10th May CASTELO BRANCO

I didn’t sleep well; I was too excited, I had so many images of Donkey Quinta (NO!!! Fonte Dos Clerigos) swarming inside in my head, what it looks like now, what it will look like with animals, how we’re going to design the house. We are so lucky!

It was exceedingly hot when we went to bed but by the early hours it had cooled off rather a lot and although I wanted the extra bed clothes I couldn’t quite find the impetus to get out of bed and fetch any – so I just lay there in a chilly excited state listening to the birds singing; they literally sing all night here, they don’t stop when it’s dark, they are still singing full out at midnight and then the dawn chorus starts around 5.30 a.m. – the birds are joined by more birds (including cockerels), frogs, dogs, cicadas and sheep bells and ......... anything else that can make a noise, for about an hour there’s this cacophony of sound, it’s actually quite soothing.

This morning we opened a Portuguese bank account, it was all very easy; then we went into the estate agents, to get copies of the paperwork for the farm, so that we can get the legal side of the process checked out by a solicitor – we need to confirm that the land actually belongs to the seller and that there are no outstanding debts/mortgages on it (if there were WE would become liable for them once we owned the farm). The estate agent informed us that the temperature was going to climb to 35°!!! Today has been VERY hot.

Then we phoned our British bank and asked them to transfer 90000€ (no, not all for the farm we need to buy a vehicle (extremely expensive in Portugal), a generator and to have the roof replaced) to our Portuguese bank, it’s going to take at least 3 working days (it’s out of our British account already – where is it? somewhere in the internet! And why does it take so long, it’s not as if the money is physically shifted from bank to bank) it’s quite worrying waiting for it to arrive in our new account; we could have completed by the end of next week; I keep writing this, oh I do hope my next week post doesn’t start “Huh, and I thought we would have been completed by now but ........”.

It’s been hotter today, at 10 p.m. it was still 31°C – that’s hot.