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Abstract

, wasn’t her usual smiling self when she answered their door. Sensing it wasn’t a good time we said we’d return later on, but she insisted on inviting us inside where she proceeded to eat all the sweets. After a brief, awkward conversation she told us she needed to feed the baby, which was fine by us, and we left on good terms. We said we’d catch up with them at a more convenient time, which was a few weeks later when we posted an invitation on their door and waited. And waited. They never answered, and after that we saw them only briefly at the elevator door, anxious to avoid us and going so far as ducking back into their apartment when they saw us emerging from our front door the same time they were coming out of theirs.The only other neighbours on the same floor were an older Portuguese couple who also spoke good enough English for us to engage in conversation. However, after an initial chat, if we met at the elevator after that they showed little interest in us. My husband had also struck up a conversation with another man living in our apartment block in the first few weeks we lived there, mainly to ask him about the rules and way things worked with the condominium. As soon as he had finished answering, the man told my husband he must learn to speak Portuguese. My husband agreed, saying he didn’t know much yet, but would try to improve. The man repeated it was essential, and a week later my husband bumped into him again and began with ‘Ola’ but then continued in English. The man tut-tutted and said my husband must speak Portuguese to him. If he didn’t, there was no point in talking at all.You’d think joining others for a group activity three times a week would yield the odd friend or two, so we were hopeful when we started swimming at our local municipal swimming pool, just a two-minute walk from our apartment. My husband told me there were always a dozen Portuguese men in the changing rooms, usually showering, dressing and chatting to each other when he entered. On a few occasions he heard some very quiet ‘Olas’ to which he always replied, and occasionally, when they were leaving, the odd one might say ‘Bom dia’ (good day). But that was all. He said he felt invisible, and this situation didn’t change in twelve months. I had the same experience in the women’s change room. I went at the same time each visit and saw the same women attending an aqua aerobics class. Like the men, they were very sociable with one another, could spare me a smile or a simple hello, but never went beyond that. The only time I was spoken to, in English, was when a woman mistook my pink bikini bottoms for underpants and told me censoriously I wasn’t allowed to wear them in the pool. I politely cleared up the misunderstanding for her, but she didn’t acknowledge her mistake. She just wanted to keep me in my place.This behaviour extended to one of the female swimming instructors, who supervised lessons and allocated swimming lanes to others training there. One day early on, my husband saw her sweeping in the courtyard below our window and remarked on how great it was that we might enjoy a conversation with her at the pool. She could speak English because she used it to tell my husband which lane he could use for his laps. We wasted no time informing her we were neighbours the next time we saw her, but no joy or positivity came to her face, nor did she ask anything about us. Many times after that we passed her at the swimming pool exit where she was smoking, and made a point of turning to her and saying goodbye. However she only ever responded with a stony face.We were at pains to understand why it was so hard to connect with people and why, after mutual enjoyment, they eventually ghosted us. Concerned we might have inadvertently done something to offend, we asked other foreigners about their experiences and friendships with the Portuguese. A French woman friend said she once had Danish and German friends in Lisbon, but they’d left the country saying they hated Portugal, citing the near impossibility of making stable friends as a major reason. Time and time again people told us of making a start on a new friendship, having a good time with Portuguese they’d met, and then nothing. Another foreigner who spoke fluent Portuguese and was married to a Portuguese citizen, told us she’d once worked in a company where her Portuguese colleagues went out together for drinks every Friday night, but they had never once invited her to join them. She worked with them for eight years.Postal ServicesThe Portuguese postal service is a very hit and miss affair and there are no guarantees mail will reach you. This inefficiency increases the anxiety of waiting on important international mail like documents or registered letters. Given that Portuguese bureaucracy is still heavily paper based, requiring notice in writing, formal letters and so on, this can be a serious problem at the local level as well.If the mailbox is inside an apartment block, the postman will need to gain access. He has to rely on somebody in the building being home to let him in the door. If nobody does, he might slip or kick all the mail, including registered, under the door and hope it finds its way to the correct recipients. Even when the building has a janitor, there’s no guarantee you’ll receive your post either. The first time I was waiting for my residence permit card to come from the Portuguese immigration department (SEF) by registered mail, I wasn’t home when it was delivered. I found out later the postman had tried to give it to the janitor, but the janitor said he didn’t know us, even though he’d met us in person and we were the only foreigners living in the building. According to the person I spoke to at SEF, when they finally answered the phone, the postman should have left a notice in our mail box and taken the letter back to my local post office where it was meant to stay for a number of days to allow me to pick it up. I immediately went down there but post office staff told me that instead of holding it for me, as they were obliged to do, they’d sent it back to SEF. When I rang SEF again they told me they weren’t going to re-send my card, and that I had to pick it up from the office where I’d made my original resident permit application, one and a half hours away by train. None of this was my fault, and yet nobody did anything to assume some responsibility for what was their inefficiency.Foreign residents I spoke to told of farcical situations where the postman was supposedly ‘unable’ to put their mail through the slot in their front door, but had no trouble delivering mail to their next door neighbours’ house with an identical door. To say these things should not happen and cause people so much stress just falls on deaf ears. You can see the disinterest in the faces of the post office staff, whose numbers are low, providing slow and poor services to very long queues of customers.CustomsThe range of products available in Portugal is very limited, so many new foreign residents have to order goods online, especially those that are vital. Anything coming from outside the EU is taxed according to its declared value, while anything from inside the EU isn’t, at least in theory. The reality is that items ordered from the EU are randomly held by customs and only released after paying a tax. However, working out what that is can sometimes be near impossible. When customs hold a package, the recipients receive an email telling them to provide proof of the value of the contents, even for gifts. There’s a number to call, but it’s rarely answered, and ringing alternative numbers has the same result. Emails sent in reply aren’t answered either. Getting through to someone can take days, and unless you have near perfect Portuguese, or they speak English, the nightmare of trying to get the package begins.A South African family posted on FB how they’d shipped 15 boxes of household goods to Lisbon, where customs imposed a €60 tax on each box. Despite making inquiries before they came to Portugal about the best way to bring over household effects, they weren’t aware they needed to apply for a Certificate de Baggagem to be exempt from any tax. This document states the goods are for household purposes only, and can be obtained from a Portuguese Consulate in the sender’s country. According to what the family wrote in their FB posts, the consulate did not tell them they needed this certificate, nor did the shipper or the receiver in Lisbon. By the time they’d finished conducting their enquiries and managed to get through to anyone at customs to explain the situation, the tax had been regarded as unpaid and the 15 boxes had been sent back to South Africa to an address in a country where they no longer lived.Health careIn comparison with countries like the US, the health care system in Portugal appears to be easy to access, of good quality and highly affordable. But this needs to be put in perspective. Granted, once you’ve got your resident permit you can register with your local family clinic, and see a doctor for a small sum. However, getting registered is not always straight forward. Leaving aside the issue of whether the receptionist will tolerate your poor Portuguese, or failing that, can’t speak English, many will insist you have a social security number in order to register. This is not true, but if they keep insisting you need a social security number and you don’t have one, you can’t register.We registered at our nearest family clinic and when my husband needed a consultation he was put on the list of one of the doctors working there. However, when I went to get an appointment with a doctor I was told all the books were full, and no one was seeing any new patients. At the time the doctors were relaxing on chairs in the waiting room, chatting with the office staff. We were told doctors are only required to see each of their 100 patients once a month and don’t have to take any more appointments. If true, this means a doctor can see them all in two weeks and then do nothing for the next fortnight. I was told if it was really urgent I could ring first thing in the morning and they’d see if they could fit me in later in the day. In saying that, they ignored the fact phone communication between the receptionists and us was nearly impossible which meant I’d have wal

