🇲🇳 Mongolia vs 🇵🇹 Portugal: One Country Empties Its Cities Every Weekend, the Other Just Falls Asleep

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Two nations, two entirely different definitions of "getting away from it all." In Mongolia, the weekend means loading a truck with a tent, a slaughtered sheep, and three generations of relatives, then vanishing into a landscape so empty it makes your soul feel appropriately small. In Portugal, the weekend means the entire country agreeing, without discussion, to close everything and take a nap. Both are valid life philosophies. Only one of them will strand you outside a shuttered pharmacy at 2pm on a Sunday, desperate and unmedicated.

I've lived enough places to know that "leisure" is a culturally loaded word, and nowhere does it diverge more violently than between a nomadic steppe nation that treats the outdoors as a birthright and a coastal European country that treats stillness as a competitive sport. Buckle up — or rather, don't, because where you're going, seatbelts are a suggestion.

Do's & Don'ts

🇲🇳 Mongolia

🇵🇹 Portugal

Mongolia: The Weekend Is a Departure, Not a Pause

Mongolians don't relax in place. The entire concept of "staying in the city on a day off" reads, to most Ulaanbaatar residents, like a small tragedy. The moment Friday afternoon arrives, a significant percentage of the capital's population — which is to say, nearly half the country's entire population, since Ulaanbaatar holds an outsized share of it — begins the ritual migration toward the countryside. Not a park. Not a suburb. The actual, unbroken, borderline-cinematic steppe.

This isn't a quirky cultural footnote; it's closer to a national reflex, and understandably so, given that most families are only two or three generations removed from a fully nomadic life. Grandparents still know how to erect a ger in under an hour. Cousins still know which valley has better grazing. The country's road network doesn't so much connect destinations as suggest directions, and Mongolians treat this as liberating rather than limiting — a rugged 4x4 and a full tank of fuel is considered adequate weekend planning.

What foreigners find disarming is the sheer scale of hospitality involved. Show up anywhere near a ger with a car that's clearly struggling, and you will be fed, watered, and possibly rehomed for the night before you've finished explaining you're just passing through. Refuse the fermented mare's milk — airag — and you'll be gently but firmly re-offered it, because leisure in Mongolia is inseparable from generosity, and generosity is not optional.

Then there's Naadam, the summer festival of wrestling, archery, and horse racing that turns an already outdoor-obsessed culture into something closer to a national fever dream. Entire weekends are organised around it. Children ride horses competitively at distances that would alarm most Western parents into a support group. Nobody apologises for any of this, because nobody thinks there's anything to apologise for.

What you won't find is quiet. Mongolian leisure is loud, physical, and communal — singing, wrestling, drinking, arguing about horses. If your idea of a weekend is a candle and a novel, you will find the countryside profoundly unrelaxing. If your idea of a weekend is feeling extremely alive and slightly concussed, you're in exactly the right country.

Portugal: The Weekend Is a National Nap

Portugal's approach to leisure is the philosophical opposite, and it starts with an uncomfortable truth: this is a country that shuts down. Not dramatically, not all at once — just steadily, store by store, street by street, until by Sunday afternoon you could fire a cannon down most residential streets and hit nothing but a stray cat and someone's abandoned espresso cup.

The lunch is the load-bearing wall of the entire Portuguese weekend. Two hours is a bare minimum. Three courses is standard. Grilled fish, a carafe of vinho verde, bread, olives, and a conversation that wanders through at least four unrelated topics before anyone thinks about the bill. Rushing this is not merely bad manners — it is, to most Portuguese hosts, faintly tragic, evidence that you haven't yet learned how to live.

Sundays belong to the coast, regardless of season. Families pack into cars and crawl along the A1 toward Cascais, Comporta, or wherever the tide is fashionable that year, less for the swimming than for the ritual of being near water while doing very little in it. The traffic is legendary and entirely self-inflicted; everyone complains about it and everyone participates in it anyway, because staying home would mean admitting defeat to the calendar.

And then there's the closing. Small-town Portugal takes Sunday shutdown seriously enough that entire commercial districts simply cease to exist for a day. Pharmacies rotate on-duty schedules like it's a wartime rationing system. Tourists who assume "Europe" means "convenience" learn, usually around 4pm on an empty stomach, that Portugal did not get that memo.

The upside is a weekend that actually feels like rest rather than an additional obligation to optimise. Nobody in Lisbon is checking a fitness tracker to see if their Sunday walk hit a step goal. The goal is the lunch, the nap, the eventual, unhurried stroll — and if you can't slow down to meet that pace, Portugal will simply wait you out.

The Verdict

Mongolia wins on sheer audacity — nowhere else turns "day off" into "return to the steppe of your ancestors" with a straight face. But Portugal wins on actual, physiological rest. Mongolians come back from the weekend sunburnt, saddle-sore, and mildly hungover on fermented dairy; Portuguese come back from the weekend simply... rested, which is, radically, the entire point of a weekend. If you want adventure, go east. If you want to remember what a nervous system feels like when it isn't under assault, go west. I know which one my knees prefer these days, and it isn't the one with the horses.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/Mongolia — paraphrased: showed up to a ger camp uninvited after my car broke down, ended up staying two nights and leaving with more luggage than I arrived with, entirely food.

Internations Lisbon — paraphrased: moved here thinking "closed on Sundays" meant a few shops. It means the concept of urgency itself takes the day off.

expat.com Portugal — paraphrased: learned the hard way that a "quick lunch" invitation from a Portuguese colleague is a three-hour commitment with no early exit clause.

Conclusion

Neither country will apologise for how it spends its days off, and that's precisely why both are worth experiencing properly rather than performatively. Mongolia will teach you that leisure can be vast, physical, and slightly terrifying in the best way. Portugal will teach you that doing nothing is a skill most of the world has forgotten how to practise. Try to import either one wholesale into your home country and you'll be met with blank stares — nobody wants a three-hour lunch on a Tuesday, and fewer still want to be handed fermented milk by a stranger with a horse. But borrow the underlying instinct — commit fully to rest, whatever form it takes — and you'll return from any weekend, anywhere, having actually had one.