It’s been a rainy Março in Lisbon, not that it’s mattered much to me. I was living in a ratty AirBnB in a not-particularly-nice neighborhood. The first apartment I rented fell through less than two weeks before I arrived, so I had to scramble to find something cheap. It was up three flights of stairs, lacked an oven and a stove,¹ and had walls that seemed to be constructed of tissue paper if the volume of the family living next door was any indication.²

My biggest issue with the apartment was the location; Lisbon has seven hills³ and I was on the edge of the Baxia neighborhood on the slope leading up to the São Jorge Castle. In addition to the three flights of stairs I had to walk the equivalent of five stories uphill to get to the door. I held out against doing laundry as long as I could because the laundromat was at the bottom of the hill. More often than I care to admit I called a cab to take me home rather than drag myself uphill.

But the shower had exemplary water pressure and was plenty hot, the apartment got a surprising amount of sun in the afternoons, and an unseasonably cold March meant I didn’t have to worry about air conditioning.⁴ It would have been a horrible place to live long term — I wasn’t exactly thrilled with it short term — but I was always just passing through and I knew it.

I had four basic goals while being there: to get started on medical treatment, to learn to speak Portuguese, to acclimatize myself to Portugal in general, and to start the process of moving there. The first of those turned out to be the easiest. I had already made appointments with a couple doctors for the second week I was here. As soon as I saw the cardiologist I had a battery of routine tests scheduled for the following day: blood draws, ECG, stress ECG, and an echocardiogram.

Broadly speaking, it’s good news. My heart function — stubbornly stuck at sub-40% since the heart attack — has now inched back up to 46%. 50% is generally considered the lowest that’s “healthy” so while I’m still not great I’m better than I used to be. And the doctor adjusted a few of my medications, I got refills for everything,⁵ and was instructed to make an appointment in the summer. It looks like I’m going to be fine in the near term.

In terms of getting used to Portugal and starting the process of moving here, it’s been a decidedly bumpier journey. I had thought I’d spend time exploring Lisbon in more depth, but I signed up for intensive language lessons every morning and it turns that much time in a classroom leaves me feeling like I’ve been hit in the head repeatedly by a sledgehammer. I was in no particular shape to do anything cognitively taxing. After class I generally went back to my apartment, crawled into bed, and had some soup or vegetable sushi while I watched Rick and Morty episodes.⁶

I’ve slowly figured out how to navigate the city. Grocery stores are a little weird — the local Pingo Doce supermarket doesn’t appear to sell ground cinnamon at all, which made stocking up for my morning bowl of overnight oats a bit tricky,⁷ but I quickly figured out there was a fancy gourmet supermarket at the El Corte Inglés and I’ve been making weekly runs to pick up supplies.⁸ My biggest issue has been the lack of flavored seltzers; there is simply no carbonated water available that isn’t sweetened. And for some reason most of the water comes in tiny 250ml bottles. First, I drink far more than that. Second, I’d really prefer to cut down on the waste I’m producing. I feel guilty enough drinking bottled water in the first place.⁹

But I’ve gotten nowhere in terms of actually moving there. I thought maybe I’d find an apartment and sign a lease; I haven’t. I assumed failing that I’d rent a storage unit somewhere; I didn’t.¹⁰ I expected to arrange a local post office box; I decided it wouldn’t be that useful. I don’t think the trip’s been a waste — getting medical care arranged is huge, I’m a least started on a path to speaking Portuguese, and I’ll have far less culture shock if and when I do look for a place in earnest — but I can’t claim I put in much of a good faith effort at relocating. There’s still time.

That leaves the language classes, my last goal in being here a month. And those were something of a mixed bag.

I am, as I expected, absolutely dreadful at learning a foreign language. I was hoping that my previous attempts at picking up a second language¹¹ weren’t indicative of likely future success, since I wasn’t really all that motivated before. Suddenly I am. Not merely because it’s required to apply for citizenship, but as someone seriously considering moving to Portugal long term it’s better to speak Portuguese to help integrate into the culture.

I signed up for a month of intensive classroom language instruction, which in retrospect was an odd choice for someone with ADD. I was in class from 9am to 1pm every weekday with a 20-minute break at the halfway point.¹² When I signed up I was mostly thinking the best way of learning a language is in an immersive setting, and if I was going to be in Lisbon for a month it seemed like a simple way to jump-start my skills and get me in the ballpark of where I needed to be to pass the exam I need to take.