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k there in the morning in the hope of making an appointment for the afternoon, when I would have to walk back there again. If I did get sick and needed a doctor, I couldn’t see this happening.The fee to see a doctor at the family clinic was around €5. It doesn’t sound much but for the Portuguese on a minimum wage of €600 a month, it is. As are all the other charges you need to pay, such as when my husband wanted to have a blood test. The labs charged €35 for the test, but first you had to pay to see a doctor to get a referral. That’s if you could get an appointment. When your results were through, you needed to go see a doctor again, for another fee, if they had a free slot. He also needed to see a specialist about his ears, and for that he needed an appointment at a hospital a few suburbs away. He could either take a standard appointment for around €50 or another for around €120. The department would be the same and likely the doctor too. The difference was in the wait. The standard appointment came with a 3–4 month waiting period while the higher amount got you in within 3–4 weeks.I never did manage to register at that particular family clinic, and when we moved to another part of Lisbon we went through the whole process again. This time our Portuguese was better, we were already in the system and both managed to get registered after spending an hour waiting to be served and 40 minutes going through the process. However, we were told if we wanted to see a doctor we’d need to come back in two weeks, just to make an appointment, as all the slots were booked up and there was nothing available earlier.I can hear people thinking, well that’s the public system. Surely private is better. The buildings might be newer and the equipment shinier, but there is still a shortage of staff and resources. The UK is flooded with Portuguese nurses and other medical staff working for better wages and conditions than they get in Portugal. The ones left behind frequently go on strike, work to rule or go slow, making the service they provide even slower and harder to access. Consequently, paying a monthly premium doesn’t equate with getting a better level of health care. For example, the son of a friend of ours broke his collarbone in a rugby match and when his mother took him to a highly regarded private hospital for treatment, the staff was unable to tape him up and put his arm in a sling. They just didn’t have any tape left or a spare sling. His mother had to drive him, in a lot of pain, to another hospital.Alcohol and cigarettesAlcohol consumption in Lisbon is very visible and it’s not unusual to see people drinking at bars from as early as 8am. Most Portuguese have a drink several times a day, meaning lunchtime drinkers might hop into their cars and drive under the influence. There are a lot of empty beer bottles and alcohol affected individuals on the streets, but not as many as the thousands of cigarette butts that dot the sidewalks and roads. Smoking is still popular in Portugal, and although it is illegal to smoke inside restaurants, smokers often ignore the signs and penalties, police don’t enforce the rule, and the people affected by the smoke say nothing. While the Portuguese complain about almost everything among themselves, they rarely if ever complain to the authorities. Forget about soaking in the atmosphere and watching the world go by at an outside table on a character-filled street, because alfresco dining is invariably blighted blighted by smokers polluting the air.DogsWe love dogs, so when we hear them barking incessantly or crying, we feel for them. In Lisbon and other parts of Portugal, dogs are often used to guard residences. They’re left on their own for days on end, sometimes without adequate water or food. FB posts by people living in central Lisbon tell of dogs shut outside on balconies, howling day and night. The Portuguese rarely show them any affection or attempt to train them properly and the dogs end up highly stressed, constantly snapping and yapping at everything. In the first neighbourhood where we lived in Lisbon there was a guard-dog that barked all day and all night, making it difficult to get to sleep and disturbing any sleep we managed to get. It was a constant nightmare and a strong reason why we eventually moved away. It just didn’t stop or even look like stopping. The same thing happened in the third place we lived. There, as elsewhere, the Portuguese ignored it and rather than talk to the owner or complain to the authorities (who do eventually come out to check although by all accounts don’t actually do anything meaningful to force the owner to improve/change the dog’s situation), chose to pull down their window shutters and swelter in the hot summer months instead.Tourists rave about the quaint cobbled streets in Lisbon but look closely and you’ll see that along with cigarette butts, there’s tonnes of dog poo. There are laws against leaving your dog’s excrement on the pavement, but many owners don’t pick it up despite the presence of free bags in parks and along popular walking routes. They will avoid having to do this by