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Moved to Portugal

Moved to Portugal

4 min read
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So this is the movement I’ve spent years waiting for.

How it started

A good couple of years back I met Margarida online in a Facebook Group for fans of niche rock music (if you’ve ever heard of bands like Melvins, you’d be part of our crowd!).

I had little plans in life except to better myself and get footing in the job market. I stumbled upon Margarida’s posts in this group and one day I just decided to write to her out of the blue. “Slide into her DMs” as the kids say these days.

And I thought about it for a couple of days… thinking I just might not be her cup of tea. Life moved on. Seven months went by, as a matter of fact. And that’s when she saw it “in her spam-box”, if you will.

There she was. A law student talking to a nobody like me.

She started writing to me. Soon after we started calling each other. And eventually I decided that what I needed was to move out from my parents’ place to really get some skin in the game with my job search… and that’s when she sent me a book and a love letter. Around that time I knew that I had to at least take it seriously. And she eventually got on a plane and met me in Gothenburg by the bus terminal, we had a Heineken at Mr.Chu’s… and then she got on the train with me to Lidköping and we’ve been a force to reckon with ever since. I blew savings on plane tickets. We weathered Covid together. I want to live with this woman.

The logistics

But we’ve made things complicated for each other, being that she is a Portuguese native and that I am from little Lidköping in Sweden.

We measured the chances of getting established professionally for both… turns out Sweden is quite horrible when it comes to transferring credentials across EU borders for the profession of law. Norway even had 8 spots available…Sweden only really had one, and it’d require that Margarida switched up focus and then did a master’s to even have a shot at it.

But what about me? This many years since being a complete nobody, I had forged a career as a web developer. I’ve been fluent in English since my earliest years in school, one of few pure talents.

I guess I’m moving to Portugal.

Making the jump

So, here I am. 8 years into my job. A lot of coworkers had left the small town I was working in, who I am coincidentally from. What am I waiting for?

So I took about 1½ years of intense studying to really feel like I’d be able to face the international market. And then I made a CV so comfortable that I’d be able to sound authentic during interviews.

First interview was for one of those gigs where you would have to look at flagged materials. Hours were terrible. Pay even worse. I skipped.

But already at my second opportunity I had the fortune of talking to a really kind Ukrainian/Bulgarian recruiter named Tereza. She offered me a position as a “Senior WordPress Developer” that would be attached to a marketing team. I aced the initial interview and then during the technical interview I spoke to two German gentlemen and they asked me about my prior experience and gave me the thumbs up.

I could barely believe it myself.

Packing up

But then came the logistics of it all. They needed me to quickly fly down to Portugal, register myself and provide those credentials.

So in three weeks’ time I had packed/sold/thrown every single belonging until all I owned could be reduced to what would fit in an XL trolley and a blue 80L backpack.

And then I went on my flight. Ended up in Lisbon, as a fair amount of times before. But I’m not going back to stay in Sweden this time around.

This is the beginning of my new chapter in life.

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