The language school was located just off of Pink Street, the tourist stretch of Travessa do Carvalho you’ve likely noticed if you’ve seen any Insta-friendly pictures of Lisbon.¹³ It was an eclectic mix of students; the classes run every week and so learners will drop in based on their skill level and drop out as they get busy or leave. It’s basically a mix of various Western Europeans — lots of Germans, for some reason — with a few students from the UK and the USA to round it out.¹⁴ I’d guess roughly a third were working or studying in Portugal, a third were living in Portugal or planning to, and the final third just liked learning languages. The classes were in Portuguese and English, and as is typical for Europe these days everyone spoke English almost as well as I do.

Portuguese is a little odd, to my ears. It’s been described as sounding like a drunk Russian trying to speak Spanish and I could hear that when I was wandering around Lisbon.¹⁵ It’s also kind of aggressively gendered; words are either masculine or feminine — there’s no neutral gender at all — so you have quirks like the word for children (os filhos) being the same as the word for boys.¹⁶ I’m agnostic on the degree to which language constrains thought, but you don’t have to be a hard Sapir–Whorf adherent to get annoyed that there’s a special word for husband (o marido) but the word for wife is the same as the word for woman (a mulher).¹⁷

Portuguese is generally regarded as being easy to learn.¹⁸ And I’ll admit, I kind of like the language. There’s a pleasing synchronicity to it, a slight rhythmic quality that means you can feel when you’re getting the cadence correct.¹⁹ Unfortunately, the Portuguese speak quickly²⁰ and coupled with the tendency to drop unstressed syllables it can make just picking out the words difficult.²¹

The other major problem I ran into was all the conjugations. I was expecting it so I can’t say I was surprised, but even so it proved to be a huge stumbling block. The pace of classes meant we didn’t have time to really let the lessons sink in, so one day we’d learn the conjugations for present tense and on the next day we’d learn the irregular forms for “to be”²² and the next one the irregular forms for a bunch of other useful words²³ and then the future tense for all those and then we were on to the Past Perfect. And then the Past Imperfect and then the Preterite and I haven’t even mentioned the Subjunctive forms yet.²⁴

I was keeping up in the first week of classes, but after the second week I was just falling further and further behind. I remained vaguely competitive on pen-and-paper exercises, the “conjugate all the forms of the verb ‘to run’” kind of things. But I struggled to respond to any sentence more complicated than Do you eat carrots?.²⁵ I was thrilled to call it after four weeks. I need time to consolidate what I’ve learned.

The challenge now is to keep going. There’s plenty of online resources to help you learn Portuguese, but the vast majority of it is Brazilian. It would be like learning Swiss German in order to move to Berlin. Your pronunciation would make it hard to understand you, and your slang and grammar would make you seem stilted and odd.²⁶ But resources like Google Translate don’t support European Portuguese making them even less reliable than usual. Duolingo doesn’t offer it as an option. I had the bright idea of listening to the BBC World News in Portuguese, but they only produce it for Brazil, I guess under the assumption if the Americans have to put up with a British accent to listen then the Portuguese can put up with a Brazilian accent. Movies aren’t even dubbed into Portuguese here, so that’s not an option.²⁷

But there’s a few resources floating around, discussed in the same tones as samizdat in the language learning community. There’s a modest output of Portuguese television which I’m not yet at a level to really take advantage of. Disney Plus, of all things, has a lot of European Portuguese dubs of their stuff available online, and I’m considering getting a subscription and the requisite VPN to watch them.²⁸

Beyond that I’ve started using Drops, a Duolingo-like language app which does support European Portuguese,²⁹ and I signed up for some automated courses repeating the A1 to A2 levels I just took classes of, to reinforce what I’ve learned and keep it fresh. My vague goal is to find some online class at some point to keep progressing, and maybe some live tutoring which I can sign up for.

The broader issue, of course, is that I’m having a little trouble articulating why I’m even doing this. Setting aside the fact that I need to demonstrate some basic competency to the Portuguese government,³⁰ why am I bothering? It would undeniably be helpful to speak Portuguese if I were living here, but I don’t know that being able to stumble haltingly through a conversation about how I spent my weekend would offer much more than just memorizing a bunch of vocabulary words so I could locate a barber shop or point to what I wanted on a menu.

