Helen and Peter in Portugal

Times, they are a changing.   Fibre optic is coming to Pera, yes our little village is going global and the sales people from Portugal Telecom (PT) have been round!    We are lucky, I think PT ran out of fibre optic cable and Pera is the end of the line!   (It’s the same (I hear) for the mains drains, anything above Pera is not connected). In fact large towns like Figueira da Foz are without fibre optic because the law in Portugal has recently changed to allow any provider the opportunity to 'rent' the lines of PT.  So, what have PT done?  They've stopped putting in the lines of course!    A law which is suppose to benefit everyone,  gives consumers choice and adds some competition to the marketplace, has backfired a little and the result is a deadlock that ends up stalling progress! So with a promise of a whopping 30mb speed guaranteed we signed up!   Now we wait for the change-over and for the obl...

Last year Peter bought himself a motorbike.   It took months of looking in every motor-repair shop in Central Portugal to find it.     Motor-repair shops either stock brand new scooters, usually called ‘Sprints’ or ‘Cities’ in an ill-placed homage to the 1980s it appears.   These great plastic things cost £2000 are about a 50cc and go about 20 miles an hour.   With two of us on the back we’d never make it up the hill to Coentral, let alone anywhere else! The other thing filling these motor-repair shops are ancient motorbikes, mostly in bits, in need of much love.   These bikes seem to be permanent exhibits at every repair shop, relics of bikes, bits missing, crash victims the whole lot.    When we asked in these shops if they had anything for sale, it turns out that these bikes are semi-permanent displays, we were told on many occasions ‘no, it’s in for repair’ but these repair seems to take years! I think Peter had images of bikin...

After what felt like weeks of rain the sun came out....BBQs, drinks on the patio, mosquitos, lizards and a little sun-burn.  Peter put his tender plants out, things started growing fast.  Then the world turned up-side-down and the cold came back.  Monday was about 12 degrees in the day, blinking freezing.  The fire was put on at night and I have been ramping up the sex appeal by sleeping in my fleece! Today though the world has returned to normal, the sun has come out and it's lovely out there.  So to celebrate I've been taking some garden pictures....  Peter without realising gave me a complement; 'you couldn't wish for a better flower bed' he said...without realising that there is an awful lot of work, weeding, thinning and re-planting gone into it. I soon told him! I love these flowers - no idea what they are  Peter and Lord.  Everything in the garden is moving so Lord is hunting lizards, mice and snakes  These tiny flower-...

A day trip to Lisbon with our Dutch neighbours Ferrie and Ingrid was planned.   Ferrie had to go to the Dutch Embassy to sort out his passport, while Peter and I wanted to go to the super Chinese supermarket we know in the downtown area of Lisbon. In a city where people queue for tins of sardines, we wanted to buy noodles, sweet chili sauce and shrimp paste (not items normally found in your average Portuguese supermarket, where flour tortillas are considered risky).   A coffee break on the drive into Lisbon (just 2.5 hours away) we realised that Ferrie had left his phone at home!   Not to worry, Ingrid had her phone with her .    The plan was to part company at the Embassy, for Peter and I to take a walk from one side of town to another, stopping for much needed Sargres (beer) on the way and for us all to meet up in the downtown district once our Dutch friends had driven over and called us.   An hour passed and Peter and I we...

This is not a new subject for those Central Portugal bloggers, but it’s my version and I’ve been meaning to show off this very special (‘special’) part of Castanheira de Pera for quite a while now. A friend, Emma, has already written one of the best blogs about our town on her blog, Emma's House in Portugal – read it here. Rightful Castanheirense (those born in Castanheira de Pera) were a very proud bunch.   In their lifetime they have seen the town change from flourishing to slightly sad (like Brighton about 30 years ago before it got good again – you know what I mean).     Castanheria de Pera is a town built on wool, from socks to traditional hats the town was once full of mills powered by the Pera stream.   Sadly, a walk along the stream at the back of town shows the decline of this industry, abandoned mills almost litter you pathway.   The whole industry replaced by cheaper imports. But despite this sad decline, Castinheria de Pera is not so diffe...

It was a cold and windy night and the power went off.   Plunged into darkness (well, we were asleep so it was dark anyway, but I’m trying to create a mood here). Power cuts are pretty common in Portugal, the electricity wires run along the forests strung from poles so every so often a tree hits a power line and out goes the supply for a short time.    However last Friday we had a storm, a big storm and our power supply was off for four days and it’s only just stopped raining.   It is only when your electric supply is out when you realise that almost your whole life depends on having this supply.    No internet means no work, no phone or mobile reception means no phoning to check the situation, no TV means a disaster! On Saturday we plugged in our gas cooking rings, got the candles ready and went off to a lunch given in a local social club.   How they catered for 60 people with no electricity is beyond me (even if it was cold and you had a...

I’ve been debating whether to write this blog entry as death is one of those strange topics.   But the custom of notifying local people that someone has died by stapling notices up around town has had me hooked since we first got here. We all know we live in an aging population, well triple that for Pera!    Seriously when our neighbours moved here with their two young girls I think it was the first young children in Pera for years.   Simply by attending events, even I, manage to make the average age a little lower!   So, as in all areas the only people having a boom in this recession is the undertaker!    A death is announced (not by a notice in the paper as Agatha Christie announced) by posters going up around town, with the details, date of the funeral and often a photo of that person looking so young and healthy that I don’t recognise them!   Funerals happen pretty quickly round here.   Within a couple of days you are sleeping i...