After two years in Jordan with the British Council I have left both. I am officially homeless and unemployed. Enough there to chat about for a while but as this blog is about Casa Azul, I’ll stick to the Portuguese angle.

The last few weeks was about shipping. Shipping our worldly goods wouldn’t be a problem (apart from the huge expense especially at the Portuguese end). Of course the problem was bureaucracy (I can see this becoming a theme with this blog).

In order to move to Portugal, or rather to ship personal possessions to Portugal you need docs. Plenty of them. The most important being a Certificado de Baggagem. Issued by the local consulate stating that the shipper (us) had lived outside Portugal for the last two years and was only shipping old, personal items. OK so far but as there was no Portuguese Embassy in Jordan I had to do it all through the Portuguese Embassy in Egypt. No problem they said – just pop over and they would process the docs for me. Of course that didn’t fly so I had to get all the docs certified by the UK embassy, translate the packing list into Portuguese, send it all to them, pray it was going to arrive safely and then arrange for someone to go to the Embassy in Cairo to physically pay for everything in Egyptian pounds. What a pain!

Now in the Isle of Man, I just have to wait in hope for the Certificado to arrive on my doorstep. The other docs (and there are plenty of them) will have to wait until we arrive in Portugal.

One week to go! I can’t wait!