Living in Portugal as a New Arrival – Dispatches from the Long Stay
How do you make a new life in a new place? That’s a pretty big question. Whatever your reasons for leaving a home in one country and trying to establish a new one, it’s about as monumental a task as you will ever undertake.
What Does “Home” Mean when you Start Over?
Moving to a new country involved an overwhelming number of practical decisions … immigration strategy and bank accounts, an apartment to find and a house to empty, phones, doctors, where to buy food, TAXES … all the small systems that the locals seem to understand without thinking about them. Everything small is suddenly hard.
Eventually you get through the list. You stop putting out fires, and move from survival mode into stability, and even a sense of growth. The boxes are all unpacked! I know where to buy groceries! I’ve figures out the buses and the trains! I no longer get hopelessly lost! Where I live feels less strange by the day.
The move is over. But the move was never the point. Finding a home was. When does the new place start to feel like home?
I don’t know the answer. Yet.
When I left the United States for Braga, Portugal, I thought I was beginning my third act. A whole new start. And it has been that, yes, but it’s also been a long conversation with myself, with the places I visit, and with the idea of home. After living in several different countries, and collecting a ridiculous number of citizenships, I am interrogating what I mean by “home.”
I intend for this to be a travel and lifestyle site, but also something more personal … an exploration into how to live somewhere new. About travelling through unfamiliar places and looking for the pieces that feel welcome. About restaurants, hotels, trains, good decisions, bad decisions, gorgeous views, rainstorms, missed connections, bureaucratic disasters, and all the ordinary details that make up a life.
Everything here is an attempt to answer one question: What does it mean to find home?
Learning to Live in Braga
How does a strange place gradually become part of your ordinary life? What does daily life in a new place actually feel like? What happens when you try to build a life somewhere new?
Sometimes the answer is found in small things. I’m getting to know my new city slowly. I pay attention to things like weather, local festivals, the food culture, and medical care. I am discovering so many shops and restaurants and gardens I want to go back to. I have a favorite bakery now. I’m getting better at understanding how Portuguese holidays work. And I am beginning to learn the language.
“Home” can emerge when a place I’ve been visiting for a while becomes somewhere I am living. In these shorter posts about Braga and everyday life in Portugal, I share the discoveries, frustrations, observations, and small victories that come with learning how to belong somewhere new. Because perhaps home doesn’t arrive all at once.
Perhaps it accumulates.
Going Somewhere Else
Travel is often described as an escape from ordinary life. I prefer to think of it as a different way of understanding. When I first began travelling with my husband Marty, we agreed that you can’t really choose to call a place home if you’ve never experienced anywhere else. For us, that wasn’t a choice, it was passivity. So we travelled, and eventually moved twice to new places.
I’m using my new home as a base to explore around me. Portugal alone could support a lifetime of exploration, to places like the Azores and the Algarve. And from Portugal, I can quite easily board a train or plane and find myself someplace totally new. I can stay in a hotel, eat food I don’t normally eat, wander streets I may never see again, and briefly imagine what life might be like if I lived there instead. Trying a new place “on for size” is a big part of how I figure out what’s important in a home for me.
My longer travelogues will take you with me as I explore … sharing the places I stay, the meals I remember, the things I think are worth doing, and occasionally those that aren’t! If you’re a traveller like me, I hope my recommendations and lessons learned will help you.
But although I’m INCREDIBLY invested in whether a hotel has a comfortable bed, and I want to know if a restaurant truly deserves five stars, I’m much more interested in how a place makes me feel. Why is one city an immediate turn-off while another becomes somewhere I want to return to again and again? What makes me want to return? What makes me wonder if I could live there?
And when I go travelling, what does it teach me about the place I’ve chosen to live?
Trying to Understand Home
And for me, since I’m a reflective sort of person who has a convoluted immigration history, I’m spending time pondering exactly what “home” means, and how I’ve developed my understanding of it.
My journey has been complicated:
- I was born in Northern Ireland,
- Grew up in Canada,
- (Lived in Barbados for 10 months while Marty had a consulting gig,)
- Worked the prime of my career in the United States,
- And now I’ve “retired” to Portugal.
All of these places have taught me something about what home is. But so has the leaving of them, after building a life. Starting over in a new place. Carrying memories while trying to create connection to somewhere new.
I don’t expect to arrive at a neat definition. In fact, I suspect the definition will keep changing. Maybe home is a place. Maybe it’s people. Maybe it’s the feeling of knowing where you belong (but if I knew, I wouldn’t be writing this blog).
This is my attempt to figure it out. I hope you’ll come along.