Portugal

Portugal is on the UKs green list. Despite that we won’t be travelling to Portugal any time soon so instead we decided to pretend to travel to Portugal using the theme to enjoy the weekend with the kids! We had a wonderful day of custard tarts, mini golf, football, cork creations and salted cod. Now I really want to go for real!

Football

Freddie plays football every Saturday morning, but as we were pretending to be in Portugal, and because the Portuguese love football I opted to dress him in a Portuguese football kit! It reminded me of the connection between Portugal and Brazil, as on our pretend Brazil day last year we took a football down to the beach. Freddie is very shy and this is only his first time at football training so we were so proud of him for joining in and enjoying it.

Golf

I know that Portugal has some of the best golf courses in the world and so we headed to the local Mini Golf to keep the kids on theme. Mark started by filling in the score card optimistically but it soon became apparent that the kids were just hitting the balls everywhere. So we have up on the scores and focussed on the fun. The sun was actually shining and we loved being outside!

Rancho dancing

I love to learn the national dances of a country! (We have tried Bollywood dancing in pretend India and we learned the Siva Samoa too in pretend Samoa). I couldn’t find an instructional video for the Rancho but we gave it a go anyway copying the moves on the video. Penny was very interested in the costumes too.

Cork creations and Roosters from portugAl

I bought some cheap cork coasters on EBay after finding out that Portugal is home to about 34% the worlds cork forests and produces more than 50% of the world’s supply of cork. We decided to decorate them with sharpies and copied some of Portuguese images that we found online. Penny is very artistic and she loves anything creative. Freddie was also very happy to colour his cork in – I’m not sure how Portuguese his stickers were though!

Café Porto

Aside from the fact that we love to eat the food associated with the place we are travelling to, I also keen as lockdown eases to support small and local businesses. As such I was delighted to discover this Portuguese restaurant right in the heart of my home town of Liverpool. The food was so authentic to the theme and I ate sardines with salted cod. Penny tried most of the food and she really liked the calamari. As an extra bonus they also had Portuguese beer, wine and soft drinks for the kids. Penny adored her fizzy pineapple drink.

Pastéis de Nata

I think that everyone that I mentioned Portugal too mentioned these delicious little custard tarts and we were lucky enough to discover them in our local supermarket, as well as having second helpings later in the day as we ate out. The ones we had in the restaurant were crispy, hot and so delicious. The kids thought they were the best bit of the whole theme. They seem very widely available but if you are feeling brave you could also try this recipe to bake your own.

The Eurovision Song Contest

It so happened that we pretend travelled to Portugal on the day of the Eurovision! I have always loved the Eurovision and have some wonderful memories of making scoring cards and watching it with my sister. This year we with the kids backed Portugal (naturally on theme) and luckily I actually really really liked their entry in fact it was Freddie’s genuine favourite. Frankly, it was a relief not to have to support the U.K.!!

And that was our day. We were so glad that we had a weekend of pretend travel to Portugal.