taking their dogs out for a walk and a secret poo late at night to escape detection from passers-by. Another technique we witnessed was people letting their dogs off the leash. The dog runs off and does its business out of sight of the owner, who can then pretend they have no connection to the steaming pile of fresh dog do messing up the pavement. I once even saw one woman clear up her dog’s mess from her balcony, before flinging it onto the street below.LitterAside from the dog poo, empty cigarette packets, butts, bottles, cans, plastic bags, transport tickets, you name it, are all tossed onto sidewalks and streets. My husband told me he was walking behind a Portuguese woman and saw her wedge a cardboard coffee cup between a downpipe and a wall. I’ve seen people kick rubbish under park benches or into garden beds rather than pick it up and dispose of it properly in nearby bins. Only tourist areas are cleaner, and the responsibility of rubbish collection is down to council workers. From what we observed during our time there, they spend more time standing around smoking and talking to their friends on the phone than actually working.Most supermarkets have toilets open to the public but they’re few and far between, so men urinating in public is a common sight. Consequently the smell of urine in Lisbon, especially in summer, can be very strong at bus stops, in parks, next to recycling bins and down side streets. I mentioned before the toilets on the ferries are so disgusting you don’t want to use them. There are free public toilets along the waterfront walk of the Cascais line, but very few, free or otherwise, in the tourist areas of Rossio, Baixo etc. The one or two in operation have a fee for use and many Portuguese won’t spare the money to spend a penny. One or two fast food places have toilets, accessible by entering a code that’s printed on customer’s receipts, and non-customers try to slip through the security door with bona fide customers.DriversSpend any time away from the tourist areas and you’ll quickly learn car drivers do not like stopping at crossings for pedestrians. Their usual method it to speed through the section of the crossing you haven’t reached and give you a ‘sorry’ wave (assuming they notice you at all) even though they don’t mean it. When they’re a distance from the crossing and see you begin to walk across the road they’ll slow down rather than come to a halt, so they don’t have to stop completely. This means they often come really close to you, and your safety depends on you not slowing down or altering your course. If their timing is bad, they could potentially hit you, causing injury or worse.To sum upOf course everyone has different experiences but as sociologists we’ve been trained not to describe just the one act as somehow representative of the whole culture. The material for this piece comes from our own experiences and also those of people we’ve met in person and chatted with online. They were from different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, professions, marital status, sexual orientation, age groups, skill sets and interests. Obviously their opinions about Portugal are coloured by their needs, rather than any objective criteria. For example, retirees who have sold up in their country of birth and can’t afford to move back are reluctant to criticise their new home as it is a reflection on their judgement. White people often don’t see the ways people of colour are discriminated against and argue that there’s no racism in Portugal. Cis gender people can be unaware of the lived experience of LGBTQ+ people and seek to deny it. Men don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and walk alone down a dark street or be in a metro carriage with a man acting strangely and feel threatened. Some people don’t go to the supermarket regularly so they don’t notice the patterns of bad service while people without children have no first-hand knowledge of the education system and its standards. Repat Portuguese can be highly nationalistic and automatically refute any critiques of Portugal by telling the commenter to go back to their own countries. Some group members reply with solutions to your problems by offering a service or the name of a service provider without revealing they stand to make money if you take up the offer. Finally let’s not forget group administrators who delete negative posts, block and eject people who challenge the idea everything is always rosy for immigrants to PortugalThanks for taking the time to read all the way to the end. If you’re thinking about making the move I hope by sharing our experiences you can develop a realistic perspective from FB posts by expats, immigrants, non-Portuguese retirees and Portuguese repats describing Portugal as a land of endless sunshine, cheap wine, tasty seafood and friendly locals. Then you can decide if the country really does offer what you’re looking for.*This is corroborated in news reports of police violence towards Portuguese people of colour and posts in FB groups by non-Portuguese people of colour recounting instances of overt racism towards them by Portuguese nationals.</article></body>

