Whoop whoop! It’s been a fantastic day!
Monday is our day in the city – Castelo Branco, which translates as White Castle but sounds so much better than that in Portuguese! Last week I called it a town, in error, on my post. It somehow doesn’t feel like a city but it has a cathedral which I think is one of the qualifications isn’t it? Some fun facts… The Castelo Branco municipality is a little larger than Greater Manchester and a little smaller than London but its population at 52,000 is less than 2% of the population of Manchester. The population density of the area we live in is less than that of the Scottish Highlands, as it’s 7 people per square kilometre. Who knew!
Now back to our day… If you’ve followed the electricity story then you’ll know that we were waiting for the electrician to certify and advise the distributor that all the work was good, and for it to be updated on the computer system. We went into the offices of E-Redes in anticipation and hey presto, it’s on the system! We did a little happy dance! So off we went to EDP, the electricity supplier, to set up the contract. Last week’s trial run meant we had all the paperwork to hand. It was the same guy Marco who served us again and within 30 minutes, the contract was signed. Phil ‘whooped’. That brought a grin to Marco’s face as I’m not sure they’re used to customers being so happy with them! Then, as if that wasn’t good enough, a short time later we got a text to say the installers would come tomorrow to switch the electric on! We celebrated with a breakfast including chocolate Nutella croissant!
The city is very easy and quick to drive across and we’ve never encountered a traffic jam. The rest of the day was spent criss crossing the city going from one DIY and builder’s merchant to another picking up things we needed. Phil is planning a new project – to make an enclosed area for Joey to run in and where he could stay in his posh new kennel if we go out and need to leave him at home. We picked up 25m of fencing and 14 wooden fence posts. We carefully piled them up in Tut so that Joey had half the floor space still to lie on during the hour’s journey home. However, it was all in vain as he decided to sleep on top of the wire fencing all the way home. Whatever! We left home at 9.30am and got back at 6pm so it’s been a long day. Tomorrow’s looking like a proper hair drying rather than an air drying day for me…when the electric is on. How exciting! Night all.