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.

Our first few posts here at The Ramble have been recounting the story of how Lisa and I came to our decision to move to Portugal, and we’ll get back to that in a little bit. However, in going back and telling those stories we’ve been neglecting to share the present with you, and recently the present has been plenty interesting. (If, that is, you find any of this interesting. YMMV.) We kicked around several pithy titles for this post, mostly along the lines of “the last 48 hours have been one heluva day.” Allow me to explain.

In the middle of all of our plans for getting ready for our transition, we scheduled (wisely, we told ourselves) a week of forced relaxation; a chance to recharge our batteries, to “sharpen our saws” as Stephen Covey would say. Lisa went to Maui with her sister, and John went to South Carolina to visit his parents. We will set aside any thoughts on the fairness or lack thereof regarding these arrangements and move on to the relevant bit. This past Sunday we each flew to San Francisco where we reunited with each other (and also with our luggage; a story for another time). The purpose for this diversion from home was a critically important step in the process of our move – the formal handing over of our applications and supporting documents for our D7 visas. Our what now?

As has been discussed in other posts, most countries have a variety of visas (the legal instruments that say a person from country A is allowed to be in country B) to cover the multitude of reasons that foreigners might have for wanting to visit their country. What Lisa and I are shooting for is a temporary residency visa in the country of Portugal. HOWEVER, the formal meeting at which you request this visa must occur in Portugal. To facilitate foreigners (e.g. us) being able to come to Portugal they are issued an interim visa – it says “these people aren’t just tourists, and they can stay as long as it takes for the residency meeting to happen.” This is a “D7” visa in Portugal’s system. By all accounts, the meeting that occurs in Portugal is far less rigorous than the D7 application process; if you get approved for your D7 the next step is (almost) a formality. We’ll talk about what goes into a D7 visa application in detail in future posts in this series; today, we’re just sharing the adventure surrounding the application meeting.

Our appointments were set for 9:30 AM on Monday, September 20th, at the VFS Global office in San Francisco. VFS Global has carved out an interesting little niche for itself in the immigration ecosystem. To simplify the lives of embassy employees throughout the world, VFS will “vet” the applications of prospective immigrants. They don’t make value judgements as to whether a visa should be approved. What they do is they make sure that the applicant has appropriately provided documents to satisfy each of the parts of the application. For example, some (but not all) of our requirements were to fill out an official application form, provide proof of sufficient funds to cover our expenses, and show that we have arranged housing for one year. So, our VFS agent made sure that our application was filled out properly (the right places were initialed, the right places were signed etc…), they looked over our documentation showing sufficient funds, and they looked over the lease for our apartment and the proof of wire transfers showing we had paid the deposit and 1st two months’ rent. (Y’all have an apartment?? We do! We’ll tell you all about that later.) There’s much more to it, but you get the idea. Our VFS agent doesn’t actually say “this looks like enough money”, they just make sure that we’ve shown something and that it looks to be in the ballpark of what the Portuguese embassy will be looking for.

So! Monday morning we get up bright and early (ok, 8 AM. You try dealing with a couple suffering from 3-4 hours of jetlag from two different directions trying to sleep at the same time :p), make ourselves presentable, and head out. We booked a room at the Hyatt, 3 blocks from the VFS office. We stroll down, find the place, make our way up to the 5th floor, and present documentation of our appointments – an initial step that they take very seriously. We’re a few minutes early, so we sit ourselves down to wait. The waiting room is like an upscale DMV – it’s still lit with flourescents, and the carpet is Industrial Chic, but it’s at least air conditioned, clean, and there’s only 8 or so people waiting so it doesn’t feel too crowded.

9:30 comes and goes, but we’re pretty sure we’ve figured out which of 7 cubbies is dealing with Portugal and they’re working with someone, so no biggie. 9:45, no problem. 10 AM, that person finishes up and the VFS employee calls out “next person for Norway?” Oopsie. Ok, we wait. 10:30, we’ve slipped from excitement, to anxiety, and are now drifting into boredom. Plus, just a hint of “is something wrong?” 10:45 or so, we finally decide to ask. I slip out to the security person staffing the front and ask her if something’s up with Portugal. She says we should be helped soon, but she’ll go and ask. A few minutes later, another staffer calls out some other country (I forget, but for example “next person for France?”) at which point Lisa very calmly stands up and says “is anybody doing Portugal?” Around 11, a very nice man named Duane (Dwayne? Didn’t see a nametag) kneels next to us and explains that the woman who was working Portugal today had an emergency and is out. Combined with some other staffing issue that was aluded to vaguely, this left nobody that could handle Portugal. Could we please call you tomorrow, he asks, to confirm an appointment with you for that day?

