. Enjoy!

Moving to Europe was still very much a hypothetical at this point, but a couple of things began to break our way. First: we had an absurdly specific notion of where we would move to – Pieve al Toppo, a small town (a village, really) in the Arezzo area of Italy. We had stayed at an agroturismo near Pieve al Toppo on our last trip to Italy, and it checked a lot of boxes for us (not the agroturismo, the town. Living in a hotel would be one of those weird things that people like Greta Garbo did), enough that it seemed like a good place to start. It was itself a small place but nestled in a network of small towns and villages that, between them, offered the variety of experiences you might get from a much larger town or city. It was an easy driving distance to major cities, which means it was also an easy driving distance to the rail network. Having such a specific vision for what success would look like helped take this out of the realm of “dreams” and into the world of “plans”. Second: the initial “are you kidding me??” test passed by pretty quickly. It turns out that as much as it might be a fantasy, neither of us threw up our hands and said, “this is ridiculous.” Believe it or not, this is huge.

Moving to Europe requires, first and foremost, the will to do it. It’s not a herculean task; millions of people emigrate every year. It starts by deciding it is a thing you’re willing to do. (These last two sentences are basically the tl;dr of this entire series of posts.)

So, with neither of us saying “get serious, that ain’t happening,” I began to investigate what it takes to move to another country. My apologies now, if you already know all about this it’s going to be very 101-level stuff for a minute, but not everybody does. Have I mentioned the “About Us” page for getting the short version? (Have I mentioned that it’s been two years and the “About Us” page doesn’t have much on it? That’s embarrassing. Anyhooo….) Anyway, the fundamental thing to learn about if you’re going to move to another country is visas. A visa is the legal instrument that defines what permissions you do and do not have regarding your stay in a foreign country. As far as I know every country has a variety of them for different purposes: tourism, working, studying… you get the idea. You prove to the country you want to move to that you satisfy their requirements for the type of visa you want, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s as simple as that. Not easy, but simple.

One of the visas that most countries have is an “I don’t want a job, I’m not going to school, I just want to live in your fine land” type of visa; it’s called a lot of different things in different places. Usually, the requirements boil down to “have enough money or ongoing income that you aren’t going to be a burden on the state”, although some countries want an actual investment in their markets, or for you to start a business, or some such. By and large, though, it’s just “have X dollars/euros/pesos/whatevs” and then fill out a pile of paperwork. Have you ever bought property? The visa paperwork is like that, only moreso because it isn’t mostly filled out by somebody else and you just sign it all 45 times. You actually have to fill it all out.

In retrospect, this leaves out that the process of finding the right people to receive your paperwork, and figuring out how to get it to them, is not a trivial task. Underselling that is a little disingenuous, although to be fair to us it wasn’t so obvious at the time. In Portugal at least, and especially as this update is being written in early 2024, knowing which agency to use and how to contact them is actually a source of frustration. It still gets worked out, but be prepared with your best frame of mind and lots of patience. On the flipside, we had a very DIY mentality about the process as far as filling out the paperwork goes; you absolutely can pay people who will help you with every step of the way, and if administrivia is the kind of thing that can derail you on a project it may very well be worth your money to use a facilitator!

The next thing you do if you’re thinking about moving to another country, at least if you’re anything like my wife and me, is you start to read.

A lot.

You read books, both of the how-to variety and also memoirs and travelogues relevant to your hoped-for destination. You find the many blogs being written by people who have done exactly what you want to do and think that their story is sooooo interesting that others will want to read about it. (Ahem.) (Extra Ahem.) Some of what they write is inevitably navel-gazing or so personal as to be useless, but there’s usually something thrown in there that will apply to your own situation. You join Facebook groups, of which numerous exist for people who want to move to X country or who already have done; I have a pretty low opinion of Facebook in general, but for the purpose of finding veeeerrry specific communities to connect with Facebook is hard to beat.

