Strikes seem to happen fairly often in Portugal.
They’re most disruptive when we don’t get good information on them. My family doesn’t even watch the Portuguese news, so sometimes we aren’t even aware of things that have become common knowledge. We live a rural life, so we just figured that city information isn’t all that necessary for us.
The school my kids had always gone to was outside the public education system, so we’d gotten away without ever being impacted by the awful strikes. My husband works from home and I commute by car, so we had also been insulated from the public transportation system. In short, we’d never really had a chance to be inconvenienced by Portugal’s strikes.
But everything changed in 2025. My daughter started using the public bus to commute to university in Lisbon, while my son transferred to a public high school and began taking the city bus there. This is relevant because after all this time, we finally started living in a way where we could get disrupted by strikes. Since my son goes to a very typical public school, he’s particularly impacted by strikes from teachers and others in the educational system.
The first school strike that happened after he transferred threw the entire family for a loop. We were so pitifully inexperienced that we had no idea what to do—so we just told him not to go. Thinking back on it now, I wonder whether the right thing to do would have been to take him by car.
I did happen to run across a public transportation strike when I was in Lisbon. I went down into the subway, and there wasn’t anyone there. It definitely felt like something was off. I didn’t realize the trains weren’t running until I got to the ticket gate. It’s always so frustrating that they don’t make more widespread announcements.
This last strike threatened to completely overturn my plans to go back to Japan for a visit, which was a totally nerve-racking experience. I did end up landing without a hitch, but I was stressed out to the point of completely panicking.
A nationwide general strike that included airports and aircraft was planned for the day before I was supposed to leave for Japan, leading to the cancellation of all flights. They announced that flights scheduled for that day should be rescheduled to one of the three days before or after the strike. My flight didn’t fall on that exact day, but if the negotiations didn’t go well, they would of course continue into the following day—and there was a chance I would be grounded.
It would be one thing to have my flight out of Portugal changed, but I didn’t know whether people in my situation were still guaranteed to get on connecting flights through other countries. It stressed me out to the point feeling sick just thinking about it.
They reported around 400 canceled flights on the day of the strike, along with shutdowns affecting public transportation, trains, buses, hospitals, and many other public services. It looked like the entire city was being thrown into confusion.
There was another thing making me nervous about my flight, too. I was scheduled to go through Beijing on China Airlines on my way to Japan, and just before my departure, the Japanese media exploded with reports of a “Taiwan contingency,” even reporting losses from travelers canceling their trips to Japan. It got so bad that even my Chinese friends started telling me that things were getting bad between our two countries, making me sick with worry that my flight from Beijing to Japan would suddenly be canceled.
Things actually ended up going through without a hitch, and I somewhat anticlimactically landed on Japanese soil.
Meanwhile, three things really stood out to me at the Chinese airport.
The first was that departure procedures have become the same whether you’re traveling to Macao, Taiwan, or Japan.
Second, there were instant ramen vending machines everywhere, with water dispensers offering hot water.
Third, when I went to the information desk to get help, I wasn’t able to communicate with the man there in English. But he immediately turned to his translation app and started speaking, which allowed us to communicate.
Even though China appears to be progressing, it still felt like it was fundamentally stuck in the past. Anyway, I felt relieved.