Moving to Portugal — An immigrant experience of Lisbon — Part II (by Lisa Morrow & Kim Hewett)

Find out about residency permits, renting, telecommunication services and public transport in Part 1.

Racial/social relations

Behaviour on public transport tends to be a very accurate barometer of racial/social relations. In our three and a half years spent on buses, metros, boats and trams, particularly on the Almada side of the Tagus River, it was unmistakably clear how white Portuguese nationals wanted nothing to do with people of colour*, be they from former colonies or more recent South Asian immigrants. Quite often we saw Portuguese nationals sitting on the aisle seats of buses, resolutely looking away when a person of colour stood next to them hoping to sit down. When they did move aside to allow the person to slide past them into the empty seat, they did so begrudgingly. The younger Portuguese, especially, do not give up their seats for the elderly, especially when they are people of colour, and getting a seat sometimes involves a race to be there first. I once saw a coloured girl of about age fifteen running for a bus, which was just closing its doors at the bus stop. She arrived there within seconds of this and tapped on the door politely and waited. The driver turned to regard her and shook his head before driving off.

Supermarkets

Pingo Doce and Continente are two of the biggest supermarkets chains in Lisbon. They sell grocery items, wine, dairy, delicatessen products, seafood, fruit, vegetables, and meat, which can be bought either pre-packaged or cut while you wait. To be served at the instore butcher as well as to buy bread, delicatessen products or seafood, you need to take a numbered ticket.

Many Portuguese shop every day and going to the supermarket is more like an outing than a chore. They chat to each other, to counter hands and butchers, and dither constantly about their choices. They’re very particular about the way they want their meat cut and will often buy enough to last a week or two. Consequently, the wait can be agonisingly long, especially on the day people receive their pensions, so many customers take a number and go off to do other shopping, returning from time to time to ascertain where they are in the queue. Despite the ticketing system people queue jump by whispering an order to the butcher/baker and then returning later on to pick it up. Everyone knows what they’re doing but the Portuguese don’t protest. They just suffer it. On the other hand, other rules say the elderly, a person with a child in a pram/carrier and those with disabilities have priority in the queue. As a result I always had to wait to buy meat, sometimes for as long as 40 minutes.

Once you manage to get your meat and other requirements you proceed to the check-out queues, which are usually very long as there are only a few operators working them, even in the biggest branches. Cashiers almost always engage in friendly conversation with customers, which would be OK if they could multitask. Items remain motionless on the conveyor until they’ve finished chatting, and only when all the items have been scanned and the customer has packed their purchases into bags, do they start to fossick through their purse, bag or pockets for credit cards or cash. If it’s cash you might have to wait until the customer has counted out the money owing, often in piles of one, two and five euro cent coins. When they reach the total the checkout person counts them all again to make sure. On top of this, unless you know about it, you might be standing under a sign above the checkout saying women with babies, pregnant women or disabled people have priority. Depending on where you live, that could cover everyone in the queue. It’s excruciating, especially when you have juggle shopping with less flexible work commitments.

To speed things up, self-service checkouts have been introduced in some supermarkets but this move has been less than successful. A lot of the customer base is computer illiterate and also don’t like the anti-social aspect of the self-service checkouts so don’t use them. When either of us used them, something always malfunctioned and no one staff member was dedicated to assist, so the wait for someone to come is considerable. Out of six terminals, five would be credit card only, even though the majority of Portuguese who shop every day pay cash. Invariably a person using the one terminal marked ‘cash or credit card’ will be using a card, and because we pay cash to avoid more delays, we have to wait. When you do get to pay in cash, the machine doesn’t always give change, so then you have to wait for a staff member to come and give it to you, which makes a mockery of the ‘modern’ technology and leaves you feeling utterly defeated.

