B. Lukács Andrea official

08/10/2026

The Spanish blue and the ancient walls greet me again.
Setúbal, candid moments #13 · 8 October 2026

And the snack on castle walls I know from Montenegro, this time in the company of a lizard, found me in Setúbal.

I took the AI's advice and went up to Forte de São Filipe by Bolt taxi. As the road kept zigzagging, I decided right away that I would come back down with it too, no way I'm wandering on a road without a pavement....

Which do you prefer, Uber or Bolt? Do you usually travel with them, or do you rather take a traditional taxi?

The full story, with the chapel that took my breath away and the practical details (entry, café, toilet), is in our community - link in the first comment.

If interested in 65+ senior nomad lifestyle, check my blog theseniordigitalnomads dot com - with plenty of useful guides (in Benidorm I climbed up to a mirador on foot - this time I took a Bolt).

Series: Live from the road
Blog series: Andy, the senior digital nomad in Setúbal
Photography: B Lukács Andrea

Andy, a solo female senior digital nomad, wanders here:
728 TikTok videos:
303 YouTube videos:

07/10/2026

s Portugal cheap? A super host is one who tells you to use all the oil and spices freely for cooking, and leaves you some anti-acid yoghurt for bedtime in the fridge, with cheese and milk.... and when at 1 am you finally get into the place after 1 hour of stumbling in the dark, mistyping the code and turning the key without success, you can fall on the feast dead tired, after checking the most important thing as a digital nomad: THERE IS INTERNET, hurray! (and electricity too). So I didn't last long without shopping, today I trudged off to buy groceries. Within 3 minutes: 2 grocery shops and a bakery (there is a video rental and a laundry too, not needed yet). The usual 2 bags: my backpack and a strong airport bag - of course both got stuffed full.

And back to the original question: is Portugal cheap? I don't know yet, but there is lactose-free milk (in Paris there wasn't).... there are soups you only need to heat up (I got used to them in Spain).... and you can get everything for sandwiches too.... I just wrote to a friend that silly me, I didn't squeeze the yoghurt cake into the bag, oooh I would eat it NOW.

2 shopping trips

Auchan

Lactose-free milk 1l 1.08 EUR
Mini rusks, big pack 350g 2.59 EUR (instead of croutons for soup)
Tortilla de patata (Spanish potato omelette) 2.95 EUR
Caldo verde with chouriço (kale and potato soup with smoked sausage) 1.39 EUR
Pumpkin cream soup 1.39 EUR
Drinking yoghurt 1kg 1.55 EUR

MeuSuper

Tinned frankfurters 1.38 EUR
Small pickled gherkins 180g 1.79 EUR
Mango nectar 1l 1.19 EUR
Butter 125g 1.39 EUR
Greek plain yoghurt 1kg 2.99 EUR
Napoli salami, sliced 80g 2.99 EUR
Ilha sliced cheese from the Azores 1.69 EUR
Goat cheese with garlic and herbs 3.99 EUR
Coffee 220g 3.89 EUR
Papo seco (Portuguese bread rolls) 300g 1.20 EUR
Vegetable soup 400g 1.79 EUR

Total: 35.24 EUR

What do you think, cheap or expensive?

Why do I share what I buy in another country and for how much? Not to show off, believe me. I'm building a community of 65+ digital nomads, and I try to give you useful everyday information, so you don't have to start from zero if you're thinking about this lifestyle too. Come and chat with us in the 65+ senior digital nomads group on Facebook (mixed languages, everyone writes the way they can or like).

11/09/2026

I found a shoebox of index cards yesterday. Filed by city. Lyon, Avignon, Geneva, Chamonix. Series: Once Upon My Time .

Each card had a script. Handwritten or Typewritten. So when friends came over for slide night, I'd read them the story behind every photo, word for word, like a tour guide for an audience of six people in a living room.

I was in my twenties. No content calendar, no algorithm, no idea that "content creator" would ever be a job title.

I just wanted people to actually understand what they were looking at.

Forty-some years later, I'm still doing the same thing, just with a blog instead of a slide projector, and a global audience instead of six neighbors on a Tuesday night.

Turns out I didn't start this at 67. I started it decades before I had a word for it.

What did you build a system for, long before it had a name?

09/09/2026

Andy continues her story. This time: the years she spent in Iraq.

My dad used to jump in the car with my mom and announce - today we're going on a trip! One of our favorite spots was the Arch of Ctesiphon, Taq Kasra (Taq-i Kisra), and I'm glad to hear it's still standing today.

As a little girl - or big girl, really, by then - I didn't think much of architectural marvels like this. Turns out, if the sources are right, it's the largest free-standing brick vault and arch in the world, part of a Sassanid palace complex, 37 meters high and 26 meters wide. It sits about 30 km south of Baghdad, where I grew into my teens, had my first love (though I'm not totally sure - I vaguely remember someone from kindergarten too) between 1969 and 1973. It's the only building still standing from the ancient city of Ctesiphon.

