Explore a Dozen Countries… in One Weekend

I’m Just a Few Short Months From Moving to My New Home.

I’m so close to the finish line, I can smell the bacalhau. 

Which, if you’re familiar with Portuguese cuisine, you’ll know is salt-dried cod…  

And that can only mean that my wife, Yulia, and I are thiiiis close to getting our residence visas for Portugal. 

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll be aware that about a year ago, we decided to look for a new home in Europe. While we both love living in Prague, Yulia grew up by the sea and missed being near the water, so we decided to relocate to somewhere with ocean views. 

This has been a process. Not because it’s especially difficult to move, mind you, but because choosing where you want to set down new roots is not a coin-flip kind of deal. 

It is a meaningful decision that Yulia and I discussed over sangria in Malaga, Spain. And over grilled octopus on the Greek island of Crete. And over fresh-caught seafood and locally made wine at this table in Rovinj, Croatia, as the Adriatic literally spit on me every few minutes when the wrong ripple hit the wrong rock at the wrong angle. 

My point with that last paragraph is that Yulia and I spent the better part of a year test-driving countries we thought we might like to call home—from Greece and Montenegro, to Croatia, Spain, Portugal, and even Istanbul, Turkey.

And I’ll tell you frankly, that’s the key to finding a new place to live: You need to consider all your options…

I speak at International Living conferences every year. (In fact, I’ll be at the IL Ultimate Go Overseas Bootcamp conference in Denver this September talking about my initial move to central Europe and my pending relocation to Portugal. Details on how to attend here.)

All the time, I hear attendees talk in definitive terms about wanting to move to Italy, or France, or Costa Rica, or some other destination. And that’s fine. If you’re fully certain where you want to go, then go for it.

But I get the impression that for a lot of people, they’ve based those decisions on falling in love with a country while on vacation. Again, nothing wrong with that. I absolutely love southern Thailand and Nicaragua’s Emerald Coast, and at the moment I was in both countries I could absolutely see myself living there.

Nevertheless, I know in my heart now that those would have been ill-informed moves.

That’s the real message here: You have to feel like where you’re moving offers you that sense of “home.” If it doesn’t, you’re quite likely to find yourself disenchanted, and write off the move as a failed experiment. Which is why Yulia and I spent so much time tooling around Europe gathering information.

And, yes, I realize that’s a luxury we have since we live in Prague and can move around the continent quite easily and affordably. But that’s the power of IL Bootcamp conferences. They’re a chance to hear firsthand about all your options in one place… over one weekend… from expats just like you who live in those places right now.

Before you move overseas, you have to consider more than one country.

If you think you love Italy, you must take a look at Croatia, just across the Adriatic. If you adore Panama, at least consider Costa Rica, or even Punta del Este, Uruguay, both of which offer many of the same benefits. If you think Spain is the bee’s knees, you might find some of the Greek islands even more to your liking.

When you look at the full range of possibilities, you might be surprised by where you end up.

Frankly, I’m surprised Yulia and I are now just six or eight weeks removed from a new life in a Portuguese beach town near Lisbon.

Yulia, as I noted in a previous column, was not immediately wowed by Lisbon. For her, it’s too crowded and busy. But then she started comparing Portugal in general, and Lisbon in particular, to the various other countries we explored.

She considered how quickly you can get Portuguese citizenship and a Portuguese/European Union visa, and the favorable tax situation for newcomers to the country. She thought about cost of living in terms of the discretionary lifestyle we could afford after paying fixed expenses for an apartment, utilities, and such.

She and I hunted through cities in and around Lisbon and down in the Algarve, since we both wanted to be on the water.

And we spent a lot of time talking about the pros and cons of Portugal relative to other countries we really liked.

Portugal won in a landslide.

Had we not had the experience of understanding Portugal relative to Spain, Croatia, Montenegro, and the others, we might have ended up in Malaga or on a Greek Island. But having a base of knowledge meant we could compare apples to apples.

Without that, we would have looked at one apple and assumed it was the best apple… when it very well might not have been. So, consider all your options. It might change the course of your life, as it did for me and Yulia.