Really... Where Do I Start?

The beginnings of how we got to where we are now.

The view of Porto from Dom Luís I Bridge, December 2022

Thursday, 22 December, 2022¹: Really... Where do I start? As I begin writing this first post I am sitting in the living room of our Airbnb in the Bonfim neighborhood of Porto, Portugal. In the background is the ongoing sound of cars driving on wet pavement outside. A sound to be expected in the month of December here in Porto. A month in which Porto typically receives 181mm of rain (about 7.25 inches) and only has 124 hours of sunshine for the entire month. While everyone complains about the damp gloomy and wet winters of Northern Portugal in the winter on my various Facebook expat related groups, I for one am feeling a sense of home. Home in the sense that I spent the 1990s living in Seattle, and this weather feels like old times. So again... Where do I start?

---

Thursday, 4 January, 2024 – First, allow me to explain why I am here. I wrote the paragraph above along with several others which have been folded into what follows just over twelve months ago. A lot has happened, but in a nutshell, my husband Yoav and I are in the process of preparing and planning a move to Porto and I am here to write about our experience and share a few life musings along the way. Perhaps by the time you read this, we will already be there.

I have been writing and posting photos of the urban environment where I have lived for nearly 20 years. I first began with photoblogging in Chicago² (remember Blogspot?) and then continued in New York City. Then when photoblogs basically died, I began writing about our 1910 classic apartment³ in New York City, followed by writing about our 1852 Greek Revival fixer-upper rowhouse⁴ in Philadelphia.

With An American in Porto, my plan is to write about our experience of preparing, planning, moving to, and then establishing our new life in Porto. I am doing this in some ways to share the experience with you, my readers, in the hope that it may help you with questions you may have. But I am also doing this for selfish reasons to allow me to document my personal journey toward what we are planning to be a permanent life in a new country.

Initially, I expect posts to be sporadic as there may be quiet periods during our wait, but once we make the move, I hope to write about our new life and the challenges we experience in pursuing it.

I also want to be very clear that while I am not a fan of our 45th President. This is not a political blog⁵, but I firmly believe the US is in trouble and he is hugely responsible for normalizing crazy.

With all that said... I do hope you will subscribe and stick around.

---

Now that I have explained the the purpose of An American in Porto, let's get into some backstory about us....

Yoav (r) and myself (l) having a gay old time.

Yoav and I met eleven years ago this week in January of 2013 via Match(dot)com. We met for coffee, but it turned into a seven hour long first date, and I knew on my way home that I had met the man I would one day marry. By April, I was secretly shopping rings, and in July, I popped the question at a cafe on Commercial Street in Provincetown, MA during Bear Week. In May of 2014, barely sixteen months after meeting, we got married (which was completely legal in New York State⁶ at the time).

Shortly after the wedding, we moved into our 790 square foot one bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in. This was to be our forever home, it was a beautiful apartment, albeit a fixer upper, with gracious rooms in a stunning beaux arts building from 1910. A truly classic New York building in every sense of the word. With a doorman, a marble lined lobby, large expansive hallways, high ceilings, and even a cedar lined coat closet. Life was pretty good overall.... At least for a while.

Our very New York apartment building on the Upper West Side.

So here we are… A married, middle-aged gay couple, moderately liberal, and both working relatively stressful jobs in the world of IT. Yoav as a Senior Software Engineer, working remotely at home for a California based tech company. I was a Systems Analyst, commuting daily to the corporate office of a popular airline in Long Island City, Queens. Yoav's work was its usual stress inducing slog, and my job after many years of going well, began to slowly evolve in a direction I was less and less comfortable with as it became more and more corporate.

Fast forward to election night, November of 2016. I had been harboring a gut feeling that things may not turn out as I had hoped. Enough so, that I had already pre-arranged to take the following day off. My intuition turned out to be spot on. As the night wore on, election results began to pour in, and I began to drink wine 🍷. More results, more wine 🍷, then more results, more wine 🍷, and then more wine 🍷. By 11:00pm, I was numbed out enough that I just went to bed with a sense of dread. Sure enough, I woke up to a certain orange haired pathological narcissistic liar having been elected as leader of the free world.

This was the impetus of where our journey to Portugal begins. We suddenly felt very unsettled about where the our future was headed under this new administration. I foresaw that there would be economic collapse within a couple of years (I was wrong). Nonetheless, be began to discuss a plan "B", just in case life became uncomfortable enough for us to want to leave.

We weren't the only ones to feel this way. A friend our ours and his husband were exploring the idea of Uruguay. I began to look into what life would be like in Uruguay and after a few weeks decided that it was not a good fit for us at all. It is too hot for us, and while Uruguay is relatively stable as a country, the surrounding countries are anything but. The orange haired beast took office and of course, things immediately began to change. But as crazy as it was, we felt it was manageable. Logic and truth would ultimately win, right?

We decided to just pretend things would be fine, putting aside the idea of moving abroad. Instead, we shifted our focus on how we could change our insanely crazy (but still wonderful) lives in Manhattan and make changes in our lives which would give us a better work-life balance and a bigger sense of comfort. To that end... In the spring of 2017, we purchased a house in a different city...

To be continued...

1. Seriously, this first post was mostly written out in December of 2022, but not everyone knew about our big move yet, and it would be a while before we were formally ready to go public.

2. I haven’t looked in years, but just discovered my old Blogspot photo blog (Looper) from Chicago is still alive, sixteen plus years later. There were other photo blogs, but they have not survived with the exception of my Tumblr: iPhoneographyNYC

3. My blog about our New York apartment: HalfClassicSix

4. And the house blog about our 1852 rowhouse in Philly: OurPhillyRow

5. Really…. I do not intend this to be a blog about politics. Clearly some of my views will be clearly obvious, but that is definitely not the point of An American In Porto.

6. The following year, in June of 2015, our marriage was cemented into law by the Supreme Court. Legal marriage was something I would have never imagined could happen only a few short years earlier. For the very first time in my life, I felt like a first class citizen. An equal to those around me. It was a joyous time, and a huge achievement for those of us who have been minimized because of who we happen to fall in love with.