waving in Portugal

Firmly planting my feet

“Lisboa não é para os fracos!” Lisbon is not for the weak. A velhina said this to me on a really hot day last month, as we watched tourists struggle to climb hundreds of narrow steps built into an alleyway. The calçada – the white and black cobblestones Lisbon is famous for – can be tricky if you’re not familiar with the steep inclines here. But once you get used to them, you realize they might be the secret to the longevity of the locals. Living in Lisbon requires a little grit and finding your way absolutely builds character.

I’ve become obsessed with the velhinas, a term of endearment for the old ladies of Lisbon. They know too much and say too little, but they’ll be the first ones to tell you when you’ve done something wrong. They’ll also tell everyone else. Gossip – fofoca – becomes a religion when people gather to drink coffee, sip wine on benches or hang outside their windows peering over the happenings on their street. The velhinas are the watchers and keepers of recent history, the ones whose crisp laundry perfume the streets on weekend mornings, hanging perfectly on lines made of rope. Befriend one and the gates of Lisbon open to you, revealing hidden secrets of the city’s seven hills. Understanding Portuguese, as a language and a diaspora, feels like a superpower as the world gravitates towards the shores of Portugal in record numbers, a recent development that’s changing the country and the people living in it. 

My mom was born in the Azores on the island of São Jorge and my dad in Alentejo, on mainland Portugal. Their families emigrated to Canada because of dictatorship, corruption, and poverty. Somewhere around 1974, my parents met on a blind date at the corner of Dundas and Ossington in Toronto. Three months later they were married and six years after that I was born. Toronto is where I was raised, a first-generation kid who didn’t spend summers in Portugal like my other Luso-Canadian friends, but wanted to. My Portuguese language skills suffered for it but I’m learning. I’ve been told that most of my texts and communication these days are an endearing mix of both languages and I’m rolling with it.

I first started coming to Portugal after university, dividing my time between the two worlds through thick and thin. Last year I picked Lisbon for good; packing only one suitcase and storing the rest of my shit in my sister’s garage in the suburbs. My life fell apart in Toronto and I had nothing to lose but my mind. I left with no plan, a prayer and all the faith in the world that I’d figure it out. I’m now an immigrant in the country my parents left to save themselves; I’m building the life they couldn’t for reasons outside of their control, saving myself in a way by starting over and making sense of generations of hardship and learning about where I come from to understand where I’m headed next. Some say “oh, you’re living the dream!” And maybe, but am I? What’s a dream when it becomes your reality, other than just becoming your daily life. I’m a romantic, but I don’t romanticize. Still, life is full of suffering and to weather all the things that come with being human, yes, I’d rather be doing that in Lisbon over Toronto any day of the week. But you can’t compare what’s not comparable, and these two cities I’ve split my time between for so long couldn’t be more unalike. I have to admit though, being able to text my foreign friends things like “beijinhos” or “let’s grab a bitoque and cerveja after work” is a pleasure. I love it. To have what once felt secret be shared with the world feels validating. As a kid I wondered why being Portuguese wasn’t as known as being, say, Italian or French or Spanish. Now being Portuguese is trending and every other person I know is taking language classes to fit in. 

My Canadian friends wonder why I didn’t move to Portugal sooner. Three-hundred days of sun a year and the idealized European way of life make it the obvious choice for quality of life. On the other hand, my Portuguese friends can’t understand why I’d leave Canada, where salaries are higher and pursuing careers is encouraged. Ocean’s always bluer on the other side though, and everyone thinks that everyone else has it better. The Portuguese are notorious for this way of thinking and I won’t make apologies for that statement. I’ve lived it and observed it to be true. What I can say is this isn’t our parents’ Portugal anymore and what it’s becoming is yet to be seen; now it’s the Portuguese looking for higher ground elsewhere once again, as rents continue to make Lisbon one of the most expensive cities to live in Europe.

When I started coming to Lisbon in 2003, nobody paid much attention to Portugal, other than the Portuguese and the odd traveler wanting to try something new. If you grew up in Toronto though, you’d be hard-pressed not to find someone who isn’t somehow connected to the Luso community. These days though, you can find pastéis de nata at Costco. And here we are. The world has arrived in Portugal and I’ve been watching the whole thing from the inside since last fall.

I started my life over again in Lisbon last September. That’s the short version. There’s never a good time to start again, just the right set of circumstances to push you in the direction of evolution. Since then, I’ve had to modify and adapt to the rhythm of a city that’s in the depths of rapid expansion. Lisbon’s rising rent prices are in the news daily while Portuguese salaries remain under 900 euros per month; the math that doesn’t add up is always the topic of fofocas in the cafés. The Portuguese are welcoming and hospitable by nature but you can feel the divisiveness growing between those who were born here and those who came with foreign salaries because Portugal was “cheap”. To say there’s been a disruption in the ecosystem is a euphemism. As a Luso-Canadian, I’m in the middle – a Portuguese-foreigner. But I didn’t come to Lisbon because it was cheap, I came because it felt like home—because it’s the place I’ve lost and found myself a hundred times. My relationship to this city is the longest love affair of my life. 

