With my vacation over, I start living and working from Lisbon for the next 3 weeks. I’m really happy that my work setup allows me to work from anywhere, as long as I’ve got high-speed internet with a latency below around 75 ms.
From my apartment, my commute to the office takes only 14 minutes. The office itself is located at a central location just off Avenida da Libertade, in an old and typical Lisbon townhouse with high ceilings and large rooms.
Normally, parking in the ‘red’ city centre would cost me a fortune – unless it’s an electric car, in which case parking is free!
Lots of Karma has me parking right in front of my office on the first day:
Portuguese authorities still restrict the maximum amount of people in an office at the same time. There is a skeleton crew that is at the office every day (immigrants such as me wanting to meet as many people as possible) and a selection of people that have announced their attendance via a shared spreadsheet.
This Monday morning I’m greeted by one of my favourite pastries being offered to everyone: Bola da Berlin! Yum – lots of calories to start the day!
My digital nomad office life isn’t something I’m going to bore you with – my days are long and typically I get out late wanting a beer and some relaxation – Lisbon is a good place to do just that!
I either walk or take the TWIKE to discover more of Lisbon without any pressure timewise. My bucket list of things to see grows every day, as everyone I speak to has a special place to recommend.
Staying longer-term in a city has one other perk – you get to live in a neighborhood and greet/get to know people. Let me show you the place I’m staying, which is a real treat and definitely not the usual AirBnB IKEA affair:
It’s located in Alcantâra, close to LX factory and the river – perfect for my daily runs.
The apartment is old, non-renovated but has loads of charm, complete with high ceilings.
I was super happy to have had help to find a place to not only park securely but also charge my TWIKE during the night at a very acceptable price. The garage itself provided me with a remote to access and park my TWIKE at any hour.
Thanks to Twitter and the @TWIKE_560 account, I was in immediately in touch with a number of people that wanted to meet – which meant that quite a few of my evenings were filled with driving around Lisbon with locals wanting to experience the TWIKE.
One late afternoon, during an activity that I’ll be writing about soon, I thought it would be nice to take some pictures of TW560 close to Lisbon’s iconic April 25 bridge. Hope you like them –
What I also did, was to visit some of the many Miradouro’s dotted around Lisbon to catch a glimpse of the town from above.
Tourists in Lisbon are ferried around not only by the historic trams criss-crossing the town and the ubiquitous Uber’s but also by an armada of electric three-wheeler tuk-tuk’s – I thought it might be fun to just park in-midst of them and see who would want to book a ride with me…which was most of the tourists. 🙂
My first week was over in no time – For the weekend I decided that I wanted to drive a little bit north and stay at one of the beaches there. An AirBnB was quickly found and I joined Lisbon’s late Friday afternoon traffic and drove all the way to Foz de Arelho on the motorway.
The special thing about Foz is that it has Europe’s largest in-land bay – a saltwater body extending 9km inland.
Maria, my AirBnB host insisted we go to the sea – which surprised me with dramatic lighting and large waves – complete with mist being blown over the beach due to the strong, cool winds being blown in from the Atlantic.
I’m looking forward to the weekend – relaxing and writing some entries for this blog.
