Welcome

            This is a blog about life in Portugal. I decided to create it for two main reasons. The first one is quite obvious: I’m writing it merely for the sake of writing in English. The second one is rather more complex: I can say that the last definitive impulse to start with this blog came from this unusual spotlight under which my little country, otherwise nearly forgotten, has lately been. It is truly ironic that this small stretch of land that once pioneered the globalization is now, and only now, suffering the full consequences of it...

          To speak of Portugal nowadays is to speak of debt, crisis, disillusionment and European distress. Alongside with Greece, we are everywhere a byword for economic failure. Truly, things are different, in reality. Life is always more complex than a simple label might convey. I hope to show some of that complexity; I want to show how it is to live in Portugal, from an insider’s perspective. That is the starting point... Then (let me apply a common Portuguese truism here) we’ll see.