When I first arrived last fall, I rented a room for six weeks in the duplex of a Parisian woman who later became a friend. When I realized the housing market was hotter than a summer day, it caused me anxiety (still does); suddenly a city that had always felt affordable, safe, relatively secret and rustic was becoming a version of something that I thought I’d left behind in Toronto. 

I’ve moved three times since arriving. Not uncommon anymore. After some networking, I found a small, traditional one-bedroom in a popular square where I spent six months. All the velhinas wanted to know how much I paid in rent and asked around to find out. I was so excited they were talking about me that I called my mom to tell her. Through gossip from a neighbour, I found out that a man had taken his own life in my living room before I’d moved in. I moved out two weeks later. What I paid for that tiny apartment with one window, was double what I paid for a two-storey duplex in the same neighbourhood ten years ago. Welcome to Lisbon.

Another thing that’s been interesting to navigate is dating here. I’m not looking for love, but I wouldn’t say no to it either, know what I mean? Coincidentally, some people I knew from Toronto also moved to Lisbon last year, which has made for some funny conversations about dating apps, meeting people organically and comparing notes between here and Toronto. Some of us have even been on dates with the same guys. Once again, welcome to Lisbon. Online dating is a never ending mix of Portuguese men, and foreigners from Northern European countries and Brazil on rotation. Canadians and Americans are in there too. Turns out all the difficulties of meeting someone new is a global issue and the same things we lamented about on the Toronto dating scene also crop up here. We lost something after Covid, when the apps exploded and we were all at home. I don’t know if we recovered socially. Some really struggle to say “hi” to people they’ve never met before, while others have breathed life into their confidence and are dating more than they ever did back home. There’s no shortage of successful, good looking, well-travelled people to meet here, and I’ve had some great dates and lame ones too. Dating is a super way to practice my Portuguese, learn about other cultures and countries, and even network for jobs. 

We have phones that can tell us where to go and soon we’ll have personal assistants constructed of artificial intelligence that will do the same. Many of those AI bots are being built right here in Lisbon, actually. Buildings that were once derelict have become coffee houses and co-working spaces filled with foreigners doing business remotely and creating the tech startups that are positioned to change the world with automation. Lisbon is attracting innovative talent that prefer good weather and ideal geography from which to bounce around Europe. How did it all happen so fast? I’ll tell you, but this is only part of the story: to stimulate the post-pandemic economy, the Portuguese government started issuing a series of visas that granted foreigners access to low taxes, working remotely and the possibility to invest in property and gain citizenship. With remote work being common now, the idea of traveling while making money became reality for so many. We’re currently living the results of this, and suddenly living in Portugal was trending. 

Changes like this are happening all over the world. I hear my Toronto friends and family lament about the rising cost of living in Canada too. É a vida, querida is another phrase not uncommon to hear, and if you were raised in a Portuguese household, our mothers and grandmothers said it often while sharing adversities and fofocas on the phone. It means, “That’s life, dear”, which has a revenant sense of acceptance. At no other time in our collective recent memory has that phrase applied more. The world is in a transition and we’re all clamouring for better days, only there aren’t solutions to issues with deep layers, only modifying our perspectives can save us. For the Portuguese, resilience is currency and no matter what happens, withstanding hardship is something the culture is rich in. I’m in the right place for that.

Of all the Portuguese phrases I hear on a daily basis, few have my heart like, “Sempre em frente!” It’s what you’ll hear when asking a local for directions, but it goes deeper than that. Translated it means straight ahead. It’s accompanied by very specific hand motions cutting through the air, slicing away everything to point in the direction of your destination. Even when the endpoint is nowhere to be seen, the Portuguese will always tell you to move ahead; they have faith that eventually you’ll find your way. This ideology sits deep within the culture and I’m proud to come from that. No other time have I needed the soul of a navigator more than I do now as I build a life I didn’t plan for. The story is evolving, even as I type this. Being an immigrant and establishing new friendships and romances, a new home and remote work hasn’t been easy, but it’s been a pleasure to arrive at self-discovery in a place I wasn’t born, but know I do belong. My roots are here, and now so am I, firmly planting my feet. Even when I feel lost, and I feel lost a lot, I know the way through is quite simply sempre em frente. 

WORDS: SANDY BRAZ
PHOTOS: KRISTINA MALINSKAYA

 

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