Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013

Last night, at 6:40 I was sitting outside when Beatriz finally showed up.  Luckily the next door neighbors were just getting out of a taxi so we grabbed it; that probably saved us about 5 minutes.

On the way to El Tesoro I was surprised to see a couple of stores with lit Christmas trees.  And I thought the USA was jumping the gun.  It seemed like the taxi driver got lost taking us there because once Beatriz stopped him from exiting the highway and another time he had to stop and asked for directions.  We ended up entering the mall through the garage, walked up 4 levels of parking before we got to the box office.  By 7:18 (there was one person ahead of us in line) we had our 3D weekday tickets for 16,500 each ($8.68).  We bought a hotdog for 7,500 ($3.95) which we shared, a medium popcorn for 9,800 ($5.16), a large Coke for 6,100 ($3.21), and she wanted a small bag of what I think were plantain potato chips for 3mil ($1.58).  The print on the receipt is very faint so I’m not sure about the hundred’s position on some of those peso amounts but the total I can see clearly was 26,400 ($13.89) so that adds up.

They have a nice little lounge with maybe a dozen small tables where we could sit down and share the hotdog.  Then we took the escalator up one flight to the theaters – they have 9 screens.  When we got inside they were showing a short about cattle ranching in Colombia.  There were 4 other people in the theater.  The movie started at 9:40 so we had a 20 minute cushion which came in handy so we wouldn’t miss anything.  Beatriz had never seen Jurassic Park but she wasn’t very squeamish except when poor defenseless animals (the bull and the goat) were being devoured.

When we left, she seemed to insist we leave the same way we came in and as I thought when we got there – the exit for the parking garage – there weren’t any taxis so we had to walk about halfway around the outside perimeter to get to the front entrance where there were many taxis waiting.  (It doesn’t seem like Medellin controls the number of taxis as in some places you will see dozens of taxis waiting for riders.) 

I went to bed at 11pm, had trouble getting to sleep (the Coke?), woke up about 5am to hearing rain outside and finally woke/got up at 7:30.

Back to discussing the Chicago Bears, it appears the consensus is for them to be the 16^th best football team in the 32 team league.  http://www.boltsfromtheblue.com/2013/8/8/4602810/2012-nfl-consensus-power-rankings-preseason  That sounds pretty average to me.  I hope, and expect, them to do much better than that.  I’ll watch how they fare in the NFL Power Rankings as the season goes on and report it here.

I completed 2 RS lessons then took a nap from 10:15 to 10:45.  In the next lesson, grammar, it looks like they may have made a mistake.  They show a picture of a rhinoceros then ask in Spanish “What animal is large?” but on the next screen they will only accept “Which animal is large?” so I scored 88% the first time but 100% the second time.

According to weather.com the high today should only be 79^o with a 60% chance of rain so I wore jeans with shoes and socks when I left the apartment.  Lunch was the chicken teriyaki special at Sarku’s for 9,900 in Viva! 

I spent a couple hours at LM studying chess openings.  About 1:30 it poured hard for 15 minutes.  I stopped at Exito and bought a 2 liter bottle of Woolite for 19,600 ($10.32) and then spent an hour chatting with Jhon at the corner store while drinking a bottle of juice.  We plan to have lunch together on Friday at Likkes and then after that we will take a bus downtown and see if we can find either of my books.  I also confirmed with the owner that she will be showing this Friday afternoons Colombia/Ecuador futbol game which starts at 3:30.  I hope to be back in time for that.  It was just starting to rain hard as I got back to my apartment, so wearing jeans worked good today.  I’m wearing my warm-up suit now as it is a little chilly outside.

I got an email from Barnes & Noble.  They are going to send me a free online gift certificate because of some court settlement to a class action lawsuit.

I plan to watch Extreme Weight Loss again tonight from 7-9pm.