This is The Guardian.
Today, how the digital nomad dream turns sour.
I'd been in London for 18 years and quite frankly, I'd kind of felt like I'd...
done it and got everything I needed from the city and had I guess entered what felt like a toxic work culture at the time that I wanted to escape from.
This is Alex Holder.
In 2019 she was working as a freelance journalist and a corporate copywriter and was starting to wonder is this the life I want?
London felt full of edges at the time.
I remember taking my three-year-old son to a local pub a really nice pub in a residential area.
And I took him to the toilets and he asked me, why are the toilets all greasy, mum?
I obviously didn't explain to him it was to stop people racking up lines of cocaine on the lids.
It was around this time that she went on a trip to Lisbon and realised another life was possible.
It's so beautiful.
You walk down the streets, there are cobbled pavements, the buildings are pastel.
The light is just kind of luminescent.
And then there was a culture that felt very open to family life.
You take, you know, take our son to a restaurant, to cafes, to parks.
And I never had that feeling of he was too loud or too annoying.
Families are always out.
Just before COVID hit, she, her husband and their young son took the plunge.
They upped sticks to Lisbon, initially just for a year.