Apart from issues around the quality of the service in supermarkets, there is also the attitude of the staff to the customers. A new butcher started at the instore counter of the Pingo Doce where I went every week and I ordered whole chicken breasts. Instead, he sliced them as he did for every Portuguese customer. My Portuguese wasn’t perfect, but I could clearly and correctly say what I wanted, so I rejected the sliced chicken and placed my order again. He begrudgingly bagged up some more chicken, but when I asked for one piece of turkey at a particular weight he put two smaller pieces together. He refused to give me the piece I wanted and was surly and rude. I asked a young Portuguese couple to tell him I needed the chicken and turkey in these forms for meals I was making, but the butcher claimed I was in the wrong, that he was the expert and I should accept what I was given. I complained to the manager and she agreed I had the right to order my meat any way I liked, just like the Portuguese do, and that yes, he should have been polite, but … and then she shrugged her shoulders as if to say, what can I do?

At a Continente supermarket my husband once asked a staff member if he could have a cardboard box from their depot, where there were hundreds piled up, but the man flatly refused him. “No”, he said. My husband was shocked and replied “Are you serious? You can’t spare one box for a customer?” “No”, he said again, and walked off.

Making friends

I’ve read numerous comments by people in FB social media groups who say they have ‘lots of Portuguese friends’ but you need to look at these claims more closely. For a start, how long have they been friends? A few months or many years? How did they meet them? Through a commercial exchange, at work, or a meet-up (where the focus is on you spending your money at a bar or restaurant). How old is the person commenting? Is the friend just someone at a language exchange who smiles and talks to them to practice their English or is there more substance to the relationship? Is the friend a restaurant owner, a real estate agent or another person they’ve met through a commercial transaction or someone they’ve met in non-commercial circumstances? When you peel away these veneers to find the real motives why someone is your friend, you may find you have fewer true friends than you first imagined. Better to regard people who claim to have lots of friends as a reflection on them, rather than any lack on your part.

Previous experience had taught us it can take time to make new friends when you move to a new country, so we knew we had to be patient. We also knew there are many reasons locals might want to spend time with foreigners that have nothing to do with friendship and we’d have to keep this in mind. Nonetheless we didn’t expect it to be so difficult in Portugal, and so fraught. In our first year we met a couple at a language exchange group. She was from Iceland and he was Portuguese. We hit it off immediately and went out for coffee and dinner a few times. It was always fun, lots of laughs, comfortable, engaging, and had potential to develop a sustaining friendship, but without a sign or hint of things not being good between us they broke off contact. There was no explanation and they didn’t answer our emails or texts.

Something similar happened between us and a married Portuguese couple we got to know after we twice rented accommodation from them in Rossio, Lisbon. The third time around, in December 2016, when we told then we were going to live in Lisbon they got very excited and offered to lend us things to make our new rental apartment more like home. We got on really well and easily with them and started going out to dinner with them, we entertained them in our apartment, met their friends and their daughter who invited us to events and took advice from them about Portuguese ways. Then, in February 2018, all that stopped. Suddenly they abandoned us, refusing to answer any of our messages by phone, text or email. No explanation came for their changed behaviour, so we stopped trying in case there was something they couldn’t talk about, but we never heard another word from them again.

We were in the process of moving a few months later and taking our belongings off a truck when a young Portuguese guy living on the same floor as us with his pregnant wife offered to carry some boxes to the elevator and then into our apartment. We were touched by this offer of help, which gave us unexpected hope for the future. He was a doctor, she was training in health and they both spoke very good English. During the move he saw we hadn’t installed our overhead lights and went to his apartment for a screwdriver. He was highly skilled and gave us advice on how to drill into the kitchen tiles for mounting shelves. He, like my husband, was also a musician, so they had much in common and planned to play together. A few nights later, they invited us to dinner at a nearby restaurant and we began to think we’d found some good, friendly neighbours. The baby was looming and they were getting busier, so we didn’t see them much before we left Portugal for a holiday in Turkey. We returned with a box of Turkish Delights for them, but his wife, with their baby in her arms, wasn’t her usual smiling self when she answered their door. Sensing it wasn’t a good time we said we’d return later on, but she insisted on inviting us inside where she proceeded to eat all the sweets. After a brief, awkward conversation she told us she needed to feed the baby, which was fine by us, and we left on good terms. We said we’d catch up with them at a more convenient time, which was a few weeks later when we posted an invitation on their door and waited. And waited. They never answered, and after that we saw them only briefly at the elevator door, anxious to avoid us and going so far as ducking back into their apartment when they saw us emerging from our front door the same time they were coming out of theirs.

The only other neighbours on the same floor were an older Portuguese couple who also spoke good enough English for us to engage in conversation. However, after an initial chat, if we met at the elevator after that they showed little interest in us. My husband had also struck up a conversation with another man living in our apartment block in the first few weeks we lived there, mainly to ask him about the rules and way things worked with the condominium. As soon as he had finished answering, the man told my husband he must learn to speak Portuguese. My husband agreed, saying he didn’t know much yet, but would try to improve. The man repeated it was essential, and a week later my husband bumped into him again and began with ‘Ola’ but then continued in English. The man tut-tutted and said my husband must speak Portuguese to him. If he didn’t, there was no point in talking at all.

