So my wife and I have become major consumers on the internet of all things Portugal since deciding to quit our jobs and retire there. These indulgences of YouTube, Instagram, and other social media has become our therapy in dealing with the stresses and anxiety of liquidating and deconstructing our 16 year life in Mesa, Arizona. It amazes me how much the internet has on just the two Portuguese cities of Porto and Lisbon. Now, 8 months into our journey, I would have figured we'd have run out of videos to watch and photos to see by now, but that is definitely not the case. It helps to reassure our decision to move when seeing the advocacy and passion these content creators have for their respective cities. Whenever one of us starts feeling overwhelmed or insecure about what we're doing, we go to YouTube and pick off another one of the fresh Portugal videos it constantly recommends to us. At one point, I became suspicious our internet search history was being used to place us in an self-reinforcing internet pro-Portugal bubble, so I started seeking out content on our current hometown in Mesa, Arizona to gain perspective for comparison. Needless to say, the pro-Mesa content was pretty sparse, and my attempt to moderate my enthusiasm for Portugal by rationally reevaluating the pros of Mesa as a city backfired completely.
I know it's a bit superficial to judge cities by their Instagram and YouTube content, but there is still something oddly compelling about the higher than average "inspiration per capita" of these Portuguese cities and villages. Maybe it's because Mesa is only 108 years old whereas Porto is estimated at something around 2120 years old. Maybe in the year 4032, when Mesa is as old as Porto is now, it will have replicated this mysterious energy that the European cities have developed slowly over the course of centuries. Strange will be the day when Mesa joins Porto in whatever the future equivalent is of being a designated UNESCO World Heritage city today.
Porto isn't even the oldest city in Portugal. Lisbon precedes it by almost a thousand more years. Unfortunately for Lisbon, most of it was destroyed in a big earthquake in 1755 and the city basically had to be rebuilt from scratch. Even in its rebuilt form its older than the United States, but whereas Porto seems to retain a great deal of its architecture from the middle ages, Lisbon does not. We are planning on trying a lifestyle on for size in both Lisbon and Porto, but we've decided its Porto first in no small part because of its medeival vibe. I'm not sure what about myself is responsible for this attraction to the old, but its taken root in a lot of my other interests as well this past decade and I will probably attempt to explore it in a future blog post.
Now, one might say, Jesse: you're allowing yourself to be blinded by all this emotional and romantic propaganda of another lifestyle that may not live up to expectation. I've thought about this, and if you asked us this face to face, we'd agree with you, smile, and say "Oh well! We'll find out soon enough!" The truth is, its pretty easy to whimsically move around if you don't have kids, furniture and your life fits in a couple suitcases. (Which for us, after 8 months of selling all our things, basically does now). If it turns out that the internet is lying and that Porto is actually a hub of gang warfare, we'll just move somewhere else. The Earth is a pretty big place.
This is not to say we're being completely irrational here in picking of Portugal. There are ample reasons I can communicate to those who only motivate their lives and understand others via facts and numbers. I can probably list more of those and lay out a complete line of reason using stats like healthcare costs and quality, crime rates, weather, cost of living, immigration policies, benefits of (eventual) dual citizenship but it would be all be boring as hell.
I thought I'd collect some of our favorite Instagram feeds and link them to the bottom of this post. These profiles are posted half of the time in Portuguese and half in English, but luckily photos speak for themselves. Perhaps my favorite photo I've found of Porto is what I've used as the background to the home page of this blog. There are a lot of non-Americans using social media and their instagram feeds are oft-unexplored windows into other places and cultures that can still be super interesting even without being able to read the captions or comments. This current generation of young people (Millenials?) are getting pretty good with their cameras, drones, and video editing software and are making more creative and interesting things with them than the TV show format of their predecessors.
Portuguese Instagram profiles and galleries:
