A House Without Address
5 May 2021 the house is officially ours. We call it Casa da Lima.
There is a puzzle to be solved: What is our address? We’re not sure. When we look into the mailbox, we see two different street names without numbers. The blue sign outside when you enter the street says: Rua Ribeira de Baixo. Interestingly, the postal code on the house documents seems to be the good for this area.
We go to the camara, the municipality, in Ansiao, as we need to get acquainted anyway. The woman there will help us find our address. Of course, it takes a while. After some emails, we hear from another person at the department assigning roads and addresses, that this could take one to two months…
Freguesia de Alvorge
Obviously the Freguesia take care of naming the streets, not the camara. So we will chat with our Freguesia Alvorge. Senior Barbosa is the man arranging all, and eventually we get a new address. Canto da Ribeira de Baixo number 25. In our new street there is one house, ours. And we get number 25. Strange, why not number 1? They assign numbers depending on the distance of the public road. So we are 25 meters from the road. This must be the road Rua de Ribeira de Baixo.
Surprise…
When we come home one day we see that a sign has been brought to our new road. It is placed in a way you can’t read it. Nobody will see the street name because we live at the end of the street, it is a dead end. You have already parked your car and you will not see the name of the street anymore, you see the back of the sign. I ask why it is put in this peculiar way. “Just because it always should be on the left side of the road, when you drive.” When we come home another day, we see that the sign has been turned around. It helps to have good contacts with the people from the freguesia.
