Vlad Lario

December 1, 2024

🇷🇺 🇵🇹 A Russian in Portugal. A whole world inside Lisbon.

📝 By Vlad, for Two Nations

I arrived here a few years ago with a suitcase, sharp English, and Portuguese… that's still on its way. Lisbon welcomed me the way it welcomes everyone: light, open, chaotic, full of accents and stories that never end the same way.

Today, the city is a meeting point of worlds. Brazilians, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Portuguese — all on the same train, in the same café, in the same Social Security line.

And that changed everything.

🌍The new Lisbon is global

There are Russian devs working with Brazilian founders.
There are Portuguese people learning Russian on Duolingo.
There are restaurants opened by people who fled the war and now serve pirozhki, khachapuri, vareniki and specialty coffee.
There are Brazilians who came "for a few months" and now say "saudade" with a Lisbon accent.

If you walk through Arroios, Anjos, Marquês, Santos — you feel it in your bones. Lisbon has become a living social laboratory.
And that's beautiful.

🎯Why this project exists

TWO NATIONS is about this:

About crossing stories, about seeing the world through eyes that aren't yours, about understanding that different cultures don't need to fight to exist on the same map.

I want to talk about Europe seen from outside and from inside. I want to talk about Portugal and also about Brazil — because, honestly, I talk to Brazilians every day and I haven't even been to Brazil yet. I want to show how a Russian reads this side of the world… and how this side of the world reads a Russian.

💬It's an open space

Here you get what I checked, what it cost, and where I got it from — no ready-made narrative. Just real conversations, real experiences, and curiosity — lots of curiosity.