Post … about post

Caixa 401

It’s the simple, everyday stuff that catches you unawares and trips you up when you land in a new country. Activities that I used to do on automatic pilot back in the UK now have to be unpicked and thought-through, as if unravelling a tapestry to stitch it all back together again but with culturally-specific adjustments in the design.

Take Amazon. An unavoidable convenience I’d relied upon, especially in our final frantic weeks of packing, to dish up vacuum pack bags, EU plug adapters – the kind of stuff you really can’t be arsed to walk into town for, but with just one click, they land on your doorstep. How does that happen, dear readers? Well, the inner workings of the world of online delivery exposed themselves to me in all their raw brutal glory when we tried to order a CD player and a hammock (Essentials! Come on!) from Amazon.es. Bank details – tick. Address details – tick. But that’s where the trouble set in. You see, addresses are not so much a thing here*. We have an address, of course – the one that’s on our rental contract, and written on the ‘what to do in an emergency’ poster by our front door – but pop it into an online form and the postcode generates a variation on the village cluster we live in that is not what we’ve been told is our address. We have a mailbox – a caixa – at the top of our track on a named road, although the name of this road is also different to the one that supposedly forms our address! Letters we found in the caixa to previous residents bore different addresses both to each other and to the one on our rental agreement. When CTT, the postal service, emailed to say that our parcel was being held in Porto ‘awaiting further information on the address’ after the courier had reported ‘address does not exist’, I shouldn’t really have been surprised but I was still flummoxed. What more could we tell them? I’d given every detail provided to us by our (absent) landlord. For two mornings, Adrian and I stood forlornly by our mailbox, hoping to flag down the courier who Adrian thought he’d spotted one morning. On day 3, we headed to the post office in Amarante to see if we could get it redirected there. The post office woman printed off sheets of paper which all seemed very promising, before she finally filed them all and scribbled a phone number on a scrap of paper and advised we call them instead.

But a phone call to an official body when you do not speak the language is the stuff of nightmares, like when you dream you’ve got the lead part in a play but you haven’t learned the lines, you can’t act and, of course, you’re naked. Nevertheless, this had become a mission. Using our new ‘burner’ phone – remember the ones with a keypad where you have to keep tapping the same key to get 1, a, b or c? Yeah, in my desire not to splash out on inessentials (like CD players and hammocks 🙄), I’d bought the cheapest phone I could find, and now had to wield it to make this Very Important (and Utterly Terrifying) Phone call! But, to my delight, turns out that the wonderful CTT offer an English language service, and the advisor was a complete star. She was absolutely going to get our parcel to us if she drove it to us herself, at least that’s how she came across! She took our location code, confirmed with the depot they’d now be able to deliver, and two days later, as promised, there was a ‘toot toot’ outside our gate and there stood Miguel, the courier, with a look that seemed to mix both relief and a sense of achievement as he declared ‘I looked for you for two days’! I have no reason not to believe him.

A week later, more phone calls and appalling, fractured shards of directions over the phone from me to engineers from our electricity supplier after a tree branch broke a cable and cut off all our power convinced me of two things. 1) People working for Portuguese services are relentless in their determination to see their job through 2) We have to start learning Portuguese properly with a teacher (and maybe 3) I should have bought a better phone!!).

Post script: We received a card from my mum! It prompted lots of whoop-whoops and cheers. We exist. No stopping us now 😁

*apparently, many Portuguese people have their mail delivered to paid-for boxes at their local post office, and some have suggested this may be a legacy of Salazar’s dictatorship when giving out your address could have fatal consequences. Even today, ‘Gumtree’ type transactions baffle expats/immigrants who don’t understand why a seller won’t give out their address but requests to meet somewhere more public instead. Fun if they’re selling a wardrobe! But there’s also just an expectation that in a community you know who’s who, you know where people live so even local businesses often don’t promote themselves or even use signage to help customers find them.

#amaranteportugal #newlifeinportugal #retiringoverseas