You’d think joining others for a group activity three times a week would yield the odd friend or two, so we were hopeful when we started swimming at our local municipal swimming pool, just a two-minute walk from our apartment. My husband told me there were always a dozen Portuguese men in the changing rooms, usually showering, dressing and chatting to each other when he entered. On a few occasions he heard some very quiet ‘Olas’ to which he always replied, and occasionally, when they were leaving, the odd one might say ‘Bom dia’ (good day). But that was all. He said he felt invisible, and this situation didn’t change in twelve months. I had the same experience in the women’s change room. I went at the same time each visit and saw the same women attending an aqua aerobics class. Like the men, they were very sociable with one another, could spare me a smile or a simple hello, but never went beyond that. The only time I was spoken to, in English, was when a woman mistook my pink bikini bottoms for underpants and told me censoriously I wasn’t allowed to wear them in the pool. I politely cleared up the misunderstanding for her, but she didn’t acknowledge her mistake. She just wanted to keep me in my place.

This behaviour extended to one of the female swimming instructors, who supervised lessons and allocated swimming lanes to others training there. One day early on, my husband saw her sweeping in the courtyard below our window and remarked on how great it was that we might enjoy a conversation with her at the pool. She could speak English because she used it to tell my husband which lane he could use for his laps. We wasted no time informing her we were neighbours the next time we saw her, but no joy or positivity came to her face, nor did she ask anything about us. Many times after that we passed her at the swimming pool exit where she was smoking, and made a point of turning to her and saying goodbye. However she only ever responded with a stony face.

We were at pains to understand why it was so hard to connect with people and why, after mutual enjoyment, they eventually ghosted us. Concerned we might have inadvertently done something to offend, we asked other foreigners about their experiences and friendships with the Portuguese. A French woman friend said she once had Danish and German friends in Lisbon, but they’d left the country saying they hated Portugal, citing the near impossibility of making stable friends as a major reason. Time and time again people told us of making a start on a new friendship, having a good time with Portuguese they’d met, and then nothing. Another foreigner who spoke fluent Portuguese and was married to a Portuguese citizen, told us she’d once worked in a company where her Portuguese colleagues went out together for drinks every Friday night, but they had never once invited her to join them. She worked with them for eight years.

Postal Services

The Portuguese postal service is a very hit and miss affair and there are no guarantees mail will reach you. This inefficiency increases the anxiety of waiting on important international mail like documents or registered letters. Given that Portuguese bureaucracy is still heavily paper based, requiring notice in writing, formal letters and so on, this can be a serious problem at the local level as well.

If the mailbox is inside an apartment block, the postman will need to gain access. He has to rely on somebody in the building being home to let him in the door. If nobody does, he might slip or kick all the mail, including registered, under the door and hope it finds its way to the correct recipients. Even when the building has a janitor, there’s no guarantee you’ll receive your post either. The first time I was waiting for my residence permit card to come from the Portuguese immigration department (SEF) by registered mail, I wasn’t home when it was delivered. I found out later the postman had tried to give it to the janitor, but the janitor said he didn’t know us, even though he’d met us in person and we were the only foreigners living in the building. According to the person I spoke to at SEF, when they finally answered the phone, the postman should have left a notice in our mail box and taken the letter back to my local post office where it was meant to stay for a number of days to allow me to pick it up. I immediately went down there but post office staff told me that instead of holding it for me, as they were obliged to do, they’d sent it back to SEF. When I rang SEF again they told me they weren’t going to re-send my card, and that I had to pick it up from the office where I’d made my original resident permit application, one and a half hours away by train. None of this was my fault, and yet nobody did anything to assume some responsibility for what was their inefficiency.

Foreign residents I spoke to told of farcical situations where the postman was supposedly ‘unable’ to put their mail through the slot in their front door, but had no trouble delivering mail to their next door neighbours’ house with an identical door. To say these things should not happen and cause people so much stress just falls on deaf ears. You can see the disinterest in the faces of the post office staff, whose numbers are low, providing slow and poor services to very long queues of customers.

Customs

The range of products available in Portugal is very limited, so many new foreign residents have to order goods online, especially those that are vital. Anything coming from outside the EU is taxed according to its declared value, while anything from inside the EU isn’t, at least in theory. The reality is that items ordered from the EU are randomly held by customs and only released after paying a tax. However, working out what that is can sometimes be near impossible. When customs hold a package, the recipients receive an email telling them to provide proof of the value of the contents, even for gifts. There’s a number to call, but it’s rarely answered, and ringing alternative numbers has the same result. Emails sent in reply aren’t answered either. Getting through to someone can take days, and unless you have near perfect Portuguese, or they speak English, the nightmare of trying to get the package begins.

