25th September FONTE DOS CLERIGOS

It was cold today; really cold, I had on three top layers and my boots and was still chilly. Before class we, along with Pam & Mark, met up with Pastor Allen to start sorting out the telegraph poles. Mark used his Landrover with straps attached to the tow bar to pull selected poles out of a huge pile of discarded poles (which, of course, I was worried might roll apart and crush one of us!).

We then went to see Augusto (the salesman who sold us the truck who now works for VW); for some reason he had our documents, why didn’t they get sent to us? Anyway they were in the correct name, so we could now pay for our road tax, and be legal, we were happy ........ for a while!

We had our Portuguese lesson today, as the Pastor and his wife are away for the next few days; it was so much better than last week, we learnt about adjectives (which are gender sensitive) and adverbs (which are gender neutral) and I think I understood – how I wish I had taken more notice in my English language class all those years ago!

After lunch we went along to the Fiscal Office to pay our road tax; the good news was that it had the correct name on the computer, so we could pay the tax; the bad news was that we could also pay the fine we had accrued for late payment of road tax!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How many times did we go to that bloody office to try to pay our road tax? And every time their computer said “no”; and unfortunately there was nobody we could appeal to, to right the unfairness of it all – it wasn’t the actual fine, of 25€ (50% of the actual road tax), it’s the principal that makes me so cross. Brett says I’ve got to forget about it now, but it bloody well niggles – shitty little bureaucrats!

It started raining this afternoon and carried on all evening; about an inch was forecast. We started watching “Transformers” after about 40 mins, with nearly another 2 hours to go, we abandoned it – I couldn’t tell who were the good robots and who were the bad (apart from the ice cream van – good and little ‘gremlin’ type robots – bad). It was still raining when we went to bed, about 9.30; it’s dark well before 8.00 now.