Portugal Made Me Do It

Notes from a recovering efficiency addict

We bought a dryer two weeks after we moved to Portugal. I am American. We dry our clothes. This was non-negotiable. The dryer lived in a hallway that led into our bedroom, while the washer lived in the kitchen, because we didn’t have a laundry room. Does anyone in Portugal?

I understand that hanging laundry outside to dry is normal throughout Europe. But when we first moved here and I saw laundry everywhere—on balconies, across courtyards, on racks in doorways—my first thought was, I could never get used to that.

But now, we only use our dryer when winter storms roll in for weeks at a time and hanging laundry outside means watching your pants get wetter. The other eight months of the year, I hang everything on a rack in the sun and wind, wait all day for it to dry, and feel inexplicably pleased with myself.

I’ll admit to putting my towels and jeans into the dryer for 10 minutes after they’ve been on the rack all day—just to knock the crunch out—but I no longer use fabric softener. I can’t even find dryer sheets here. I’ve looked, they don’t exist. And I’ve stopped caring.

My clothes smell like “outside”. I don’t know how else to describe it. And it turns out I prefer that to whatever “fresh linen” dryer sheets were trying to approximate.

This was not in my assimilation plan, not that I technically had one. But it was the first of several things Portugal made me do that my American operating system had initially, explicitly, ruled out.

Portugal: 1. Two hundred years of American exceptionalism: 0.

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The second was the groceries.

Back in Florida, we did one grocery run a week. One store, one list, done. Here, there is no such thing. Six grocery stores within a block of each other, and not one of them has everything. This one has the largest wine selection. That one has the cereal we like (there are six options for cereal in that store, not an aisle—six). One makes you weigh your own vegetables before checkout; the other does it for you. More cheese options at this one. The spices are better at that one.

After a year of going to four grocery stores just to get through a week, adding stops at the talho for meat, the padaria for bread, and the mercado for produce didn’t feel like a stretch. It felt like the obvious next step.

And at our new place, a man parks his fruit and vegetable truck steps from our front door every Friday. Everything on it is seasonal, which means he doesn’t always have what I need. I’ve made peace with recipe substitutions. But I get excited about it every week, like a kid who gets to see the fire truck at the station.

photos taken by the author

All of these stops equal the most inconvenient version of grocery shopping. But our food is now better and fresher, with generations of care behind every cut of meat, every loaf of sourdough.

The former professional organizer in me, the one who color-coded her pantry and did a Costco run every other Sunday to ensure we had weeks worth of toilet paper at a moment’s notice, is watching all of this and shaking her head. The person I am now simply does not care.

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The third thing was harder to notice, because it involved talking to strangers. I am an introvert. I don’t talk to strangers. This was a firm personal policy.

Except now tourists sit down next to us at restaurants, hear us speaking English, and ask how long we’ve been here, and do we like it, and what made us leave to U.S. We have the answers down to a science. My husband can walk someone through the whole arc—the Florida house and the hurricanes, the empty nest, his Portuguese grandfather, the healthcare, the American political climate—in about four minutes flat. I handle the politics-detection portion: I mention the current administration, watch their face, and decide from there how much more time I want to give them.

Once, an American couple materialized at our table mid-lunch. Food had just arrived. They introduced themselves like we knew them, then started asking their questions, with no apology for the interruption. The husband kept mentioning a town north of us—Peniche—and pronouncing it PEN-ish. “It’s puh-NEESH-ah,” I corrected him. He said it wrong again. I corrected him again. He said it a third time, and I let it go.

I have opinions about the kind of person who can’t be bothered to pronounce the name of a place correctly, even after being told twice. He is not going to enjoy it here. Portugal will not bend to accommodate him and he will be genuinely baffled by this. I did not say any of this. The Petty Betty in me hoped he’d learn it the hard way. I ate my bifana.

A different afternoon, a Portuguese mother and daughter were at the table next to my husband and me. They’d been deep in conversation, then turned to ask in careful English if they could give our dog a french fry. I said, “Claro” [Of course]—without thinking. The mother’s eyebrows went up. “Fala Português? [Do you speak Portuguese?]

“Sim, mas só um pouco. No entanto, gosto de praticar.
[Yes, but only a little. I do like to practice, though.]

She insisted we continue in Portuguese so my husband and I could practice. She corrected my pronunciation often and her daughter laughed with me, not at me. I was reminded how easy conversation with strangers can be when it’s not transactional. I walked home feeling like I’d passed a very important test.

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The last thing is simple and I’m slightly embarrassed it took me two years here to fully claim it.

When you live in Florida, people assume you’re always at the beach. But if we went to the beach twice a year, it was a lot. Something as simple as a weekday glass of wine at sunset on the beach would have required 50 minutes of highway driving home from work, then 20 minutes more to the beach, finding and paying for parking, and ordering at a bar that would rush me to finish so they could turn the table, as they pre-selected a 25% tip on my tab.

All of that would drag me past the point of exhaustion, just to do something that technically counted as fun. Looking back, it seems crazy that enjoying the beach was often last on our to-do list. Or that “enjoy the beach” was on a to-do list at all.

Here, the weekday sunset glass of wine at the beach goes like this: drive five minutes into town, park for free, walk two minutes to any one of about ten oceanfront bars or restaurants, sit down, order a cold glass of vinho branco (2-4€), watch the sun drop into the Atlantic, stay as long as I want.

I do this on Thursdays now. Just because.

photos taken by the author

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I moved here terrified my Type-A, Capricorn, former professional organizer self wouldn’t adapt. That the inconveniences and inefficiency would break me. That I’d spend days grinding my teeth at banks that close for two hours at lunchtime and grocery stores that don’t carry my brand of anything.

Instead, somewhere between crunchy towels, a produce truck, telling our story to strangers, and Thursday 2€ wine, Portugal just... got in. Under my skin. Into my nervous system. Its current is taking me somewhere I like, and I’ve finally stopped fighting it.

Portugal: 4. Two hundred years of American exceptionalism: 0

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