Alex: Portugal is a place where for the most part, people are
very non confrontational. And what's more important here is
being Bem educado which is Portuguese for just having good
manners and being considerate. So after about a year or two, I
started noticing that I felt the stress leaving my shoulders.
Noki: My lifestyle has changed immensely, so I feel happier,
healthier, a lot less stress.
Alex: Hi, welcome to our apartment in Lisbon, Portugal.
My name is Alex Trias. This is my wife Noki. We have a daughter
named Evie. And we all live together in Lisbon, Portugal. We
live in a two bedroom apartment that we bought back in 2015. So
this building is over 400 years old. Originally, this was the
St. Paul St. Mary's College. The building sat largely vacant for
many, many years until it was reclaimed and got a new lease on
life as a condominium. In the same way that this building got
a new lease on life. I feel that the building gave us a new lease
on life. We're an American family. We live for many years
in New York City. And before moving to Lisbon, we lived in
Washington DC for 10 years.
Noki: Alex and I are both retired, I worked as a
registered nurse and I made about $75,000 a year.
Alex: I worked as an attorney and I earned 200,000 a year.
We live in the heart of Bairro Alto. Today,t he best way to
describe iBairro Alto is it reminds me a lot of Bourbon
Street in New Orleans.
Noki: It's like a five minute walk to really any place that we
want to go to. Our daughter can walk all over the city and feel
super safe.
I'm gonna say our adventure here really began as a leap of faith.
I had taken Evie off to go skiing, and Alex despises cold
weather really, really hates it. So he opted to stay back home in
Washington, DC. And then I got a call in the middle of the lift
line. "Hey, do you know that it's like 60 degrees Fahrenheit
in Lisbon right now?" I was like, No.
Alex: That sounds pretty good.
Noki: I was like, you know, why don't you research that a little
bit and get back to me on it.
Alex: So I did
Noki: We were just really in love with Lisbon and thought why
not spend at least a couple of our retirement years here
exploring it and learning about Portugal and learning about a
new culture. We started looking at apartments but we quickly
realized that the idea of actually moving someplace and
trying to understand building codes and acclimate and, and and
and and was just too much so in the end, Alex sent me and Evie
back home so she could go back to school.
Alex: I looked at about 10 different apartments.
Noki: But we also searched the Internet for probably a month.
Alex: Just walking around and seeing the space went a long way
to convince me. As I was leaving the space, I saw a sign posted
on a wall across from the door to the building that made an
impression on me.
The process of putting the offer together consisted of putting
10% down by a wire transfer to the owner's personal account.
Our main one moving expenses were extremely low since all we
brought with us were two suitcases a piece and no
furniture.
Noki: We decided because of that, that we would splurge for
business class tickets, because it allowed us each to have two
giant checked in pieces of luggage.
Alex: And we spent about 15,000 to furnish the entire apartment.
Noki: 15,000? Oh we did? That's a lot.
Alex: Yeah, but that was for everything.
Let's take you into the kitchen.
Noki: This is probably one of the most used parts of the
house. When we first arrived, it was in pretty good shape. But we
decided after two years to make a renovation so that the kitchen
would be really customized to suit our needs. I was definitely
worried that our refrigerator was going to be the size of a
dorm room refrigerator. It wasn't it was a full size
refrigerator. So that was the good news. The bad news is that
our cats figured out how to open it. This one works by pushing on
it, you push and the refrigerator opens. You also do
the same thing with the freezer and the push point is high
enough that our cats can't open it. But I have to tell you my
very very favorite part of the kitchen is this spice rack.
Alex: And this is where we spend most of our time. Most of it's
sitting at this table eating or drinking coffee. But this is the
main room in the apartment. For us really, we tried to keep
everything very minimalist and very sparse and open. Our side
of the building faces a small walled in plaza, where we have
olive trees, we have some cypress trees growing along the
side. Let me show you our first bedroom. My favorite thing about
this room is the new closets that we put in. My wife's first
closet, she has a little bit more stuff. It's a small
bedroom. You could almost say that it's more of a room with a
bed, but it suits its purpose for us.
Noki: Our bathroom is here. It's a really nice size for a
bathroom. We do have a washer and dryer which is really nice.
Let's wrap up in the bathroom here and hanging right into
Evie's room.
Evie: Probably one of my favorite things about my room is
the privacy that I get back here. Which brings me to one of
the only problems I actually have with my room which is the
Wi-Fi connection. And the walls are so thick, my internet
connection is slow as a snail. As you can see if I stand right
up next to them are quite wide. They're wide enough to stop the
earthquake of 1755 which devastated move to the city. And
well if they could stop an earthquake they can stop Wi-Fi
signals as well. Back to what I said before of course one of the
one of my favorite things about my room is privacy. And with
that being said...
Alex: We're heading now into the Azulejos room in the convento.
All of these are original titles. And each of them
features a different scene from the Bible. My personal favorite
is this one. This is actually Saul being lowered out of his
window in Damascus on his way to escape to Jerusalem. Now we'll
take you into the other garden in the front of the building. In
the evenings, my wife and I like to come out here with sometimes
with a couple of our neighbors enjoy a glass of wine and enjoy
the Portuguese weather. And the view out onto the Taisho River.
After we'd been here for a couple of years, we started
looking around at some other spaces but we just never found
anything else that we wanted. We really started falling in love
with just being exactly where we are. We didn't want to move.
Noki: Nowadays I have a lot more time to really focus on keeping
myself healthy and happy. I don't have time to go on dates.
We have time to hang out with friends. We have time to explore
new things that we just want to learn. We actually are
celebrating not quite a month now of having attained finally
Portuguese citizenship certainly for the foreseeable future. We
are really super happy here and very, very content to say. I
know the Evie is looking around at a lot of different
jurisdictions for university depending on where she goes,
might influence where we wind up in the next couple of years. So
we got at least two years to really enjoy ourselves here in
Lisbon. Alex: Cheers!
Alex: Welcome to Portugal! Noki: Cheers!