As for its condition: in 2019 and 2020, parts of the vault collapsed. Rain, material fatigue, and clumsy old restoration did the damage, not war. Since then the ALIPH Foundation has been helping Iraqi authorities assess it and shore it up, including a digital 3D scan of the whole site.

The photo has faded a bit, but that's Taq Kasra - the gateway of a Sassanid palace from Ctesiphon, once the Persian capital, just south of today's Baghdad, near al-Madain.

It's about 1700 years old. So when this photo was taken, between 1969 and 1973, it was already ancient. Digging further, I learned it was once the palace of the capital, first of the Parthian and then the Sassanid Empire, a rival in splendor to Rome and Constantinople.

I stood in that place as a girl. It's still standing today - in a state of emergency, with international organizations racing to save it from collapse.

If anyone has a recent photo, I'd love it if you dropped it in the comments. This is all I have... maybe more will turn up.

09/09/2026

"Could you do this for me?" - you ask about one thing, it works, you ask something a bit harder next, and one day you realize you're working completely differently than you were a couple of weeks ago.

I read a survey result today, and I was surprised how tangible it was - what people actually want AI help with.

Participants at a workshop described, in their own words, the specific task they'd hand off to an AI. Not vague "make my company smarter" stuff - very concrete, everyday work. Here's what came out of it:

→ Managing email, drafting replies - 25%. Sorting inboxes, answering the same handful of recurring questions over and over.

→ Reports and dashboards - 16%. Usually the same template, just new numbers, month after month.

→ Posts, ad copy, content creation - 14%.

→ Contracts and official documents - 13%.

→ Copying data into spreadsheets (from PDFs, invoices, screenshots) - 13%. This was the most surprising one to me - so many people still do this by hand, daily or monthly.

→ Putting together quotes and proposals - 8%.

What really struck me: nobody's trying to outsource complex, creative decisions. It's repetitive, time-consuming, but mechanizable work. Exactly what AI is best at.

For me, this plays out very concretely: in August alone I started 118 sessions with Claude, and out of all those workflows, around 20 have become skills I now use repeatedly in my actual work.

And here's the part that matters most: I stumbled into this completely by accident. I never sat down to plan out an "AI strategy." I just kept asking, "could you do this for me?" - and it built itself from there.

Meanwhile, my own usage has long since outgrown the tasks on that list - I'm working with Claude at a far more advanced level than what it shows. Which says something too: this isn't a sudden leap, it's a gradual, almost invisible learning curve. You ask about one thing, it works, you ask something a bit harder next, and one day you realize you're working completely differently than you were a couple of weeks ago.

Andy, the senior digital monad

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30/08/2026

Last year, two of my nomad stations were Paris too, and I just got back home from this year's Paris chapter as well.

The French are cunning: look through dozens of rooms wallpapered ceiling-high with paintings that mean absolutely nothing to you, get dizzy from the pointless greed swarming with the collecting passion of the bourgeois petty-kings who exploited the people - just so you can reach the room that actually interested you (me): the Galérie des Glaces (that is, the Hall of Mirrors).

With a backpack on my back, a small tripod in my hand, within a few minutes I realized: this is not simply a tourist attraction here, it's half a photo studio. Girls, women, in extravagant dresses, in high heels, made up to perfection, spinning in front of the mirrors for someone's camera. And there I stood in sneakers, after 15,000 steps that day, trying not to walk into anyone's shot.

The light, the gilding, the infinity of the mirrors - immeasurable wealth and ornament, splendor evoking bygone times, and within it, dresses that are works of art and makeup representing the modern world, so that eventually the photo gets published in some women's magazine, with the smile - which sometimes comes naturally, sometimes is forced .... the nightmare of unfortunate photographers ....

If someone goes to Versailles, don't just look at the room - bring a beautiful dress too. There, everyone can be a star for five minutes.

29/08/2026

AI's miracle? An ad stopped my scroll this morning. "Create your eBook in 3 minutes." A stack of pretty covers, $27, lifetime access.

I looked at it long enough to figure out what's actually being sold.

Let's see clearly: the AI doesn't write your ebook. It only dresses up whatever you already have and hands it back looking like a product, yes - maybe - in 3 minutes (not sure even).

What the ad skips: if you don't already have years of writing, testing, figuring out what you actually know, there's nothing for the AI to dress up. The 3 minutes only work because of everything that came before them.

I've been building my own "everything before" for two years now. Blog posts, patterns, structure, voice rules, all written down long before any AI touched them. The AI got fast. The material still took time.

So here's my honest question: are these tools selling you speed, or quietly reminding you how much you still have to build first?

17/01/2026

MY LESSONS, YOUR START – HOW COMMUNITY PORTAL LAUNCHED

Months of planning and daily work shaped the heart, platforms, and spirit of the community — lived and built by me at 67, for fellow senior digital nomads. My lessons, your start - how community portal launched

17/01/2026

The Senior Digital Nomad’s Year-End Audit Framework. Guide to: Close. Reflect. Reset.

Before stepping into a new year of flights, clients, and deadlines, hit pause. This guide walks senior digital nomads through the full year-end close. Close. Reflect. Reset.