However, one of the biggest benefits for her was the fact that she felt comfortable walking around alone in the evening, something that wasn’t the case in San Diego; Portugal is the seventh safest country in the world, according to the Global Peace Index.

“I just feel so safe here,” she says, adding that she loves how walkable Porto is and the fact that it “feels like a village.”

Although she has a car, Dreyfuss says she doesn’t use it often and slon 19 cc notes that drivers seem to go much slower in the city.

“People say to me, “How can you drive in Porto?’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘I drove for 35 years in Los Angeles. It’s not that bad.’”

She also finds the health care to be “astronomically” better in Portugal than the US, “not just because of the cost, but the quality of the care.” Portugal has a mainly tax-based health system with universal coverage.

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However, Dreyfuss admits that getting to grips with the banking system has been “a little bit of a challenge” along with buying real estate, particularly as Portugal doesn’t have a statutory seller’s property disclosure statement, where sellers are required to inform buyers of issues with the property.

She bought her first home in Porto in 2022, but sold the two-bedroom apartment in the Bombarda Art District after two years and went on to buy a top-floor apartment in the Marques neighborhood with a veranda on both sides, where she currently lives. Dreyfuss has since bought a second apartment, which she rents out to a friend.

“Nothing is perfect. I mean, the bureaucracy here is a pain in the ass sometimes,” she says. “There’s some things that are almost exactly alike. There’s some things that are better. There’s some things that are worse.”

Comfortable lifestyle