Happy Bragaversary!

Today is the one-year anniversary of our moving to Braga. It has been an eventful year! There is so much I could talk about, but an anniversary is typically a place to look back and see where you are and how far you’ve come, so I will do that in order to focus.

In the past year, we have moved from the immigration “survival” phase, of constantly dealing with issues and putting out fires, to the “stability” phase, where we are finally in a place to plan instead of react. Things we’ve accomplished:

Established legal residence, me through a CRUE (EU Residence Card) and Irish passport, Marty through family reunification and a Portuguese residence card.
Set up our finances in Portugal (banking, NIF) and our financial infrastructure back to the U.S. (banking, foreign exchange pipeline).
Figured out where EVERYTHING is … groceries, hardware, services, restaurants, post office, many kinds of government office … you name it.
Learned just enough Portuguese to navigate services.
Worked our way into the medical system and had a year’s worth of checkups, including specialists. I still have work to do understanding the public/private split here, though.
Set up our apartment and unpacked more completely than any place we’ve ever lived. We actually have NO boxes left over from previous moves, and 95% of the art we brought with us is out on display. This is really satisfying.
Had four separate sets of houseguests. For the first time I have a dedicated guest room, and it makes sharing my space so much easier.
Travelled within Portugal to the Azores and the Algarve, and trips to Lisbon too numerous to count.
Built a good foundation for community. We’re active with the Braga+ community which is a lot of expats but locals as well, and we have social events to attend pretty much whenever we feel like them. We have some new friendships which look promising. We had a housewarming with about 20 people attending, and my birthday dinner party included eight Braga residents I really wanted there as well as my sister and oldest friend.
Spent a year going through Braga’s seasons. I now know what the locals consider cold and rainy in January (not cold to me, but definitely rainy). I’ve experienced 42C during a European heat wave for the first time in my life, once in June and again in August. I know when I want to be in Braga and when I want to visit Canada (hint: read that last sentence).
Learned that Braga has a festival or event happening practically every month. This city loves life. 🙂

We met R and Y through the expat community recently, and they have now been here four months. R is doing something similar to me, he has a Substack about their relocation experience (he’s a good writer, here it is). Just two days ago he published “Give It a Year,” a reflection on where he expects to be when he’s at the point I’m at now. It’s a wonderful coincidence, and I found myself nodding constantly at his description of four months in. I am only eight months further along this journey, but I find myself helping others like he describes, sharing my experience and contacts and lessons learned. That’s another good sign that we’ve really settled.

(And as a tangent, now I’m dreaming that Braga 2026 is the new Paris of the 20s, where writers “in exile” meet and socialize and start writing their grand epistles. A writing community here would be amazing.)

I haven’t even mentioned the most important thing. By a year in, the shine should have worn off, according to everything I’ve read about the expat transition. We should be over the honeymoon phase by now. But we’re still ecstatically happy with Braga. We keep pinching ourselves, wondering how we managed to luck into such a perfect place to live. I’m not using the word “home” yet, because then I’d probably have to shut down this blog, but I want it to be home. We miss people dreadfully, and occasionally have some homesickness, but life here is great and we are slowly scraping off 20 years of the self-protection that we had to build for living in the U.S.

And now we are excitedly planning for a year of language lessons and short trips around Europe, hopefully with more visitors. And a second go-round of Braga’s events calendar.

Happy Bragaversary to us both.