Tuesday 19 August 2014

From Fuerte, with things

I hate my smartphone. It has a most annoying habit of doing things on its own, like phoning another person’s mobile and not hanging up, or switching itself on and off. Last Thursday, it locked itself. It couldn’t choose the least appropriate moment to do so.

I was flying from Gran Canaria to Fuerteventura to collect our household stuff which we left behind in a storage room (trastero) when we moved to Finland. The “proper” (British) removal company gave me a quote which we were not prepared to pay. Eventually I found a local man with a van who took the job. He and his partner were travelling by ferry on Thursday morning. I was to meet them in the afternoon, pack and load the van, spend a night in Corralejo and go back home with them next day.

Just before the plane took off, I, like a good boy, had switched the phone off. When we landed, I found the damn thing on and locked. Apparently, it switched itself on and tried, unsuccessfully, to guess the PIN number. Not so smart, eh? Now it was demanding the PUK which I, of course, didn’t know. I was not sure that I kept the original plastic thingy (does it have a technical name?), and even if I did, I had no clue where it could be. Maybe in trastero?

I popped to the Movistar shop to buy a new SIM card. Luckily, all the important numbers were stored in the phone’s memory and not on the locked SIM (although this smartass is also known to lose some of my contacts in the past). So I was saved.

It took us three hours to clear the trastero. There was not that much stuff, however the tiny room was pretty full and there were some steric constraints I completely forgot about. For example, to extract a bookcase (there were four of them), we had to flip it upside down while moving through the door. All our things seemed to survive this year without any damage and even did not collect much dust. To my amazement, I found the plastic card with the PUK number under the foot of the last bookcase.

It was nine o’clock already when we finished our job. I went to the C.C. Campanario because I needed to do some minimal shopping and to get something to eat. Better still, I was in time to see the second half of de lo Flamenco performance!

Next morning, I met Luca who brought me two more boxes (books again!) and the last of my musical instruments which he was hosting for a year. Finally, the van was full. We started from Corralejo at midday. It was a holiday, Asunción de la Virgen. The roads were largely empty, and we had reached Morro Jable much faster than expected. The sky was dusty-grey; it looked like the kalima was coming.

Good bye, Fuerteventura. It feels a bit strange that there are no more material things left that would oblige us to come and get them. But we’ll be back anyway.

More photos of Fuerteventura @ Shutterstock.

No comments:

Post a Comment