More Grey Hair and a few Chubasco's

We have had the builders at work on our house in Spain doing some alterations. They are local, so exchange of information has been quite tough as we don't share much language. For months they have been telling us in emails that there was no water on at the house, and most recently that there was no meter. This could not be correct, since we have had a water connection and a metered supply paid by standing order, for over 3 years. We thought that they must be looking in the wrong meter cupboard.

So when we arrive to view the finished works, we open up the meter cupboard, and find that the meter is gone. No water supply and no meter. The house is also deep in concrete dust, all over the hard and soft surfaces. Lets just say I was a little unhappy!

After a bit of digging around in official offices in town we end up in the office of a local developer. This company are responsible for supplying the water to the estate, we show the woman at the desk the photo above, explain the situation and show her my bank statement indicating that we have paid for a water supply.

Her expression was priceless. She clearly knew what was going on, got on the phone straightaway, and we were sent back to our house to meet the meter man. A short debate followed as, for some reason he was not keen on fitting our meter, however we pointed out that from our perspective the meter had been stolen and we had paid for a meter and supply. His response was that the meter had not been stolen, so....... he knew too!

Our new meter was fitted early that same evening, and just in case the company is thinking of doing the same again, here it is, image captured for the whole world to see.

We were pretty relieved to get the water on, but that was a bit short lived when we soon had a water outage lasting 15 hours. This was followed by a pretty serious rainstorm, and it was then that we discovered that our builder had failed to consider the need for a doorstep downstairs in the conversion. Our new room was flooded.

After lots of mopping up we headed to the DIY store where Andy purchased a doorstep and some concrete to fit it with. This concrete powder has a setting time of 3-6 minutes, so he had to work quite quickly!

He also discovered that the electrical work that had been undertaken was, well, really odd. Along the lines of, the electrical plugs being wired through the ceiling light fittings.

Still, the builder is coming back to fix that, he called round to give us back our house keys, so we were able to show him the problem. I got the impression that he's seen it before!

The weather continued to be pretty cold and dismal, but it gave us chance to clean the place up and visit the Town Hall to get the Council Tax put on direct debit. The official says "si automatico!" we shall see what happens when it's due for payment.

Here we are driving past the famous Floating Orange Groves of Valencia. Well, the irrigation was afloat, as was the main road. Don't blame us if your oranges are full of muddy water.

Here's the beach view, the Med is normally like a millpond, we have never seen it like this in May.

The stormy weather meant that I could take longer in the shops and try out some different food. Found these tomatoes, called Cebra, very tasty. They don't photograph too well, but are mainly black and red stripes.

The local supermarket seem to have realised that women can never have too many hambags, as these were all over the store.

I have to say that we are both pretty tired after our trip. Hopefully the next time we are there will be much more tranquil.