The sheer prevalence of English in Lisbon has led to what I’m thinking of as the “uncanny valley” of language acquisition. It’s useful to recognize some basic phrases and to be able to say “hello” and “sorry” and “thank you,” if only to be polite. And it’d be great to be fluent. But there’s not a whole lot of point in being somewhere between those two points. But it’s going to be years before my skill and comfort level speaking Portuguese is better than any average person’s on the street in English. That’s less true in rural areas, but am I going to even be living in rural areas? Am I even going to be living in Portugal in five years?

Despite all that, I remain weirdly determined to hit fluency. We’ll see if that mania fades, as most of mine do once I’ve got some other project to obsess about. But maybe it’ll stick. Stranger things have happened.

I’m now flying to Berlin, where a hurried day going through costume options for the upcoming month will segue into my travel to the UK for a bit before Solmukohta in Finland. I’m still waiting on my visa for Portugal. In just the last week I’ve heard they’ve finally processed at least one applicant who had an interview in September, 2022.³¹ I interviewed a month later. I haven’t been asked to resubmit any new documentation, which is either a great sign because they’ve got everything they need or a terrible sign because they haven’t even reached that stage of the process for my application.

Either way it’ll likely be at least two more months before they make a determination on my application. I had resigned myself to staying in Portugal during most of that process but the ease with which I managed to get quasi-affordable medical care here,³² along with the fact that I won’t need to be monitored nearly as closely as I had feared, have me reconsidering. I have plans in the autumn in the EU and it would be nice to be able to actually see friends and spend time, even if I don’t have my residency card in my hands until August.

My summer is currently completely unscheduled — I thought I was going to be in Portugal — and so I’m only just now considering the possibility of actually, you know, traveling like I was before my heart imploded. I’m not due for another medical appointment for 3-4 months. Maybe it’s time for me to be somewhere I’ve never been again.

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Footnotes

¹ There is an antique electric double burner in the kitchen which looks like it’s as likely to torch the apartment as boil some water for pasta, so I avoided turning it on.

² I’ve counted five distinct voices, including a baby, excluding the cat. I sincerely hope their apartamento is bigger than mine.

³ Even the Romans noted it was just like Rome.

⁴ The apartment didn’t have heat but there was a space heater which was more than adequate.

⁵ Since I’m not officially a resident I don’t get discounts on my medication here, and yet it’s still cheaper than filling my prescriptions in the United States. In the United States my insurance won’t pay a cent until I’ve spent $5,000 in any given year, and until that point it costs about $1,000/month. A month’s worth of medication for me here costs €250.

When I first got here I saw my GP and got two month’s worth. When I followed up with the cardiologist they said I was doing fine and to come back in four months — and gave me four month’s worth of refills. I filled them all since I have no idea when I’m going to be due back, but if anything I now have too many pills.

⁶ I somehow missed the release of Season 7, so it was good to have something like that to watch. I could have done with a trigger warning for the fifth episode, though.

⁷ It did have maple syrup and agave nectar, and I found a large packet of chocolate powder, so I just had chocolate oatmeal until I found the cinnamon elsewhere.

⁸ The gourmet supermarket has an extensive supply of vegan stuff, from ice cream to Beyond Burgers to stables like tempeh and tofu, which I’d be thrilled at if I had any kitchen to speak of. I’ve mostly relied on it for prepared foods for lunch.

⁹ The person I rented from assured me the tap water was safe to drink, and I have no reason to doubt them, but there’s a bit of a sulfurous odor to it and I’d rather not.

¹⁰ I had booked a flight to Berlin to start consolidating some of the things I’ve left scattered at friend’s places around Europe, but it got canceled by the strikes in Germany. So I didn’t really have anything to store.

¹¹ French in high school, German when I lived in Germany 25 years ago. I’m not counting American Sign Language because it’s not exactly foreign and while it’s certainly a real language the fact that it doesn’t involve speaking seems to bypass some of my language learning issues.

¹² The exception was the last week of classes, which ran from 9am to 2pm but had Friday off due to a holiday. I thought the four-hour classes were grueling but that extra hour was a nightmare, especially since my brain shut off reliably at the 3½ hour mark.

¹³ The street’s painted bright pink and only extends for a couple blocks, although they’ve crammed a surprising number of bars and restaurants along with a wine store and a strip club into that small space.

It was a mob scene in the afternoons when I got out of class but I kind of liked the vibe in the mornings when I would walk along it to get to class; before 9am it was empty with only the street cleaners hosing down the neon pink and sweeping up the detritus of revelry.

