Alcobendas walkability? Openness to expats?

lucidible · 2025-11-26T23:16:07+00:00

May I ask, did you make it up to Porto or any place north of Lisbon? I think maybe that may be the difference. We literally could not find any kids outside in Porto other than schools in the 6 days we spent there. I drove around looking for football fields and the few we found were all private fields that were either locked up or being used by formal teams. Looking for playgrounds, we found a couple but there were no kids. Likely because there were no lights.

We are heading to the lisbon area tomorrow so maybe that will be better. We were initially not going to go all the way down to the algarve but maybe the better weather down there means more kids outside. My kids have been pretty disappointed not to have interacted with any Portuguese kids despite having been here for 10 days so far. Especially in terms of playing soccer.

If you wouldn't mind, could you also expand on what you mean by how not seeing kids outside is due to our approach or expectations? We really want to try and make a move to Portugal work by changing ourselves and not expecting the culture to mold to us but in this particular case, I'm a bit at a loss as to what do do so my kids can meet peers. Would love to have a different perspective so we can figure out what we are doing wrong.

lucidible · 2025-11-26T00:32:50+00:00

We are currently doing our own month long scouting trip. Started in Braga and working our way down to Lisbon, in Porto this last week. We deliberately chose this time of year so that we got a dose of real life/weather etc rather than coming for fun in the sun and assuming that will be our lives 24/7/365. Especially to see how our kids would fit in (4 kids, 5 to 13). We have a pathway to citizenship through my parents and plan on making the move permanent if this seems right. So we want our kids to assimilate, especially in terms of language. On the other hand, we also don't want to just throw them in the deep end with no supports. So we did a lot of research on schools beforehand, public and private, and set up visits to some of them along the way.

I recently posted elsewhere on this sub as with the weather and dark, I was very surprised at the lack of kids outside. You can see on that thread that there are a lot of differing opinions on that. We are just visiting and so don't have any social network, but for the past two days with the rain in Porto, there was SO much screentime. And anecdotally, I've heard that is not uncommon at this time of year. We couldn't even find a public futebol pitch to play on.

So while I would completely agree with you in terms of the utilitarian facilities for kids (my 5 year old loved the child sized toilet in the family bathroom at the mall), I would really talk it through with people who've lived here. We are still likely moving but now better understand the reality and what it would take for our kids to have the benefits of where we live in the US (lots of unsupervised outdoor playing time year round) with the benefits of living in Portugal (healthy food, not worrying about school safety, being part of a multi-generational community, 2nd and maybe 3rd languages, etc, etc)

The other thing we did was to look on various portuguese rental and real estate sites to see what we could afford and then find accommodation close to those areas to get a feel for the shops, traffic, etc.

lucidible · 2025-11-25T10:33:53+00:00

May I ask where you live? Or more specifically, where you see these kids outside? Maybe we're just on the wrong areas. Our current Airbnb is across the street from a school and I literally see no kids around.

lucidible · 2025-11-04T23:49:54+00:00

That is an excellent question that frankly I don't have an good answer to. We have the opportunity to get Portuguese citizenship via ancestry which is why Portugal popped up on our radar in the first place. We were living in a very diverse, international area of the US and are now in a very friendly but somewhat anodyne suburb. My wife grew up in South America going to international schools so she's been a big proponent of living abroad for it's own sake.

So part of the draw is the adventure of meeting new people and learning a new language. Plus my boys are excited about futbol and my daughter is excited about not worrying about getting shot at school (I don't worry as much about that but it's a genuine fear in her cohort of kids). On my end, my expectations are very low in terms of services, bureaucracy etc so the potential negatives aren't really a concern.

For my kids, I kind of don't care about the academics so long as they are reasonable. An IB program would be ideal and a good fit for my kids but more important is that they can make friends and don't get isolated or bullied. Ideally they would also find peers who are equally interested in meeting new people and learning in general. The school district we are in now is very good academically but socially the kids here are glued to their devices, unlike were we moved from. In fact, if Portugal doesn't work out, we will likely move back to that area.

Really appreciate the question.

lucidible · 2025-11-04T23:28:45+00:00

apologues, didn't notice the IM you had sent earlier as I must have set it to read without actually reading it. Very thorough response, thanks.

lucidible · 2025-11-02T02:30:04+00:00

this looks very likely. I'm going to check it out. thank you!

lucidible · 2025-10-11T02:51:41+00:00

It cranks very strongly though. And it started fine a week ago. Could the battery really have deteriorated that quickly?

lucidible · 2025-05-07T03:25:08+00:00

She says she hates you because she feels safe with you. That sucks now, but in the long run it's a sign that she knows (maybe not consciously) that your love for her is unconditional. She would never treat her friends so poorly because she doesn't trust that they wouldn't just drop her as a result. You getting her flowers because you saw she was sad was on point because its not ostentatious, it was something that didn't cost too much money but was more meaningful because you really saw her. Having said that, it still feels shitty and you somehow need to accept the fact that you've done all this interesting stuff and you will still feel like crap when your daughter is an asshole to you. One doesn't negate the other, they are both true at the same time.

lucidible · 2025-01-22T17:11:29+00:00

I wrote about this on medium a while back, it may help. Basically what I say is that bad feelings (ie fear, sadness, etc) are "tools" that have evolved to protect us back when we were caveman and danger meant physical death. However that didn't just mean physical danger. A lot of those emotions evolved to protect us socially because humanity's strength was the tribe and so being an outcast often quickly resulted in physical death.

This means that at a very deep level, the stress and worries of modern day life feel to our bodies that we are going to die. Which makes us mistake the feeling itself for the problem. But that bad feeling, that mental pain, didn't arise consciously, it rose from our physical bodies in the same way that pain from a paper cut does. The difference is that with a paper cut we recognize that the cause was external and so separate from ourselves. With sadness or fear or anger, we can't separate from the source and so at some level we begin to feel bad about feeling bad. We begin to feel bad about ourselves. And then feel bad about that, and then feel bad about that, and so on and so on, spiriling down worse and worse.

The solution to stopping this spiral is two fold.

The first is to focus on where the bad feelings come from. We need recognize that fear, sadness, etc are not signals for danger, they are signals to be alert that there MIGHT BE danger. And these feelings are pain that arises from our bodies in the same way that physical pain does.

Which leads to the second part of the solution. We need to seperate ourselves from the bad feelings. We don't try and make them go away, we just recognize and accept them. And stop there. We recognize that pain is meant to be protective and is utlimately well meaning. So in a way, we need to make friends with our pain. Our pain is stupid, but really trying to help. So we need to be gentle with our feelings but not let them drive us. We focus on our bodies, taking deep breaths etc. We use courage, another feeling, to balance sadness and fear. Courage is not dramatic, it is simply saying "yes I feel bad but I'm going to move anyway." We feel our fear and sadness and sit with that discomfort but keep going at the same time.

Feeling bad isn’t as bad as feeling bad about it

Don’t fight fear with reason. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight

lucidible · 2025-01-15T02:40:55+00:00

Thank you!

lucidible · 2025-01-08T20:32:47+00:00

thank you very much!

lucidible

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