Italy’s visa process was actually fairly straight forward on the surface. You get a short-term visa to go to Italy, where you immediately get an appointment to apply for a long-term visa (I believe it was one year to begin with).

“What’s with Italy?” you may be asking. “Don’t y’all live in Portugal?” you may be asking. Yep. This is absolutely the “long version” of this story, with all the twists and turns and especially including the eventual dead ends. It is absolutely true, we did not start out with a plan to move to Portugal, and we still think it’s a valuable lesson – practically everything about a plan to move overseas is subject to review, up to and including your final destination. We are thrilled with how life turned out, but we’d be liars if we said everything went to plan. So yeah, we 100% thought we were aiming to move to Italy when this process started.

And not to get too far ahead of the story, but since we’re already discussing how this doesn’t end up with our moving to Italy – if you’re actually interested in moving to Italy, our friend Rafael DiFuria has a lot to say on the subject and can connect you to invaluable resources.

Once you get that, you begin a cycle of temporary visas until you eventually are allowed to apply for a permanent visa and/or apply for citizenship. If you’ve done any research on this subject, you’re already cackling at my use of the term “straight forward” but, again, I call this “simple but not easy”. Stories abound in the relevant message boards and facebook groups of people going through 10 different hells trying to navigate the visa process in Italy, but in my opinion almost all of those stories boiled down to “I can’t believe they were such sticklers” or “it took forever.” Which, when I read them, I would think “why are you surprised that they are sticklers? Why did you take any short-cuts at all in something so important?” Every story I read of someone successfully navigating the bureaucracy involved pointed to the same basic facts: assume nothing, show some humility, follow every little instruction no matter how picayune it may seem to you, and give yourself enough of a head start that you won’t be panicked about missing a deadline. Well shoot, I can do that, and we’re talking about moving in like 10-15 years, so we’ve got plenty of time.

At least, until I said the next thing.

Vignette Um: Cover me!

Like many people, we rely on the insurance provided by our credit card when we rent cars; rental agencies typically have downright brutal rates for coverage, while it’s included in your card. (Always check first, don’t assume you have it!) As we prepared for our honeymoon back in 2012, however, there was a consistent piece of advice we were seeing in various travel forums – get the comprehensive coverage. We were nonplussed, but there was a consistent narrative that the rental agencies in Ireland (Northern or the Republic, it’s not a regional thing) will terrorize you with charges and fees, defining the mildest dings as full replacements and the like. It seemed… well, borderline racist, but even the Irish commenters would say “yes, get the coverage.” And so, we paid a few hundred extra euros for comprehensive accident/collision/meteor strike coverage of our car.

Well. Our honeymoon consisted of a deosil circuit around the edge of the country, scooting south from Dublin and poking around in numerous villages; a new one every day (not something we’d do again, but hey, live and learn). We drove a lot. And when we did it was almost exclusively on the charming back roads. In case you aren’t familiar, “charming back roads” means that two-way traffic proceeds on 1.9 lanes worth of pavement, often with thick stone walls abutting the lane under the deceptive cover of a thick carpet of greenery. Not only that, but some of the most interesting things we wanted to see were on even lesser roads, sometimes of the dirt variety. In short, we were provided ample opportunity to bang up the car and to be frank we took advantage more than once. Most notably were the scratches in the paint from all the vines and such we brushed up against; We never hit a wall but we skimmed along them plenty. Then there was the very deep pot hole that was disguised as a puddle; there’s no way that didn’t bang up something on the underneath. When we pulled into the rental return lot at the Dublin airport you could practically hear the Scrooge McDuck coin-clinking sound going off in the attendant’s mind. We produced our insurance documentation and he noticeably deflated before wishing us a bon voyage.

Get the coverage in Ireland.

