We are now frantically trying to get OHUB finished, and the builders are working long and hard to ensure that everything is done by next Friday, 18 May 2007. Our original date of 12 May was a little ambitous, but as you can see from the photo, practically everything is in place. What this does not show is about 10 minutes after the photo was taken the first chairs arrived, and we are arranging for everything else to come next week.

What will affect our opening now is our ability to get all of the licences and the permissions from the local authority in place. Everything has had to be done in accordance with a project, which included inspections for water and sound (the sound test took over 5h to complete last week, but fortunately we passed), and next week the final inspections for the water and residuals will be made. we hope to go to the Câmara next week nd our schedule for opening is 25 May.

If you have not checked already, there is a slideshow to how the construction has progressed either on the companion blog, at www.ohub.wordpress.com, or on our MySpace page on www.myspace.com/ohub. If you have already seen these, we have been updating them each day with new images. We are also on the verge of getting the website completed, and we intend to have this up and running by the opening date. At the moment there is a holding page on www.ohub.pt.

One of the questions that we always get asked about London is how we used to get to work. For those that don’t know, we used to live in Plumstead, South East London, and work in Hammersmith/Acton, in west London. This meant that we had to get a bus to the railway station, followed by a train to central London and from there the tube to either Barons Court or acton Town. Now things are slightly different. For the same amount of money that we paid in travel tickets we pay the instalments on a car, and on top of that each month we put in 40€ worth of petrol (or rather diesel) to travel from Oiã to Aveiro. It is also rather easier to get to Aveiro than to get to central London, although it is about the same distance – 15km…

Rather than describe the journey, we thought it would be fun to show you the journey. Normally it would take about 20 minutes, so 20 minutes worth of video would be pretty boring, not to say taking up a huge amount of webspace. So we sped it up a bit…

Hope that you enjoy the trip…