Tarte de nata

If you have been part of the recent rush on Lisbon or Porto, you'll likely have eaten pastel de nata and drunk coffee in an open air café. I recreated it in Maputo with the larger cousin, tarte de nata. It was tasty and judging by the number of Portuguese Mozambicans and cafés with this sort of fare, colonial era cuisine is popular enough to cling on.

A useful day of meeting our key government partner and a very helpful contact called Dina who was advising me on NGO registrations, staff employment and work permits. She was brimming with useful ideas about scoping office spaces and Portuguese teachers and somehow has wangled me a free pass to a spinning class at her gym tomorrow. A useful woman to know, with a Mozambican mother and British father, whose family is from the Southport area. Dina is getting married in Lisbon in August and I was imagining a bunch of Lancastrians rocking up and feasting on pastéis de nata.

Also I was passed some key documents from our former country representative that I need to pore through to understand past hoops we've navigated. Poring is tricky with a rudimentary grasp of written Portuguese, but an appreciation of how to manoeuvre around NGO rules and regulations is slowly dawning.