It took more than three years, but I finally got my residency visa for Portugal. After that long, I’d have hoped it would feel more momentous, and maybe it would have a year or two ago. Now I mostly feel exhausted. It’s timely, coming on the heels of the election in the United States. I need a new home. Here’s a country offering me one. But it’s now clear I’m in the middle of a transition from how I’ve been living to how I’m going to be living — still to be determined, but I’m starting to get some idea what that might look like — and I’m not sure Portugal is going to be my ultimate destination.

When I first applied, the estimate was that it would take about 18 months to get approved. That would have started a five-year countdown to the point where I could apply for citizenship, and I thought I’d have ample time to explore the country bit by bit, find a city I liked, and then settle down and see how it felt. The extra two years have meant I haven’t seen any of the country outside of Lisbon,¹ and recent changes in the naturalization laws have meant I’ll be eligible to apply for citizenship in 2026.² I’m going to have to pursue citizenship before I’ve fully made up my mind if I want it.³

It feels like there’s so little time left. I need to get certified in Portuguese in earnest, and had thought I’d move here for a few months and take one of the intensive classes to get it out of the way. But those run four hours a day for seven weeks, and that’s likely to conflict with the schedule for any job I’m applying to.⁴ I had the great idea of signing up for remote classes in December and January, since I have the time free, but they’re apparently booked solid until February. And the February/March classes won’t work for me because I’d miss too many classes to qualify for certification at the end. It’s a mess.⁵ Better than being dragged back to the United States, at any rate.

I’ve fallen into a rhythm of returning to Portugal every few months to deal with medical stuff, and I’ve been lucky that it’s largely been maintenance. My heart seems mostly fine, I’m on the same medications at the same doses I was at the beginning of the year, my various degenerative diseases are degenerating at an unexceptional pace. I’m getting old, but no faster than everybody else. I did refill the medication I needed for my rosacea, so that’s been a bit of a relief.⁶

This time in Lisbon I fully expected to have to have my gallbladder removed, and I saw a surgeon to discuss the options and my cardiologist to assess my suitability⁷ and underwent an array of tests including the ultrasound they were unable to schedule in the UK. And to my bafflement, the ultrasound technician could only find a single, tiny stone in my gallbladder. Which raises a whole host of questions about what caused my recent bout of pancreatitis.

I know I used to have gallstones, because I got diagnosed with them 20 years ago. It’s possible they all just dissolved, and the pancreatitis was unrelated.⁸ It’s also possible they’ve all been leaving one by one without incident, and the last one just got stuck. I suppose it’s even possible I was misdiagnosed 20 years ago. The upshot is I don’t seem to be especially susceptible to pancreatitis, and it doesn’t look like there’s much danger in leaving my gallbladder intact. So that’s at least one surgery dodged.

But I made the mistake of scheduling a dental appointment to get my teeth cleaned, and after the initial X-ray they informed me two of my remaining wisdom teeth are pressing against the roots of my molars and are going to need to come out.⁹ And because I have stents in my heart they can’t even do a cleaning without being on antibiotics.¹⁰ So I had to reschedule an appointment with my primary care doctor to get antibiotics, then reschedule an appointment with the dental clinic who informed me I needed a letter from my cardiologist to get the teeth extracted, so it’s not happening this trip. It’s all being addressed in January. I look forward to a week of soups.

Other than that I’ve been staying in a fourth floor walk up in Lisbon, keeping my head down. I don’t get out much. I’d rather be seeing some other parts of the country but I’m trying to be frugal since I don’t have a job. Besides, I’ve needed to stay close to my doctors to schedule and attend all the appointments I have. I’ve tried to socialize a bit¹¹ but really haven’t been in the mood.

Being forced to settle somewhere has really forced me to reckon with what I want from a place to live. All the travel I was doing compelled me to get out and see things, even when I was on my own. Without that, I need some sort of excuse to go outside. In a lot of ways this is really the worst of all possible worlds. I don’t know anybody in town so I don’t have a reason to leave the apartment. It’s not my apartment and I’m not here for the long term so there’s no point in decorating or buying new furniture. The kitchen’s cramped and I don’t often cook for myself, so I’ve been ordering in delivery food.¹²

But it’s temporary. I’m leaving Lisbon to spend the holiday season with family and friends in and around New York. I’ll be back in January for that tooth extraction, before leaving for February and returning in March. After that I’ve no idea. I might effectively be here for a year while I prepare for the future, and if I’m going to get stuck somewhere I’m slowly figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ll need to find a job at some point, although I might end up setting another stack of my retirement savings on fire while I figure out what I want.

I discovered there was a tiki bar right around the corner from the hospital, and after my first round of appointments — they were in the late afternoon and I finished around 6pm — I dropped in. I was feeling celebratory, since I had finally picked up my residency card. The place was tiny, with seating for maybe 20 people and a bar that wasn’t much bigger than a kitchen island jammed into a corner. It was clearly decorated on a budget. A TV in the corner was playing Woody Woodpecker cartoons. I liked it immensely, even if the cocktails were pricey.

I was the only customer in there, and about halfway through my drink the bartender, bored, wandered over and struck up a conversation. They turned out to be an immigrant from Guyana, who had traveled to Belgium for a master’s program in animation.¹³ There were visa snafus — there’s always visa snafus — and they ended up moving to Finland for a while before ending up in Portugal. They had managed to get a residency permit and were working their way towards naturalization, same as me.

