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With Americans Arriving in Droves to Portugal, Life Becomes Unfair for the Portuguese
New York Times article commented on by a Portuguese.
“Americans Head to Europe for the Good Life on the Cheap” is thus the title of an article in today’s New York Times, which, quite honestly, could have been written either by me or by several Portuguese journalists whose voices do not reach out there, but who have every week, for more than a year now, been warning about the huge imbalance happening in Portugal in the real estate business.
The NYT begins with the picturesque image of someone who doesn’t know much about a country but has only an imagined and usually false representation of it.
An American man sitting in a garden drinking a glass of green wine in Lisbon while watching his daughter play on the swing.
Here is the cacophonous unframing of it all. The noise of the swing in a city with not so many trees; the vinho verde that is traditionally from the north and not from Lisbon, and an American family renting an apartment for the “reasonable” price of 2500 euros per month.
For a Portuguese reading this, everything is disturbing, especially the ending, the exorbitant rent that where an American family can make a living, a young Portuguese couple in fertile…
