Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Internet...sort of

We've been trying to get internet and cable installed at home for close to seven weeks now. Unfortunately, the end is not in sight. After we switched to a new company, we ran into all sorts of new bureaucratic problems (we just found out that the original problem was caused by our building being historic and needing special permits for any type of modification). We thought it had all been sorted out and at 9:30 p.m. on the night before our scheduled installation, the company called us and said they had to cancel because of the same problems we'd been having.

Normally the embassy is able to take care of this huge hassle, but since nothing else was working, I went down to our local finance office to get the Portuguese equivalent of a social security number. Everything was going along smoothly until they realized that one had already been issued for me when we opened a local bank account. That number could only be used for banking transactions, however, so they now have to request that someone at their headquarters delete it and issue me a new one. How ironic - we opened the bank account so that we could pay our cable and internet bill. The joys of living overseas.

But the good news is, we recently found a weak pay-as-you-go wireless internet signal that's been working intermittently at home, so we're able to post some of the pictures we've taken around Lisbon.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

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