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Chapter 17
A Carnation Revolution
On April 25th, 1974, in what became known as the
Carnation Revolution, military officers who opposed the
authoritarian regime that had run Portugal for forty-
eight years carried out a military coup. Overnight,
Portugal swung from one political extreme to the other,
and work for this English fashion photographer, who
had moved to this little corner of paradise seven years
earlier, dried up. Amidst the uncertainty and upheaval, I
found myself at a crossroads, but a chance encounter set
off a chain reaction that changed everything.
There I was chatting with a stranger at the local
English ex-pat pub near my apartment when he turned
out to be the recently arrived head of immigration at the
Canadian Embassy in Lisbon. Initially, when he
suggested to a group of us ex-pat Brits that he could get
us out to Canada, we laughed. Brazil? Same language
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