We chatted for a bit about our respective immigrant experiences, neither of us properly refugees but estranged from our native countries nonetheless. I asked about the Guyanese expat community¹⁴ and they asked about the differences between our respective visa programs. We commiserated about the Portuguese bureaucracy and the difficulty of picking up the local language.

Eventually I thanked them for the chat and paid for my drink, wandering back into the Lisbon night to puzzle out the tram schedule back to my apartment. I eventually did. But the whole thing reminded me of something it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to feel like I’m the only one trying to find a place for myself. But there are others of us, different but similar, all on their own personal odyssey. I may be by myself more often than not, but I’m far from alone.

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Footnotes

¹ I avoided Portugal while my visa was pending, reasoning that I’d rather spend my Schengen days elsewhere since they’d be effectively free in Portugal once I had my visa in hand.

² Probably, anyway. The courts still haven’t ruled on what the changes mean for people with my visa. Most lawyers think the five-year countdown starts when I first applied in 2021. Some think if that doesn’t count then it’ll definitely start when I was asked to provide biometrics in 2022. And there’s a small contingent who believe it’ll go by the strictest possible criteria which would be when I paid the fees right before my card was issued, shaving a grand six weeks off the five years I’d otherwise have to wait.

It’s now clear we aren’t going to get any clarification until after people start applying for citizenship based on the law, and since the decisions of Portuguese courts aren’t binding on each other there’s likely to be some differences in how it’s interpreted which has to get worked out on appeal. So I’ve no idea.

³ Practically speaking, yes, it makes basically no sense not to apply, since it’s fundamentally the same steps as applying for permanent residency (in fact, you get permanent residency along the way to naturalization) and I would be extremely grateful to have an EU passport, if only so I could stop counting the days I spend in Schengen.

I really don’t want to apply for citizenship purely as a transaction, though. My question has always been is Portugal a place I’d want to retire. I’m not sure I’d be able to really answer that in five years. I’m certainly not going to be able to answer it in two.

⁴ Morning and afternoon classes are going to interfere with European working hours, while afternoon and evening classes are going to interfere with working hours in the United States. So I’ve no idea what I should sign up for.

⁵ It’s also nearly impossible — at least for me — to figure out when the classes are running and get enrolled, so I’m probably going to end up taking remote classes even though I’ll be in Lisbon. As far as I can tell, the information on the free government run classes for Portuguese as a second language is entirely in Portuguese. They’re also famously oversubscribed and difficult to get into and getting the details requires calling every single school over the telephone and asking.

⁶ Up until a year ago my rosacea mostly made my face always look sunburned, with the doxycycline I use to treat it actually making it more likely to get sunburned in a classic damned-if-you-do scenario. Without the medication I’d typically get nasty acne outbreaks; unsightly but not health threatening.

The fun bit now is that with all the blood thinners I’m on if I run out of doxycycline I still get the acne but it now scabs over and flakes off and bleeds profusely, causing it to scab back over and flake back off again and again and again. Still mostly cosmetic, but there’s nothing like feeling an itch on your face and reaching up to discover you’ve got a rivulet of blood running down your forehead for no reason. I’m particularly happy to have a refill.

⁷ I’d need to switch out my blood thinners for aspirin before and after the surgery, which makes sense.

⁸ As the ultrasound tech put it, it could have been “sludge” in my digestive tract.

⁹ None of my wisdom teeth ever came in, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent any time in my company. Annoyingly, the one healthy wisdom tooth I do have breached my gum about four years ago so I’ve got an annoying outcropping of dental enamel in the far back of my mouth which I endlessly drag my tongue over.

¹⁰ Turns out when you bleed from your gums you open a direct channel into your circulatory system and there’s all sorts of nasty bacteria floating around in your mouth that can fuck up your arteries.

¹¹ I signed up for Timeleft because I read an article about it, and shortly thereafter its ads were plastered all over my feed so I guess they’re in the middle of a marketing push. It’s a service that sets up dinners for you and 5-6 strangers and serves mostly as an excuse for me to leave the apartment at least once a week. I’ve been twice and my major gripe — which is gonna sound weird, but hear me out — is that they sort you into groups primarily based on your age, so I’m dining with people in their 50s.

I have, it turns out, virtually nothing in common with most people in their 50s besides heart disease. Many of the people I’m meeting are expats — no big surprise, since I’m opting for the English-speaking group — and the most interesting thing most of them seem to have done in the last few years is move to Lisbon. Moving to Lisbon is probably the least interesting thing I’ve done in the past few years.

I’m sure this is horribly unfair and I’ll grant I probably don’t come across as particularly interesting to them either. But I don’t have any children to talk about and I’m not especially invested in the traffic around the city or what their apartment search looked like. My topics of conversation skew more towards whether the Wicked movie is any good or the ending of the latest season of Arcane or the recent exodus from Twitter. All of which probably hits about a decade younger and a whole lot more geeky. And I’ve no idea where to find those kind of people around here.

¹² There’s a lot of 2-for-1 deals, for some reason, which if nothing else is easy on the budget. My daily food bill is about 15€, 3€ for a yogurt in the morning and about 12€ for lunch and dinner. I guess I need to throw in another 2€ for all the fizzy water I drink.

¹³ That explained the Woody Woodpecker cartoons

¹⁴ Brazilians are, for obvious reasons, the largest and most visible immigrant group in Portugal. That puts other immigrant groups in a kind of odd position, especially since a lot of them don’t know the language coming in. As you might expect, the Guyanese expat community is small but tight-knit because of it.