This is the 3rd morning
in a row I’ve woken cold symptom free so I guess what happened 3 mornings ago
was just an anomaly.
I checked my USAA account and my
last small pension deposit showed up but they are all still displayed in black
ink with a description of “Uncategorized” so I’m guessing the money isn’t yet
available. Since Sunday isn’t a business
day I’m guessing the pension money will be available on Monday and my Social
Security will begin to show up at that time.
(Wouldn’t it be ironic if the money became available on Easter Sunday
when all the stores were closed?)
2:20pm and a guy walks up the middle
of the street yelling something and carrying toilet “innards”.
We have been invited to her friend Judy’s
house for Once. (Remember “once”,
pronounced “own say”, literally means eleven but it has also come to mean
“snack” as working Colombians traditionally would take a midmorning snack at
11am.) Reina tells me they live only
about 5 blocks away so it should easily be within walking distance. Luckily today isn’t so hot and it’s overcast.
How quickly things change!
Before we left Reina gave me 150mil
and some story about borrowing it from her sister and paying her back out of
the money we owe Helen or something like that.
It’s all getting too confusing for me to keep track of everything not to
mention the problem trying to figure out translations perfectly. She also asked me take my debit card to try
just in case. And instead of Once we are
going to have a little birthday celebration for Reina (April 1st) at
Judy’s.
Since we now have some money we need
to stop somewhere and pick up ice cream and cake. Since we are so familiar with Exito we took a
taxi down to Los Malinos Mall which is close to their house. We stopped at one of the ATH ATM machines and
surprise, surprise it gave me the 300mil pesos I requested. (It’s nice to see the dollar getting
stronger! Today 1830 pesos to the
dollar.)
We then walked around the mall but
couldn’t find any suitable cake & ice cream. We checked some of the shops outside around
the mall but no luck there either. So we
took a taxi back past our house and then about halfway to downtown and stopped
at Carrefour. There we found a nice
large cake, a large tub of ice cream and a bottle of wine. Reina also picked up balloons, candles shaped
like a 4 and a 2 and some other things.
She was unsuccessful at finding a piñata so she also picked up some
little candies and little toys. All this
came to 117,750 pesos.
At Evan & Judy’s I played about
4 games of chess with one of the brothers from the paper factory (Andres which
I think might translate to Andrew) and another guy I’ve never seen before. (Won them all!) While I finished my last game the hostess
gave everyone what I would describe as a large slice of hamburger/cold
cut/lunch meat (not sure what to call it) on an arepa. Then everyone gathered around Reina and I
sang Happy Birthday to her in English.
Then they lit the 2 candles they had placed on her cake and she blew
them out. Then they lit another larger
candle that was in the middle of the cake and I would describe that as a small
roman candle. Next we had cake and ice
cream and I apparently made some type of faux pax because I took a piece of
cake on a plate and gave it to a teenage girl sitting nearby. Then Reina divided the candy and toys in a
plastic bag and I held it up over the children’s head and she tore out the
bottom of our “piñata”.
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| Playing chess with Andres. |
|
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| My 2nd challenger. Andres was much better. |
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| Reina's 42nd birthday cake | |
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| Blowing out the candles. |
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| Fireworks on a birthday cake! |
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| Let me see you blow out that candle! |
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| Cutting the cake. |
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| Gotta have the vino! |
When we got home I checked USAA and
it still shows up in black as Uncategorized.
Maybe Saturday is considered a business day after all!?
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