¹⁴ Although there was a very nice retired gentleman from Norway who apparently just fell in love with the language and felt compelled to learn it. And I met someone from Japan at one of the weekly dinners.

¹⁵ Russian is a stress-timed language, just like Portuguese, and there’s a generous number of guttural phonemes in each. Portuguese also has a lot of German and Arabic loanwords which influences the cadence and pronunciation.

I’ve also heard that native speakers of other Romance languages don’t think Portuguese sounds Slavic in the slightest, so YMMV.

¹⁶ One of the examples we translated was “How many children do you have? And how many are children and how many are girls?” In context you understand the first os filhos means “kids” and the second means “boys,” but it’s very perplexing the first time you run into it.

¹⁷ There is at least a word for spouse (o esposo/a esposa) so you can usually sidestep that particular landmine.

¹⁸ The US Foreign Service ranks languages based on how many hours it takes a native English speaker to learn them, and Portuguese is in their “Category I” ranking, along with the rest of the Romance languages. It apparently takes 600 hours of practice to master. Even German, which never struck me as all that hard, is “Category II.”

¹⁹ Syllable-timed languages like Spanish and French tend to be paced so each syllable takes about the same amount of time to say. Like English, European Portuguese is stress-timed which means the timing between the stressed syllables is the same, and the Portuguese tend to swallow all the sounds in between them. Interestingly, Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed and you can really fuck up your accent if you spend a lot of time listening to Brazilian speakers while you’re learning.

²⁰ The verb telephoner — it means what you think — is often pronounced in practice as tlfoner. Good luck trying to pick that out in an A1-level listening exam.

²¹ Faster than Germans, albeit slower than the French and the Spanish.

²² Portuguese has three verbs meaning “to be,” one for temporary conditions, one for permanent ones, and one for declaring the existence of something. They’re used everywhere and highly irregular.

²³ to go, to see, to have, to do, etc.

²⁴ Typical verbs in Portuguese have over fifty different forms to memorize and I’m getting a bit of a stress reaction just thinking about it.

²⁵ I think my biggest problem, speaking, is that there are too many variables I’m trying to juggle. I have to remember the vocabulary, and then remember what tense I should be using and how to conjugate it, then remember if the object takes a preposition and if so which preposition and then remember if I need to adjust the preposition to match the gender or number of the object or if this is one of the prepositions that combines with the article so I need to use a different form altogether. Reaching fluency means making that process automatic and instantaneous and I am so painfully not there yet.

Beyond that, I just don’t have the vocabulary to say what I really want to say. When someone asks me about carrots what I really want to say is “Kinda, I mean, I’ll eat carrots raw if I’ve got hummus to dip them into and I think they’re great in carrot cake or chopped up with other root vegetables in a stew, but otherwise I’ve never been that fond of them on their own and I’d rather snack on broccoli, given a choice.” and instead the best I can manage is “Sim. Gosto de cenoura.”

²⁶ One obvious example: what the Portuguese call breakfast (pequino-almoço, or “little-lunch”) the Brazilians call café da manhã or “morning coffee.” No one’s going to misunderstand you, but they will think you’re a little clueless.

²⁷ The real value of movies is being able to listen to spoken Portuguese and then check your understanding in the subtitles, so the opposite direction isn’t nearly as helpful.

²⁸ You would not believe the excitement I felt when I realized the third season of Bluey was available on there in European Portuguese.

²⁹ Drops has a lot of special lessons timed to seasonal events and I made the mistake of signing up for the lesson in honor of International Women’s Day, so my beginner lessons were composed of things like “hello” and “good morning” and “cat” interspersed with stuff like “We have a strong gender nondiscrimination policy” and “I have a good work/life balance.”

³⁰ There’s an official exam which runs a couple times a year which I’ll need to schedule once I feel comfortable enough to pass it, probably next year. I wasn’t expecting to take it so soon, but with the shortening of the time needed to apply for citizenship there’s a lot I’m kind of being rushed into.

The alternative, if you have test anxiety, is to enroll in one of the official language courses, which are government-sponsored, typically free, and gives you the required accreditation at the end of the class. But they’re ridiculously oversubscribed and can take up to nine months at two two-hour classes per week.

³¹ Although they haven’t finished all the applicants for August 2022 yet, so as usual the timing is non-deterministic.

³² I understand for Europeans the amount I’m paying probably seems exorbitant. I’ve just been so repeatedly scarred by the health care system in the United States that the thought I’ve located a sane, reliable source for the medication keeping me alive feels surreal.