“Our Year In, Ummm…”

Ok so our year in Portugal may or may not end up being a year in, well, Portugal itself.  We connected with the immigration attorney we’d identified before leaving, and - though the internet says one can apply for the Digital Nomad visa upon arriving in Portugal - she insisted that no, we do, in fact, need to apply for the visa in our home country.  Womp.  Womp.  Triple womp.  Because this is a relatively new visa program (just launched last October 2022), it looks like there may be some misinformation and confusion over how the thing is implemented.  So.  Here we sit.  Well within our (thank goodness) 90-day vacation/tourist visa time during which we, as Americans, can be anywhere in the EU without any further effort or paper action.  And I suppose we could head home, figure it all out, re-apply, blah blah blah (as we could have, if we’d made the time before we left but felt too busy!)...but something tells me we won’t do that.  Something tells me - if this attorney turns out to be right - we’ll spend a few months here, and find a new adventure, somewhere else.  (Costa Rica, anyone? Colombia? Eastern Europe for 90 days, then back here another 90?)  Stay tuned for more…we most certainly will be!

*Side note: our second night here, I woke up in the middle of the night (OK Luca probably woke me up with a kick in the face as he insisted on sleeping only in our bed - on my person - for the first 4 nights) and decided I was going to write a book one day.  Even if it’s just a measly compilation of essays, and even if it’s just for yours truly, I would do it.  And I even had a title!  “Our Year In Portugal,” I said (to no one in particular).  It’s funny how attached we get to things, even if we didn’t know they existed moments before.  This book was IT!  I say this because - when I first got the immigration news - I didn’t think “oh no, what will we do” or “well damn, that was something we could have figured out more easily BEFORE we came here” (those thoughts would come later) - instead, I thought, simply, laughably (now), “but what about my book?”  Specifically, what about my title?  I imagined the cover having a big “X” over the word Portugal and wondered what we’d put there - a place, more than one place? - instead.  My existential crisis took this form.  This was what I mourned.  This was the way I asked the question.  Like I said, funny how the thing (which we focus on) isn’t always the thing.