A friend asked me if living in Portugal feels like a vacation.

Well I do a lot of lunchtime drinking. 

Portugal definitely has a vacation vibe with its sun and beaches and delicious food and wine. So much good wine at such low prices! The olive oil is also very affordable here too but I digress. About living a vacation.

We did not come here for a vacation. We came here to shift our energy. We find ourselves doing that not just with day-time drinking, although that helps, but oddly enough with bureaucracy. A vacation would/should not involve so many bureaucratic errands.

My intention in sharing this is to help others see how powerful it can be to change something in your life in order to change your energy when you are facing a challenge. Not everyone wants to move across a sea but everyone can find healing in any intentional shift, big or small.

To this end, I have dragged three children and a sometimes-cranky husband to the immigration office, the chamber of commerce, Vodafone and the bank many, many times. Setting up a life in a new country is harder than I expected and I studied for this for months. I am still three errands away from a drivers license and I’ve been working on it for weeks.

Yet somehow this never-ending bureaucratic spiral allows me to celebrate my life in a way I had not been before. Every piece of the puzzle is a piece I already had in America but did not much celebrate. I already had a drivers license, a bank account, a cell phone plan, and a gym membership. But as I stitch a new life together with foreign versions of all of the things I already had, I create a new version of myself that I appreciate in a new way. So we celebrate. With wine!

Most immigrants have a company, relative, or school to sponsor their visas. We have none of those things so every time we check off a box, we have done it completely on our own and it gives us the confidence that we are on the right path.

The day we were approved for visas, we drove two hours to a hard-to-find place with no parking. I walked in with color-coded files and copies of all documents in triplicate. I had apostilled every document I ever had in my life: marriage licenses, birth certificates, background checks, drivers records. You name it, I had it certified by the state! The woman who processed our visas was friendly but unsmiling. I was so nervous and I sat there wringing my hands, worried she require something not on my checklist. It seemed to take forever as she scanned our documents and poked at her computer.

Then suddenly you hear a stamp slammed against a piece of paper and you smile for a camera and in an instant, you are no longer a tourist! You are an immigrant with conditional approval to live in a place that you care about.

It’s a feeling I cannot describe unless you have wanted it this badly and done it yourself. Maybe the photo on my visa can describe this nervous/elated feeling better than I can. Go ahead, make fun!

So I would say that life here feels a bit more celebratory but not like vacation. It is more like the day you received your first drivers license. Remember how excited you were? That is the sense of accomplishment that this move has provided for us and that bit of healing was unexpected. It’s so lovely!

Correction: it’s lovely for me. It is not lovely for the people helping me on the other side of the desk. There is a woman at the bank who is very friendly but I suspect that she cringes a little when I walk in with my three children and my insistence on speaking choppy Portuguese.

I wonder if my Portuguese would be better with alcohol? Maybe I should move that first drink of the day up a few hours to the morning on days when I have appointments. On second thought, that won’t help with the vision exam I still need for my drivers license. I’ll keep it to mid-day for now. Stay tuned to see if this becomes a problem.