Vignette Dois: Google Day-drinks

Let’s get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way: of course the internet has transformed the travel experience, usually for the better. The general reliability of services like Google Maps means, however, that its shortcomings our more noticeable. Less-populated locations, or regions with poor data connectivity, are ripe for difficulties. These troubles happen often enough on our travels that we’ve taken a “ya gotta laugh or you’ll cry” attitude, and so we simply decided that Google often drinks during the work day, perhaps on its lunch break. We have been told to walk down a canal in Venice (blub blub!). We were once sent down an increasingly narrow lane on Naxos (the Greek island) late at night, which eventually ended as the driveway to a home. This necessitated backing up, in the dark with no street lights, for about a kilometer before we could get the car turned around.

Most infamously for us, in the Italian hill town of Orvietto we were sent on a circuitous route to get to what ought to have been a straight-forward destination. We long ago gave up second-guessing the google directions because the times we’ve done it have invariably gone wrong; we were being directed away from a route we knew well because of a traffic snarl we couldn’t see. “Ha, this isn’t the way!” we would say, and then stew in traffic for an hour. No, our faith in these directions is just that – faith. We have no empirical proof that the directions are good, but it often turns out ok. Anyway, we listened to google as the little cobblestone lane got narrower … and narrower.. until finally we reached the last, left, turn that would put us on a proper avenue. However, the aperture for the turn was between two buildings that were, it turns out, 10 or so centimeters tighter than the width of our car. It was only with the jiggling of a 40-point turn and the guidance of some very friendly and helpful locals that we extricated ourselves with only modest damage to the paint of that car. Ouzo, grappa, moonshine… when google drinks, google goes hard.

Vignette Tres: I knew I should’ve taken that left turn in Albuquerque.

Once again, we’re in Italy. This is 2017, and the whole digital apparatus of our lives is far loosey-goosier. (good luck, spell check!) And so we find ourselves navigating through the city of Siena with a cached map that is meant to guide us to some of the veeeeery limited parking in the city. Ah, Siena! A beautiful, ancient city, most famous for the horse race that goes on annually, a contest between the various neighborhoods within the city. Each district has its own livery and symbols, and it is an intense point of pride to claim the prize each year. The race takes place on the piazza del campo, an expansive brick plaza for pedestrians to enjoy; it is a tradition to gather each day in fair weather to watch the light change against the buildings as the sun goes down. People sit in cafes as well as upon the campo itself.

So, we proceeded into beautiful Siena. If you’ve never been into one of these old cities, they are often warrens of twisty-turny avenues; the European aesthetic is often to prefer the retention of old buildings rather than knocking them down to allow for modern roadways. And so we are twisting and turning our way, trying to follow some tricky directions (remember, google drinks!). Fortunately the name of our parking destination begins to appear on directional signs, so we are close! Another couple of turns and it feels like we are almost there. There is an emphatic sign about the left turn we are about to take but… welp, it’s in Italian. So left we go, down a tight little lane but we can see it widens just ahead. Yep, it does.

Onto the campo.

“Oh poop” we both say (more or less). Panicked, we look around. There is absolutely no way we are going to drive across the campo, regardless of the exits that beckon from the far side. It is unlikely that la polizia will accommodate us in any case. Lisa looks to our hard-left and sees a small lane; we make a break for it. Windows down, we are waving people out of the way so we can scoot off this UNESCO World Heritage Site pronto. Y’all… this lane was so narrow and so in use it was crazy. There were cafes that had outdoor seating, and hand-to-gods with our windows down we could pick olives off of the tables. A waiter saw us, shrugged in classic Italian fashion and scooted a chair a few inches out of the way.We were like a whale swimming with dolphins, where the dolphins were the pedestrians who were supposed to be there. We honestly should have turned the engine off and kicked ourselves along like a scooter. We look back and laugh, but we were naturally mortified in the moment.

Believe it or not, despite all of this (and this really is just a sample) we still enjoy the freedom of driving through the back roads of Europe. We did it earlier this year in Scotland with pleasure, and will continue on in the future.