A South African family posted on FB how they’d shipped 15 boxes of household goods to Lisbon, where customs imposed a €60 tax on each box. Despite making inquiries before they came to Portugal about the best way to bring over household effects, they weren’t aware they needed to apply for a Certificate de Baggagem to be exempt from any tax. This document states the goods are for household purposes only, and can be obtained from a Portuguese Consulate in the sender’s country. According to what the family wrote in their FB posts, the consulate did not tell them they needed this certificate, nor did the shipper or the receiver in Lisbon. By the time they’d finished conducting their enquiries and managed to get through to anyone at customs to explain the situation, the tax had been regarded as unpaid and the 15 boxes had been sent back to South Africa to an address in a country where they no longer lived.

Health care

In comparison with countries like the US, the health care system in Portugal appears to be easy to access, of good quality and highly affordable. But this needs to be put in perspective. Granted, once you’ve got your resident permit you can register with your local family clinic, and see a doctor for a small sum. However, getting registered is not always straight forward. Leaving aside the issue of whether the receptionist will tolerate your poor Portuguese, or failing that, can’t speak English, many will insist you have a social security number in order to register. This is not true, but if they keep insisting you need a social security number and you don’t have one, you can’t register.

We registered at our nearest family clinic and when my husband needed a consultation he was put on the list of one of the doctors working there. However, when I went to get an appointment with a doctor I was told all the books were full, and no one was seeing any new patients. At the time the doctors were relaxing on chairs in the waiting room, chatting with the office staff. We were told doctors are only required to see each of their 100 patients once a month and don’t have to take any more appointments. If true, this means a doctor can see them all in two weeks and then do nothing for the next fortnight. I was told if it was really urgent I could ring first thing in the morning and they’d see if they could fit me in later in the day. In saying that, they ignored the fact phone communication between the receptionists and us was nearly impossible which meant I’d have walk there in the morning in the hope of making an appointment for the afternoon, when I would have to walk back there again. If I did get sick and needed a doctor, I couldn’t see this happening.

The fee to see a doctor at the family clinic was around €5. It doesn’t sound much but for the Portuguese on a minimum wage of €600 a month, it is. As are all the other charges you need to pay, such as when my husband wanted to have a blood test. The labs charged €35 for the test, but first you had to pay to see a doctor to get a referral. That’s if you could get an appointment. When your results were through, you needed to go see a doctor again, for another fee, if they had a free slot. He also needed to see a specialist about his ears, and for that he needed an appointment at a hospital a few suburbs away. He could either take a standard appointment for around €50 or another for around €120. The department would be the same and likely the doctor too. The difference was in the wait. The standard appointment came with a 3–4 month waiting period while the higher amount got you in within 3–4 weeks.

I never did manage to register at that particular family clinic, and when we moved to another part of Lisbon we went through the whole process again. This time our Portuguese was better, we were already in the system and both managed to get registered after spending an hour waiting to be served and 40 minutes going through the process. However, we were told if we wanted to see a doctor we’d need to come back in two weeks, just to make an appointment, as all the slots were booked up and there was nothing available earlier.

I can hear people thinking, well that’s the public system. Surely private is better. The buildings might be newer and the equipment shinier, but there is still a shortage of staff and resources. The UK is flooded with Portuguese nurses and other medical staff working for better wages and conditions than they get in Portugal. The ones left behind frequently go on strike, work to rule or go slow, making the service they provide even slower and harder to access. Consequently, paying a monthly premium doesn’t equate with getting a better level of health care. For example, the son of a friend of ours broke his collarbone in a rugby match and when his mother took him to a highly regarded private hospital for treatment, the staff was unable to tape him up and put his arm in a sling. They just didn’t have any tape left or a spare sling. His mother had to drive him, in a lot of pain, to another hospital.

Alcohol and cigarettes

Alcohol consumption in Lisbon is very visible and it’s not unusual to see people drinking at bars from as early as 8am. Most Portuguese have a drink several times a day, meaning lunchtime drinkers might hop into their cars and drive under the influence. There are a lot of empty beer bottles and alcohol affected individuals on the streets, but not as many as the thousands of cigarette butts that dot the sidewalks and roads. Smoking is still popular in Portugal, and although it is illegal to smoke inside restaurants, smokers often ignore the signs and penalties, police don’t enforce the rule, and the people affected by the smoke say nothing. While the Portuguese complain about almost everything among themselves, they rarely if ever complain to the authorities. Forget about soaking in the atmosphere and watching the world go by at an outside table on a character-filled street, because alfresco dining is invariably blighted blighted by smokers polluting the air.

