The Hand Family in Portugal

It’s funny. Until yesterday, I actually didn’t have an idea for my “M is for” post at all. Then, much like the proverbial bus/train, 2 came along at once! First, along came “Money”. I toyed with the idea for a while but wasn’t really convinced that it was really what I wanted to blog about. [...]

Really, how could I have chosen anything else? L is for Lifestyle When people ask us why we moved to Portugal, we come out with a whole list of reasons but, for the most part, they can all be grouped under one overall title – Lifestyle. Moving to a country which is far deeper into [...]

We’ve had some lovely weather over the past couple of days. We’ve had some pretty dodgy weather beforehand, mind you, but now that the UK tourists have gone home (kids are back at school in the UK now – ours have been back a week already here in PT!) the weather is doing as it [...]

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” George Bernard Shaw He had something there, I think. As a family who, 2 years ago, made a huge step towards moving to a completely different country and way of life, you can be assured that we (well, I!) spent much time researching ev

It’s weird. I had some free time scheduled for this evening so I thought I’d come on here and see if I could inspire myself to do a “J is for.. ” post. I had several options and hadn’t really decided which one I was going to choose. Just before Eliot went to bed, he [...]

As promised, I took some photos of Eliot’s recent bedroom makeover. I mentioned before that our property is a rental so, as every rental home seems to, it has the obligatory “white walls all round”. This is great for making your home looks bright, airy and clean. Well, until you move a young boy int

I’m not sure if it’s an obvious one or not but I did struggle to come up with anything more important to us, here in Portugal, than the whole language element, whether that be Portuguese (português) or English (inglês) So, here it is I is for Inglês Language is, of course, one of the biggest hurdles

There have been a few changes “Chez Hand” lately. They’ve been a long time coming and needed a lot of discussion, thought and deliberation, to say the least. Perhaps the biggest change is that I am soon not going to be doing the IT support and software testing  job that I have been doing for [...]