Saturday, March 21st, 2015

Slept well, only getting up once about 3am.  I finally got up at 8:15.

We borrowed 100mil from the money we were going to use to pay back the Exito credit card for Wilson’s exercise machine.  This is for Teresa’s mammography test later today.  She needs to have one every 6 months.

We left the finca at 11:50 and got past the killer dogs undetected.   Shortly after we reached the highway the neighbor Guillermo (sp?) came down the sideroad and joined us.  We were on a bus after only a 5 minute wait.  The posts for the soccer field fence are up but not the fencing itself.  We took the bus to El Poblado where I added 20mil to my cell phone and then we got on a Metro Poblado 134i bus.  We had to wait about 10 minutes until the bus was full before it left.  20 minutes later we were at El Tesoro CC.  We had to ask for directions from there to get to Torre Medica.  

We were 25 minutes early for Teresa’s 1:40 appointment but they took her anyway.  I think she was their last appointment of the day.   She was out about 5 minutes later.  

We crossed a road that goes under the building and took escalators up a couple floors where we ran into Dr. Rendon, my Endodontist.  He was with his wife, their 3 children and their cousin.  He informed me that he has moved permanently into an office in Torre Medico with his wife who is also an Endodontist.  He gave me his new business card and we continued on our way looking for the food court.  

Before we found the food court we came to a restaurant that Teresa was familiar with – J & C Delicias.  Teresa ordered a chicken curry arepa and a Coke Zero and I ordered their spaghetti with meat sauce and a Coke.  Teresa called Laura and she was in her English class with Jhon.  We had to wait about 20-25 minutes for our food and we were starving.  My spaghetti was good and it even came with a piece of garlic bread.  The total came to 43,500 (about $17) and I charged it to my debit card.

We checked the Cinemark movie theatre but there wasn’t anything decent starting when we were there at 3pm that was also in English.  Teresa is interested in seeing Still Alice which the theatre has translated into Spanish as Simply Alice – not quite the same thing. 

Teresa found a hat, for sun protection, she really liked at Azulu so I put it on my charge card for 29mil ($11.10).

We walked out Entrance #4 where we found a Poblado Metro bus to take us to Monterrey CC.  

The bus left at 3:30 and I recall thinking that we should be back at the finca by 5pm.  About 20 minutes later we were at Monterrey, walked to the other side of the metro to the highway and sat down to wait for an express bus.

Most of these bus stops have a person working there, officially or unofficially, who calls out buses as they arrive, and answer questions as to where they are going.  The workers don’t look like more than street people so I asked Teresa how they earn their money and she told me that the bus drivers give them change.

We waited over 45 minutes for one of the express buses (TraTam, Fredonia, etc.) and finally I asked Teresa if she was sure they come to El Poblado.  She asked this “bus lady” and that’s when we learned that those buses arrive on the other side of the “island” from where we were sitting.  We walked over there and there were a lot of people waiting for buses.  Teresa explained that this is a “bridge” weekend, what we would call a “long weekend” so there were a lot of people heading out to the fincas.  After 5 minutes we finally gave up and went back to where we were originally and quickly caught a bus to Caldas.  Teresa finally admitted she thought we had been at the Aquacatala metro station.

Luckily, we only had a short wait from the Caldas bus stop for a bus to take us to the finca.  We got past the killer dogs undetected and finally got back to the finca just after 6pm – more than 2 ½ hours after we left El Tesoro.

We watched Defiance (7.2) on Netflix and then Teresa watched almost the first hour of Still Alice that I found on Yaske.net.  Then she wanted to stop and continue it tomorrow.  I told her this isn’t Netflix – once you stop (I don’t mean pause) you have to start over from the beginning.  She really wants to see this movie so we’ll try to see it Monday – probably in Vizcaya at 2:10.

I took my sleeping pills at 10pm and we went to bed at 10:30.

T-shirt of the day: Thanks for not staring.