Dogs

We love dogs, so when we hear them barking incessantly or crying, we feel for them. In Lisbon and other parts of Portugal, dogs are often used to guard residences. They’re left on their own for days on end, sometimes without adequate water or food. FB posts by people living in central Lisbon tell of dogs shut outside on balconies, howling day and night. The Portuguese rarely show them any affection or attempt to train them properly and the dogs end up highly stressed, constantly snapping and yapping at everything. In the first neighbourhood where we lived in Lisbon there was a guard-dog that barked all day and all night, making it difficult to get to sleep and disturbing any sleep we managed to get. It was a constant nightmare and a strong reason why we eventually moved away. It just didn’t stop or even look like stopping. The same thing happened in the third place we lived. There, as elsewhere, the Portuguese ignored it and rather than talk to the owner or complain to the authorities (who do eventually come out to check although by all accounts don’t actually do anything meaningful to force the owner to improve/change the dog’s situation), chose to pull down their window shutters and swelter in the hot summer months instead.

Tourists rave about the quaint cobbled streets in Lisbon but look closely and you’ll see that along with cigarette butts, there’s tonnes of dog poo. There are laws against leaving your dog’s excrement on the pavement, but many owners don’t pick it up despite the presence of free bags in parks and along popular walking routes. They will avoid having to do this by taking their dogs out for a walk and a secret poo late at night to escape detection from passers-by. Another technique we witnessed was people letting their dogs off the leash. The dog runs off and does its business out of sight of the owner, who can then pretend they have no connection to the steaming pile of fresh dog do messing up the pavement. I once even saw one woman clear up her dog’s mess from her balcony, before flinging it onto the street below.

Litter

Aside from the dog poo, empty cigarette packets, butts, bottles, cans, plastic bags, transport tickets, you name it, are all tossed onto sidewalks and streets. My husband told me he was walking behind a Portuguese woman and saw her wedge a cardboard coffee cup between a downpipe and a wall. I’ve seen people kick rubbish under park benches or into garden beds rather than pick it up and dispose of it properly in nearby bins. Only tourist areas are cleaner, and the responsibility of rubbish collection is down to council workers. From what we observed during our time there, they spend more time standing around smoking and talking to their friends on the phone than actually working.

Most supermarkets have toilets open to the public but they’re few and far between, so men urinating in public is a common sight. Consequently the smell of urine in Lisbon, especially in summer, can be very strong at bus stops, in parks, next to recycling bins and down side streets. I mentioned before the toilets on the ferries are so disgusting you don’t want to use them. There are free public toilets along the waterfront walk of the Cascais line, but very few, free or otherwise, in the tourist areas of Rossio, Baixo etc. The one or two in operation have a fee for use and many Portuguese won’t spare the money to spend a penny. One or two fast food places have toilets, accessible by entering a code that’s printed on customer’s receipts, and non-customers try to slip through the security door with bona fide customers.

Drivers

Spend any time away from the tourist areas and you’ll quickly learn car drivers do not like stopping at crossings for pedestrians. Their usual method it to speed through the section of the crossing you haven’t reached and give you a ‘sorry’ wave (assuming they notice you at all) even though they don’t mean it. When they’re a distance from the crossing and see you begin to walk across the road they’ll slow down rather than come to a halt, so they don’t have to stop completely. This means they often come really close to you, and your safety depends on you not slowing down or altering your course. If their timing is bad, they could potentially hit you, causing injury or worse.

To sum up

Of course everyone has different experiences but as sociologists we’ve been trained not to describe just the one act as somehow representative of the whole culture. The material for this piece comes from our own experiences and also those of people we’ve met in person and chatted with online. They were from different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, professions, marital status, sexual orientation, age groups, skill sets and interests. Obviously their opinions about Portugal are coloured by their needs, rather than any objective criteria. For example, retirees who have sold up in their country of birth and can’t afford to move back are reluctant to criticise their new home as it is a reflection on their judgement. White people often don’t see the ways people of colour are discriminated against and argue that there’s no racism in Portugal. Cis gender people can be unaware of the lived experience of LGBTQ+ people and seek to deny it. Men don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and walk alone down a dark street or be in a metro carriage with a man acting strangely and feel threatened. Some people don’t go to the supermarket regularly so they don’t notice the patterns of bad service while people without children have no first-hand knowledge of the education system and its standards. Repat Portuguese can be highly nationalistic and automatically refute any critiques of Portugal by telling the commenter to go back to their own countries. Some group members reply with solutions to your problems by offering a service or the name of a service provider without revealing they stand to make money if you take up the offer. Finally let’s not forget group administrators who delete negative posts, block and eject people who challenge the idea everything is always rosy for immigrants to Portugal

Thanks for taking the time to read all the way to the end. If you’re thinking about making the move I hope by sharing our experiences you can develop a realistic perspective from FB posts by expats, immigrants, non-Portuguese retirees and Portuguese repats describing Portugal as a land of endless sunshine, cheap wine, tasty seafood and friendly locals. Then you can decide if the country really does offer what you’re looking for.

*This is corroborated in news reports of police violence towards Portuguese people of colour and posts in FB groups by non-Portuguese people of colour recounting instances of overt racism towards them by Portuguese nationals.