We went on March 4, 2023 to visit the Knowledge Pavilion, in Lisbon, which is a super interesting science center for children and adults too.
Lunch
We left Cascais around 11am and arrived close to lunchtime in the Parque das Nações area. We chose the Italian restaurant Mother Earth, which had a good rating on Trip Advisor but which, to our surprise, was completely empty. It's very simple, it looks like a weekday restaurant, you know? I found the pasta menu to be quite limited, with only one pasta option and one lasagna, but everything we ordered was delicious.
Tickets
We walked around the area a bit and after Juju fell asleep in the stroller, we decided to go into the Pavilion and paid 28 euros for the 3 of us (Ju doesn't pay because of her age). See ticket prices here.
Oh, and be careful, the ticket office is inside the store that has incredible toys that will make your child want them all!!! lol
Inside the Pavilion
Right at the entrance we come across a Foucault's pendulum. Patrick was completely hypnotized by its movement and we spent a long time there waiting for the sticks to fall with the impact of the pendulum.
Then we went exploring the Dinosaur Exhibition and to my pride, the little one knew the names of most of them. I thought it was really cool that they were life-size, moved and made sounds. It made the experience more interesting than the one in Dino Park, in Lourinhã.
We then passed by Augmented Workshop, we played a little and then took the elevator to the top floor. By the way, we had a baby stroller with us but I saw a lot of people using the elevator unnecessarily. People, climbing stairs every now and then is good! lol
When we got up there, we saw a kid riding a bike bicycle on a rope with a safety net underneath and Patrick immediately got excited. I was excited for him, but of course I was nervous in case something went wrong. Since he was too small for the bike, he couldn't pedal, but he put his feet where the woman indicated and she made the movement of pushing and pulling the bike with the rope. We were all impressed by his courage! The name of the toy is Flying Bicycle.
The famous Tcharan
Then we entered a giant room called Tcharan with amazing toys for little ones. He was AMAZED by the house under construction and spent almost 2 hours playing at being an engineer/bricklayer there with kids his age. I sat there watching, taking pictures, filming and catching up on my reading on my Kindle. What an amazing toy! To this day, 1 month later, he talks about this toy…
When he finally got tired, he wanted to explore the rest of the space and we could see how delighted he was with so many new things. We played with practically all the options available and that's when Juju decided to wake up. It was more than 2 hours of nap!
She also played in some places, always very curious but scared at the same time. She wanted to be held all the time and we were getting tired. We gave her snacks and when they were both very tired, we decided to go home even without seeing the rest of the place.
We'll have to come back one day to see the Fishanarium, which I tried to show Juju but she was scared, and also the experiment room. Of course we will return to the house under construction too!
That was it!
If you want to know more about what to do with children in Portugal, see this summary post here. See you next time!
