{"id":1284,"date":"2023-02-14T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T00:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transitorythoughts.com\/travel\/?page_id=1284"},"modified":"2024-03-03T16:07:05","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T16:07:05","slug":"portugal-move-2023","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.transitorythoughts.com\/travel\/portugal-move-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Portugal Move, 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Early in 2022 we began serious planning for a move to Portugal. Yes! Portugal<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a long awaited astrophotography workshop in Menorca Spain in May 2022, we added a mini-tour of several cities in Portugal \u2013 Lisbon, Porto, Braga, and Coimbra. We stayed the longest in Porto and Braga, thinking we would be most interested in the north. They were all great places to visit, but we were most intrigued with Lisbon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a 2nd<\/sup> photo trip in August, where we traveled with a small group to several high-elevation refugios in the Dolomites of northeast Italy, we added a nine-day stay in Lisbon at the start of September. We booked a three-bedroom apartment in the Avenidas Novas neighborhood near the Gulbenkian Museum where we might want to live, visited the grocery and cooked some meals, used the metro and buses to travel all over neighborhoods, explored parks to make sure we\u2019d find green space, and took the train to tourist spots of Cascais and Sintra. We found some great restaurants and really liked the variety, especially vegan, no-lactose options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With help from the Portuguese relocation\/real-estate company Savvy Cat, we signed a lease for an unfurnished rental apartment a couple days before Christmas in Caxias, which is just west of Lisbon. We decided to travel there on a tourist visa to start furnishing the apartment while we waited for our residency visa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it begins…
(scroll to the bottom for the most recent posts)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living in Portugal – Diary<\/h2>\n\n\n