May was my first month into a new country, so the move was roughly completed. I didn’t set base into a long term accommodation yet, I was still searching, the long term thing happened only in June, so May was more or less suspended. The course of events is still clear in my mind, because the dates were almost surgically aligned. On the first day of May I crossed into Portugal (like, literally, I came by train / bus), and it was also the first day without restrictions on the ground traffic. Surreal memories.
By then, a lot of the past was already behind, I was eagerly starting to explore my new life. May was also the month in which most of the logistics that required my presence happened, like obtaining all the paperwork for residency and so on. I also walked more than in any previous month (Camino month excluded, obviously), and this happened on a much hillier terrain. If you ever visited Lisbon, you know what I mean. It’s one thing to walk 10 km per day on a flat terrain, and a completely different one to walk 10km on a level difference of 30 stories every day.
May was also one of the most consistent months in terms of well defined, on topic, posts. Because I was right in the middle of the process, I wrote a lot about location independence, and also about the big changes that the world went through. For instance, the religious similarities between Covid-19 apostles and Bitcoin maximalists, or the realization that there are idiots at the both side of the spectrum. And, obviously, about the Berlin wall inside our minds, which is still unfolding these days.
I also wrote about financial resilience, from introductory posts like how to become financially resilient in 3 steps (spoiler alert: there’s more than 3 steps, but you can still do it), up to financial resilience in 3 words.
But probably the post that was most influenced by this time (and you’ll see by its title why) is Most The World Is Functioning At The Grape Level. A lot of good wine in Portugal.
If I would have to put May in a single word, it would be: “renewed”. If I would have to put it in a sentence it would be: “learning to walk again, into a new space”.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
