Thursday, January 31st, 2013

Well, another interesting day in Medellin.  Today was a major success with one exception as you will soon see.

After breakfast we went across the street to the Internet Café to make another phone call to Citibank to see if I could change Tuesday night’s Wire Transfer to a different Routing Number.  We got there right at 9am and it appeared closed.  We knocked on the door and waited a few minutes and then left.

Aunt Helen and her grandson came with us as we took my dirty clothes to Reina’s mother’s house so she could wash and line dry them while we were out.  We stayed there a few hours while Reina cleaned her room and defrosted the refrigerator (anybody old enough to remember doing that?).  Then we had a nice lunch her mother made for us.  I remember beans and rice and chicken with I think fresh mango juice to drink.

We finally hit the road about 1pm and went downtown where we made copies of my passport and the card identifying my blood type.  All of this is for my Cedula (national Id card).  At the same location I went into a stuffy phone booth and called Citibank.  Again, after having to identify myself, and being informed I couldn’t change the routing number, I cancelled the Wire Transfer.  (They said it was still in pending status and hadn’t gone through.)  It cost me about 300 pesos a minute for the call.  That’s about 14 cents a minute and I was on the phone about 10 minutes.

We then deposited 149,650 pesos into a special account at Banco Occidente.  We got a receipt to give to the immigration office for my Cedula.

We then went to the same ATM machine that had been working for my Citibank card to take out money using my USAA debit card.  It refused my request.  Is that because now I’m using a different machine from earlier? Is it because, even though I checked online and saw the deposits, the money isn’t available yet?  I haven’t a clue. I guess I’ll try all the ATM machines again tomorrow and if it doesn’t work I’ll have to call USAA again?  Drats!

I then called Mrs. Montes (the building owner) to inform her I had cancelled the wire transfer.  The first thing she told me is the original routing number was the correct one.  She just found out the new routing number is only for international transfers outside of the US.  I told her I had already cancelled the wire transfer with the original routing number but I would submit it again and it would probably take 3 days for her to get access to the money but I told her since we had done everything she asked of us she should give us the keys to the apartment without waiting 3 more days.  I said I would submit a new wire transfer that night.  She said when she receive the confirmation number she would call the landlord and have them give us the keys tomorrow morning.  I said that was fair.  After I hung up, I signaled Reina that everything was ok.  Would you believe she called the landlord, we took a taxi to the apartment and picked up the keys immediately?  Go figure!

Tomorrow we’re going to buy light bulbs and cleaning supplies and go over and clean the place.  Even though it’s a new apartment in a new building it still is a little dusty.  BTW, we appear to be the only tenants so far. 

We then went to the immigration office at Calle 19, #80A40, Barrio Belen la Gloria and submitted my Cedula application.  At first they told Reina something wasn’t right about the payment we made for the Cedula fee, like it was supposed to be a different bank or something.  But we did everything exactly as they asked on the form!  We waited about an hour and eventually they called us up to one of the windows where they proceeded to ask me a number of questions.  What kind of work I did seemed to take the longest as they seemed to be looking for my job in some sort of list.  I think they may have settled on Computer Engineer.  Whatever works!  They then fingerprinted all of the fingers together on each hand and then each finger individually.  All of this was done on some type of hi-tech machine.  Anyway, I got my Cedula (at least that's what I thought at the time); it’s just a special stamp in my passport on the page opposite my Visa.

We then went back to the store where we bought the roller skates the day before.  Apparently we bought skate covers for the skates and they forgot to put them in the bag they gave us.  That was taken care of in a few minutes.

Then, to celebrate we went across the street and had Helado (ice cream).  It was in a bowl about 8 inches across and at least 2 inches deep.  The bottom layer of the bowl was like a fruit cocktail, a mixture of bananas, strawberries, mango, and other berries I couldn’t identify.  Then the sides were supported with slices of apple.  There were a couple of large scoops of ice cream with what I thought were chocolate chips in them but they were raisins.  Surrounding the ice cream were slices of fresh kiwi, strawberries and banana with sprinkles of something I thought was coconut but wasn’t.  (I found out later it’s cheese.)  The fruit sundae was delicious but so large we made that our dinner.  BTW, I don’t normally like kiwi but these tasted almost like strawberries.

Then it was back to Aunt Helen’s so I could submit the Wire Transfer again.

I checked my USAA account deposits more closely and they show a category of “Uncategorized” and if you click on it, it displays the message “These purchases have posted, but are not yet fully processed. Once a transaction has fully processed, you can change the category.”