Country life

No water
Imagine getting up one Sundaymorning and there is not one drop of water coming out of the tab. Though we have our own water well, we always use the mains water because it is approved for drinking and it is being checked constantly by the technicians at the municipality. It took until Monday morning before we had water again, but a few weeks later the water pressure was so low that our water heater would not work anymore. We either had cold water or no water at all…. We called a good friend who is also our plumber and electrician, and he came and helped us in a temporary way: he fixed the tubing so we could have more water pressure and found out that there was a very big leakage somewhere in the water supply system of Vilar the Ortelle. It took a few weeks for the technicians to find the leakage, because it was somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but they tracked it down ad made the necessary reparations, and it all works again as it should. My compliments to the Municipality of Pantón!

The Internet: The biggest challenge of all!
When we started living here, in 2008, we had a mobile phone and their were lots of internet-café´s. Of course we wanted our own telephone line with ADSL, but it took us about 30 visits to the telephone-store, about 50 phone calls with the telephone provider and exactly 6 visits of various technicians. Only the last technician that visited us, on the 22 of December 2008, was able to connect the telephone line to our house (a line that was not in use, and apparently had always been present at the house of our neighbours). So from then on we had telephone and a few days later internet with a speed of 1 Mb, and later 3Mb. Wow… A couple of years later, we had smartphones and 4G in our area. So we switched to a 4G connection with the same phone company. The speed was max. 20 Mb, usually between 5-8, but it was a lot faster then before. After a time when the connection got worse, we switched to another company with a 4G connection. We had a great speed, around 30 Mb, but sometime at the end of last year we had nothing anymore, no internet at all. It took the phone company about 3 months to find out that the problem was theirs and they were unable to solve it. So, again another company with 4G, that gave us the gigantic speed of around 5MB, which actually is enough to do decent streaming.
But..with little to no prospects in the near future for Fibre Optics and being tired of the little speed we have, we are studying another solution: Starlink. Let you know how that works out!