I mean… what was our option. “No, screw you?” Of course we’d do that, we had no choice. Except, we do have some other important things going on, like beginning the estate sale-like liquidation of our household on Wednesday (more on that process later, as well.) But, no, technically Tuesday is not a crisis. We spend some time arranging our flights and an extra night in the hotel, then spend an afternoon with Lisa’s mother who lives just outside of San Francisco. Fine. Dandy. We get back to the hotel and bunk down, ready to start fresh on Tuesday.

We’re up at 8 on Tuesday, not wanting to miss the call. We decide that if we don’t hear anything by 10 or so we’ll just go down and start making very polite nuisances of ourselves. We scrub up, scrounge breakfast from a bodega-esque joint, and settle down to wait. It’s just after 10 AM when we decide enough is enough, and we begin to dress for the day and to head out. As we are doing so, we get the call from Duane(!). Come on down, he says, there’s one appointment being handled right then, then we’d be made a priority, he says. Lisa and I have read a lot about this process, one appointment should be 20-30 minutes, tops, so we got moving. (I’m new at this; how’s my foreshadowing doing so far?)

We make it back into their offices and have a seat in the same chairs as yesterday. We draw a bead on the person who is being helped with his visa, and we immediately know that there’s going to be at least a litle trouble. The man at the counter has got a 500-page three ring binder in his lap. We soon grok that he is there with his wife/partner, who also demonstrates the ownership of a similar binder. We also overhear that they are applying for thier two children as well. Now, if you haven’t gleaned all the “oh fuck” in the above, let me illuminate you. There are 11 steps to the D7 checklist. Several of them are satisfied with 1-2 pages. NONE of them require more than 20 (that’s a stretch, honestly, but how you demonstrate your finances can vary wildly I suppose.) This family is WILDLY over-prepared for this process. And here’s the thing. When you’ve brought THAT much extra stuff, it’s clear (to us at least) that, in fact, you don’t which of those things you actually need. We even heard the guy mutter a few times “I’ve got this organized in just my special way, hang on, I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.” This is, as we say in our household, no bueno.

We’re not com-PLETE-ly eavesdropping, so we aren’t sure what step they’ve made it to, but around noon or so Duane sneaks up to us again (oh boy…) and tells us that he’s been told it’s likely to be another hour or so, and would we like to go get lunch, or perhaps we would like to wait in the British waiting room? We don’t need lunch, but the “British waiting room” was certainly intriguing. Lisa also sussed out that they had COVID protocols and we were probably taking up seats that they needed. So, to the “British Waiting Room” (“BWR” hereafter) we went!

Y’all. Take a look at that photo. This place really cracked us up. Seriously, the Brits our so prissy that they even want prospective immigrants to be given dignified digs. They even had little bottles of water and grocery store biscotti under glass. Meager fare, perhaps, but the default waiting room offers diddly squat. Plus, the chairs are much nicer than the Ye Olde Conference Room Chairs in the other room. Seriously, we giggled. (I posted this same photo to the main facebook group we follow for these things, and many people were tickled as well.) Anyway, I got us a couple bottles of water and for the next couple hours we sat comfortably waiting for…

… why are you looking at me like that? Oh, the “next couple of hours?” Yeah sure, it absolutely took that long. Longer, actually. Our hotel checkout time was 2 PM, so during that time I slipped out, finished packing our bags and took them down to the lobby where they graciously checked them for us, then made it back to the BWR to settle back in with the missus, where we happily passed another hour before finally being brought in to the regular waiting room because “we’d be seen any minute now”. Which, by the by, I knew was incorrect when they said it because I’d heard the VFS staffer telling Duane that she had missed her lunch two hours ago and her blood sugar was getting dangerously low. I don’t begrudge her lunch at all, but that’s another half an hour.

In the end, our actual appointment was anti-climactic. We had done our research thoroughly and were almost impeccably prepared. One or two little niggles (our checks were made out to the wrong office, easily fixed) and we were passed with flying colors. Seriously, we really were done in ~30 minutes or so. By 4:20 or so we were back at our hotel, summoning a Lyft, and by 5 PM we were at the airport. We had, with some foresight, rebooked ourselves to the latest flight available, 9 PM, and so we had a relatively leisurely meal in the D gates, chatted, and boarded our flight. I’m typing this somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle from an altitude of 12,000 ft or so. It has been, as we said at the top, a heck of a 48 hours we went through today.