It was the draw of the Taça de Portugal on Saturday, the equivalent of the FA Cup in the UK. Like the FA Cup, premier league teams are drawn against ‘minnows’ from lower divisions, with the hope of causing a major upset. This year, Benfica has been drawn against… Oliveira do Bairro.

Oliveira is a small town near Oiã, about 20km from Aveiro, and they are in the II Divisão Série C, equivalent to the lower regions of the Conference League. To their credit, this is a national league, compared to Oiã, who are in the AF Aveiro – 1ª Divisão.

So we are looking at a major upset on 07 January at the Estadio de Luz in Lisbon. We went past the stadium in Oliveira today and, looking at the small stadium (but they do have a stadium), I suggested that there may well be more Benfica fans in Oliveira do Bairro than Oliveira fans…

The image, by the way, is of the Estadio de Luz, rather than Oliveira’s stadium, which is smaller, sandwiched between woodland and the local swimming pool.

I thought that no one would believe the rain in portugal, so here is an example… Boring, I know, but it has to be seen…

Not all of our new life in Portugal has been plain sailing. Although setting up our company, O Hub Venue Lda, and everything about the business has gone really well, we’ve hit an obstacle because selling the house in Plumstead has not gone according to plan.

 Originally the idea was to sell to a cash buyer, Gilltrust Homes, with the intention of completing at the end of August. We’d passed up a chance to sell to a really nice French couple as we were assured that a cash purchase was a sure thing, but it did not prove to be the case.

Things probably started to go pear-shaped even before we’d left the UK, as the buyer and their solicitor’s proved really elusive, always being out and not answering the phone to the estate agent’s or our solicitor. By 12 September the solicitor sent a threatening letter, and made several attempts to contact the buyer’s solicitor, but was told they were not available, and even when she tried to contact a senior partner to complain about their behaviour she was told she could not speak to anyone.

So the house went back on the market and fortunately we received a second offer within about a week. We had to put funds into the UK from our ‘Portugal pot.’ Everything went well to start with, but they pulled out over fears about an insurance claim that I made over the drains. The estate agent wasn’t sympathetic to my position and actually seemed to be taking the side of the buyer (who is paying them was my question) so at this point I thought I should be going to more agents.

I checked out yell.com for alternatives and two stood out, ‘Harrison Ingram’ and ‘Robinson Bellgrove & Jackson’. After emailing them both, got an email from RBJ but two calls from HI. Called them up and they seemed really ‘hungry’ for the sale – so decided to ask them to go and view the house with the intention of going ‘multi agency’. But after speaking again with the original agents, they still seemed to be blaming me for the loss of the second sale, so I thought it was time for a change and gave them notice that I wanted to change agent.

When the new agency took over, they found a buyer really quickly. The price was the same as the last offer but they wanted to exchange really quickly. The snag was that I’d have to come over to London to sign the contracts…

…and falls…

OK so today is a sunny day so far, but for the past week the country has been on yellow or orange alert, and it has done nothing but rain… and rain.

On the news are stories of flooding and images of houses filled with mud. Yesterday the TV interrupted the broadcast with special reports from around the country updating us of water rising in the north and south of the country.

Apparently, at the end of the summer Portugal was facing a drought, but now there is enough water in the reservoirs to last until 2008… until the fires start, that is…

Still at least the forecast for Tuesday looks good…

Technorati Profile

We’re listening to Top FM at the moment. It’s a local Aveiro station and a bit unusual in that there are no DJ’s just songs, jingles and adverts. They have a fairly limited playlist and they’ll mix up records throughout the day. So there will be a totally crap cover of Serge Gainsborough’s ‘J’taime’ – but in English and with Pan pipes, followed by Black Eyed Peas then Shayne Ward (really) then they’ll have a ‘retro-classic’ and a bit of rap, then soul… It’s as if they’ve go an iPod on shuffle and just plonked it in front of the microphone and gone off for a beer – or several.

At the moment they’re playing that hit that was big last year (you know, the heavily beeped and faded track with ’<beep> you, I don’t want you back’) at 10am on a Sunday morning – unedited, it’s actually ‘fuck you, you ho, I don’t want you back. What a difference, I didn’t realise how heavily it was cut but the unedited version is so much better. Now we’ve got Kasabian followed by Kelis (then a rap jingle) and now James Blunt… I never realised how profane James Blunt was in his songs, it’s all edited out. Listen to “Wisemen” – or even better watch the video – and spot the editing, or even in ‘Your Beautiful” he’s ‘fucking high’. James Blunt, not so boring after all.

Great stuff, Top FM, but it’s not on the web, nor on digital radio.

