The Opposite of Nomad

Ode to another day of the usual things

What if you move across the world to a new country and then just… live there. The idea is a dream. (Or at least it’s the dream for a certain subset of people for whom moving countries is optional and accessible and adventure-adjacent instead of desperately needful and laden with trauma.)

In this dream, however, the expectation of what it means to “just live there” varies wildly from person to person. It’s common, I think, to imagine your life in a new country as an endless vacation full of exhilarating adventure and scenic vistas and life-changing meals and photogenic outfits.

Reality is what you make of it. And while there is a version of life in Portugal that looks a lot like vacation with household chores and bureaucratic headaches thrown in now and then, I’d imagine that for quite a few of us, life here just looks like regular old life.

As our tenure in Portugal approaches the three year mark, we might not be fully blended into the background like a local, but we definitely don’t stick out as much as we once did. We know what we’re doing, for the most part. We know where to go, and how to go. We know (most of) the words we need to use to accomplish the things we need to do. We know the neighbors well enough to wave a cheery bom dia! across the street or the wall or the field full of sheep.

We are not here to check it out. We are not getting settled. We just live here now.

Monday through Friday we get up early, make breakfast, feed the dogs, take Filha up the hill to school, go for a hike, write some paragraphs, hang out the laundry, check the tomatoes, pick up some groceries, fetch Filha from school, toss back a sandwich, take Filha to tutoring, take a number at the post office, write a couple more paragraphs, pick Filha up, figure out dinner, water the jacaranda, feed the dogs, bring in the laundry, read a chapter, tuck in the kid, turn in to bed. Weekends we mow the grass, grill with friends, wash the sheets, take the dogs to the beach, pull a few weeds, watch the sun set.

Our life is smaller than it used to be in some ways. Which isn’t surprising—San Francisco is a city of 800,000 people, which is 300,000 more than Portugal’s largest city of Lisbon. Setúbal has about 120,000 residents, but we were only there for 9 months. Now we’re 5 miles away in Palmela (population 68,852), and not even within Palmela’s small town limits—we’re out in the sticks. So we went from a city neighborhood where the 18 bus was always growling down the street outside or some rascal was lighting up firecrackers or losing their shit really loudly at 2am to a quaint little quinta tucked away behind high stone walls where the morning birdsong is punctuated by two donkeys braying back and forth from one pasture to another.

We socialize less than we used to. That’s not just because of the international move—there are plenty of opportunities to clink cocktails here, it’s just that we don’t really want to anymore. Maybe that’s middle age, maybe it’s remnant of habits established during pandemic lockdowns. Somewhere along my way through the last four years, I activated Hermit Mode and have yet to switch it off.

We travel less, too. Less than we used to in our California decades, and less than a lot of the other Westerners who’ve made the move to this side of the sea. Back in our previous version of life, we would pop over to Illinois to see the family or up to Portland to see more family. We’d drive down to Santa Cruz for the day, swing by the aquarium in Monterey real quick. We’d save up vacation days and blow them all in an international locale that we’d research meticulously for months ahead of time. Then there were the work-financed trips. In one 12-month span of time I traveled to Argentina, Bolivia, India, Costa Rica, and Japan. There were multiple jaunts to Australia to speak at conferences or wrangle photo shoots. There was that luxe “women leaders in tech” retreat in Cabo San Lucas complete with a massage, tarot reading, and boat ride through the bluest waters I’ve ever seen—and none of it cost me a thing.

Pre-Portugal move, both Marido and I assumed we’d be be-bopping all over Europe by now. Take a little jaunt to Spain for the weekend. Pop on over to Germany for a wee bit of schnitzel. And we have bopped, but only a little bit. So much of the time I just want to be home. I worked so hard to get here. And being a foreigner in a foreign land is exhausting. Not as exhausting as it was in Year One, but still. Just because you know where to go doesn’t mean you’re delighted to go there. Just because you know the words to say doesn’t mean your accent is acceptable. It’s gorgeous out there, yeah, but so is Oliveira do Paraíso, and no one raises their eyebrows at my pronunciation here.

Also: Hermit Mode.

Also: Time of Life. We are parents of a middle-schooler and captive to the Portuguese public school schedule. There’s also the need for both grown-ups to bring home some viable bacon, since we’re not independently wealthy. And then there are the two not-easily-portable dogs and the one needs-lots-of-attention parrot and the 3,000 square meters of plants to be watered. Not every square meter is plant-covered, but you get the gist—we can’t just up and leave on the whim of a moment.

The retirees we know (and those we see on Facebook) seem to have a more glamorous time of it. A little jaunt to Rouen here, a quick tour of Cape Town there. When your kids are grown and flown and you’ve turned in your last employee keycard and your apartment has no canines or jacarandas that require constant watering, you can hop an EasyJet and go have a gander at Luxembourg or Liechtenstein or Lithuania any old time you please.

The truth is that even if I could be a bona-fide nomad, a travel writer or someone who sets off on a new jaunt to a new place every month or three, I wouldn’t want to. I like having a home that needs me, a routine that pleases me. I am built to put down roots.

Someday maybe when Filha is out there living her own life, I’ll embrace a more jet-set version of my own. Marido and I have talked about a future in which we spend 6 months here and 6 months… somewhere else. We’ve talked about a time of life when we travel more.

For now, though, I’m content. I look at friend’s travel photos on social media (pic or it didn’t happen!) and don’t feel the jealousy I did when I was Stateside. I’m just like, “Oh nice, Bob was in Barcelona and it looks like Jane went to Jamaica this spring.” And I look around at my quaint little hermitage and think, “I’m all good here.”

Then I get up early and go outside to hear the birds sing their very best welcomes to the sunrise. I pull a few golden loquats from the tree near the front door. I breathe deep because the air is drenched in jasmine. I pour the dogs their kibble, fill my glass with ice and tea, and get ready for another day of the usual things. Waving Filha off to school. Hiking my way up the uneven calçadas to Castelo Palmela and back. Stopping by the padaria for a few fresh rolls, still warm. Sitting here in my second-floor writing room with Lisbon to my left and a field of geese (and one ostrich) to my right, finding the words to fill the page. Again. And again. And again.

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A Gallery of The Usual Things:

Every day after I drop Filha at school, I go for a walk by myself. One morning this week I started writing this post in my head as I walked, and took these photos to accompany it. I wanted scenes of normal life, not tourist life or expat life or endless vacation. Just the small, daily stuff that is beautiful in its own simple way. These photos were all taken in Palmela, Portugal on Tuesday, April 9, between 8:08 and 8:41am. (If you’re reading this in your email, you may want to click through to the substack site to see all the photos, as sometimes a long scroll gets cut off in email.)

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