Being a New Zealander is in almost all circumstances a good thing.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but people like us. No, they love us. They find our accent quaint and charming. When they think of us they think cuddly sheep and breath-taking mountains. Clean rivers and good rugby. When they meet us travelling they’re always a little bit thrilled by our comparative rarity, like when you discover someone famous and popular has the same birthday as you. We’re also charmingly modest.
Admittedly, we’re not perfect. We’re not the best looking folk, for example. And we can be frustratingly conservative. But on the whole if you belong to that paradise at the bottom of the South Pacific then you’ve been dealt a pretty strong hand.
And I would have agreed, until I arrived in Lisbon. I’ll explain.
After a year living in Bilbao I headed out to the north-west corner of Spain and hopped down the Atlantic coast. From beautiful a Coruña, the city that rolls down from the hills to the long arc of the golden sand beach and the lighthouse on the headland, I went through the old plazas of Santiago de Compostela and the industrial port city of Vigo. In northern Portugal I stayed in Braga, that old university town with its majestic wide stone steps climbing up the hill arched over by dark leafy trees to the cathedral. In Porto I escaped the swarming tourists to sit in a park and ate tuna from a can for dinner and spilt the oil on my shorts.
And then I arrived in Lisbon. It was summertime. I was in love immediately. I was staying in a loft apartment on a sloping cobblestone street. I walked around Alfama, the last surviving neighbourhood of the 1755 earthquake that flattened the city. From the narrow streets you can gaze out to sea. It feels authentically inhabited still and people’s washing dries in the sun outside their windows. I had found my castle on the hill.
You see, when I was a winsome youth, perhaps of fifteen years, I watched a film called The Spanish Apartment. In the film a French student goes on exchange to Barcelona where he moves into a flat of motley European nationalities, each character an exquisite representation of their national stereotype. The German is serious and rigid, the Italian is passionate and expressive and the Englishwoman has freckles.
I vividly remember the feeling of romantic intoxication seeing this as a teenager who had lived all his life in provincial New Zealand. The old town in which they lived, the chaos of the apartment, the urbanity of Europe. I promised myself that one day I would be young and free and bohemian in Europe. I downloaded the music from the film and burned it to a CD to listen to during my morning shower. I imagined myself talking philosophy with gesticulatory European women and conversing in the vernacular with shop men in aprons.
Some twelve years later, and a few weeks before I found Lisbon, I was ruminating on this while looking out of the window down at the river Nervion as my bus squirted out of Bilbao on the motorway. I was leaving Bilbao, perhaps forever, and about to embark on six months of new and presumably rich experiences on my six month jaunt from the north of Spain through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and back to New Zealand.
The sky was open and blue, and questions idly circled my mind. Had I chosen the best side of the bus for optimum views? When should I open my packet of chips? And should I have spent a year in Bilbao?
The concept that economists call ‘opportunity cost’ has long been a stock character in the stage show of my life. Opportunity is the inherent price of every decision, the thing that you pass up when you choose something. When you choose the steak you are passing on the fish. Signing up to the sculpture classes means you can’t join your work indoor netball team. And by choosing Bilbao I didn’t go to Madrid. Or to Seville. Or to any of Europe’s other bewitching cities. My vision, nurtured from my adolescence, was to experience a life of easy Mediterranean living. I pictured sun and warmth, open and gregarious people, a vibrant and kaleidoscopic social life, energetic promiscuity. Instead I went to Bilbao, neither on the Mediterranean nor particularly warm.
It has other qualities of course. The food is excellent, the accessibility to the outdoors is incredible, the quality of life for the cost is remarkable, and I had a large established social group to inherit from my friend Jake. Work is plentiful and easy, it has a gorgeous old town and you can live affordably in the city centre.
On my afternoon jog I would run along the river past the elegant bridges and the Guggenheim, one of Europe’s most esteemed buildings. Its football team is a marvel and the associated bar culture is fantastic. When I left I was surrounded by friends, pleasingly unemployed and with a working knowledge of all the best kebab shops. I mean it when I say Bilbao is a great place. But for all its undeniable charms, it didn’t have the sun, openness or vivacity of my imagination.
Then, two weeks after leaving Bilbao, I found Lisbon. I stood and looked out at the harbour over the orange roofs of Alfama. I had pastel de nata, the ubiquitous custard tart that you see in shop windows across the city. I climbed up the hill through Bairro Alto to the lookout. Young people were everywhere in the warm evening, talking and laughing, and I drank beer and watched the lights of planes as they came into land at the airport. My imagination constructed perfect images of the greener grass, unblemished by the inevitable imperfections that come from colliding with reality. Lisbon. If only, if only.
But the thing was, Lisbon was not on the menu. And the reason for that is that I am not Australian.
Like I said, not being Australian is usually a pretty good thing. But in typical Australian fashion, as treacherous and untrustworthy as ever, Australia has a working holiday agreement with Portugal, and we do not.
I sat there on my last afternoon in Lisbon, sitting on the bed in the apartment in and staring at the laptop screen. I had the freedom to live anywhere in Spain and I felt sorry for myself. Oh if I could have lived in Lisbon! Entitled? Well, yes.
Currently the best passports to have, according to www.passportindex.org are those of Singapore and South Korean, holders of which are able to visit 164 and 163 visa-free, respectively. They only recently knocked Germany into third equal place with the Japanese on 162, who are followed by a set of respectable European countries on 161. Australia and New Zealand have a ‘Passport Power Rank’ of eight and nine respectively, with visa-free access to 157 and 156 countries, behind twenty five other nationalities.
But that only tells a part of the story because visa free travel is not exactly my hustle. My thing is the working holiday: the right to stay and work in a place for at least a year. And this is where the Australasians are the heavy-hitters.
Now, both Australia and New Zealand have a pretty impressive set of agreements. Young people from both countries can get working holidays to a list of 31 countries. That’s pretty good, undoubtedly. Americans, for example, have a paltry six in total. Even Canadians don’t have as many as we do. But unlike Kiwis, Australians have the option to live and work in Portugal.
But just before you drongos chuck another shrimp on the barbie, wait one moment. Because you guys can’t work in Brazil, or Slovakia. It’s true, you’ve connived yourselves into arrangements with Cyprus, Iceland and Greece, but we have agreements with Croatia, Austria and the Czech Republic. Yes, Iran and Indonesia are great countries. But better than Mexico and China? And while you have Turkey we have Malaysia. And Peru. And the Philippines. Unanswered.
We simply crush you with our bilateral agreements. Humiliated. Our diplomats are the best in the world. We’re the Michael Jordan of diplomacy, the Jonah Lomu of negotiation. We’re Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, who you call when you need something done. Ok, I’ll stop. It was hot on the top floor of the apartment and I stayed looking at the screen for a moment, smiling slightly.
Bilbao was not Lisbon. But then Lisbon would not be Lisbon either, at least not the Lisbon of my imagination. Nothing could be. You only have the opportunities that are given to you, and mine stretched on and on down the page, country after country, representing the astonishing depth of my privilege. My research had proved fruitful. Well that’s that, then. I will never whinge again.
It was with a new sense of gratitude and a bosom full of patriotism that I packed my bag, checking that my elegant, handsome passport was safe and tucked away, and climbed down to the cobblestone street to find my way to the station and my night train to Madrid. And perhaps some greener grass.