The population of Portugal, male and female, is divided by a passion for three football  teams, Sporting an Benfica, both in Lisbon, and FC Porto, from the north and the rivalry is intense. The. A survey on a Portuguese blog (http://diariodeumquiosque.blogspot.com/) gives a rough breakdown support for the teams. The colours on the figure are the team colours, although Sporting should actually be green stripes, like the Celtic strip. I’ve coloured the ‘others’ category in the colours of Beira Mar, the team from Aveiro that I have chosen to support (much to most people’s amusement – except when Beira Mar drew 3-3 with Sporting recently)

Beira Mar, which means ’sea side’, is the equivalent of Charlton in the Premier League – or perhaps Wigan (I could never come to terms with Wigan being a Premier League team. It doesn’t have the same ring to it alongside Arsenal or Man Utd, or Everton – or that other Merseyside team…)

Beira Mar have recently recruited a Brazilian International to their side, in the hope that he’ll push them out of the doldrums of the lower parts of the league. Unfortunately it transpires that he had a drug and women habit that made Maradona look like an amateur so I was suggesting that when they’d flown him in to talk about joining the team he’d flown over Aveiro and seen all of the salt pyramids and thought they were piles of cocaine.

At the moment Beira Mar are loitering in the bottom three of the Bwin league, the equivalent of the Premier League, with 7 points out of nine games – and are well below Benfica who are 6th, Sporting, who are 2nd, and FC Porto, who remain top. The photo is the Beira Mar stadium, which was bult for the Euro 2004 competition and is really fabulous.

At the other end of the scale is Oiã, the local team of the village where we live. They are not doing too badly, being sixth in their league (same as Benfica, eh?) but their fortunes are somewhat different. Oiã are sponsored by the local garden centre, and by an old people’s home, compared to Sporting and Benfica, say, who are sponsored by PT, the equivant of BT, and BES, one of the larger banks in Portugal.

The Olympic symbol in the badge reflects the fact that there is a former olympic stadium in Oiã, although the team don’t play there and no one is really sure what it was for. They also play in a quieter location, the stadium being in the middle of a woodland… They did really well at the weekend, though, beating the opposition 6-1!

While I was looking for the bitoque photo, I came across a photo of health and safety in Portugal, and it reminded me of something I’d seen in Aveiro.

The photo shows a Portuguese workman being forced to hang out of a window to repair an air conditioning machine. apparently some employers don’t provide the necessary health and safety equipment for them to do the job properly, so the employees have to ‘improvise’.

This reminded me of something I saw in Aveiro in October. Lina was getting her hair done, and I was having a wander around Aveiro. Outside the Forum, I saw the following scene… A man was standing in the bucket of a JCB drilling a hole in the side of the canal. Everyone around was paying absolutely no attention, it must be such a common experience, but for me I was dumbstruck, I am just pleased I had my camera.

At first glance it is failry innocuous, but when I zoomed in I noticed that the drill was electric and the man on the wall was casually holding and electric lead so the chap could drill safely. I had images of the wire or the drill falling into the canal and all of them going up in a puff of smoke. Or at least frying a load of fish…

I found this on Live Spaces, but I still like it… try it… 

Pick the month you were born:

• January–I kicked
• February–I loved
• March–I smoked
• April–I dry humped
• May–I choked on
• June–I murdered
• July–I did the Macarena with
• August–I had lunch with
• September–I danced with
• October–I sang to
• November–I yelled at
• December–I ran over

Pick the day (number) you were born on:

• 1—–a birdbath
• 2——-a monster
• 3——-a phone
• 4——-a fork
• 5——-a Mexican
• 6——-a gangster
• 7——-my cell phone
• 8——-my dog
• 9——-my best friends’ boyfriend
• 10——-my neighbour
• 11——-my science teacher
• 12——-a banana
• 13——-a fireman
• 14——-a stuffed animal
• 15——-a goat
• 16 ———a pickle
• 17——-your mum
• 18——-a spoon
• 19——-myself
• 20——-a baseball bat
• 21——-a ninja
• 22——-Chuck Norris
• 23——-a noodle
• 24——-a squirrel
• 25——-a football player
• 26——-my sister
• 27——-my brother
• 28——-an iPod
• 29——-a permanent marker
• 30——-a llama
• 31——-a homeless guy

Pick the colour of shirt you are wearing:

• White———-because I’m cool like that.
• Black———–because that’s how I roll.
• Pink————because I’m NOT a homosexual.
• Red————because the voices told me to.
• Blue———–because I’m sexy and I do what I want.
• Green———because I hate myself.
• Purple———because I’m cool.
• Gray———-because I was drunk.
• Yellow——–because someone offered me $1,000,000.
• Orange——-because I hate my family.
• Brown——–because I was high.
• Other——-because I’m a ninja.
• None——–because I can’t control myself.

First posted in September, bit out of date now…

Aveiro made the national news last night, what can I say…

There we were, waiting for DANÇA COMIGO (Portugal’s answer to Strictly Come Dancing with Catarina Furtado – seen here with Angelina Jolie) to start – two hours of mind boggling TV with amateur dancers paired up with professionals. Last night a 72 year-old danced the pants of other contestants. I think he got the sympathy vote…

Still, I digress… Waiting for DANÇA COMIGO we were watching the news when all of a sudden Aveiro was being reported on the news. What was it? The lastest from the University of Aveiro’s achievements? A new theatre production or news of Aveiro’s rich cultural and historical heritage?

No… four Canadians had been arrested in a boat called the Lady Mary trying to smuggle 800kg of cocaine into the country. They were probably caught near the Boat Club, which unsurprisingly was one of the venues we were considering for our business (but they wanted to retain a nautical theme – not quite the direction we were looking for).