Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Wednesday, December 4th, 2013



Today is my daughter’s 25th birthday!  Happy birthday Jeannie!

Last night I finished the Medellin Travel Guide by David Lee and I learned something very interesting regarding the local cell phone service:
“There are three major cell phone service providers: Comcel, Tigo, and Movistar…
Calls and text messages to people using the same network are less costly than calls and messages between networks…
That explains why there are people throughout the streets of Medellin with a handful of cell phones, advertising 200COP calls.  If you know which network the person you’re calling uses, then you can pay someone on the street to use a phone on that same network.
Most Westerners visiting Medellin won’t bother, but its normal for Colombians to use these phones on the street to save money.  For this reason, you can’t rely on Caller ID alone to screen calls.”
That explains the ladies on the street with multiple cell phones chained to their vests.

I went to bed at 10pm (with earplugs), got up once at 3pm, got a drink of water, finally fell back asleep again and got up at 7am.

I stopped at Redd’s and had a large glass of orange juice, stopped kiddie corner from the corner store and had a banana then stopped at the Tinto store for at least an hour and had 2 cups of coffee while I read my Nook book.  Gonzolo mentioned that Exito is going to have a lot of good sales this month, especially clothing.

Inferno by Dan Brown is very good.  It’s a little complicated keeping the characters apart because so often they are not who they appear to be: good guys turn out to be bad guys, and bad guys turn out to be good guys.  I hope I haven’t said too much to spoil it for you.  I still have a little more than 100 pages to go so things could certainly still change.

I got a call from Olga but I couldn’t hear her very well, and while it was nice talking to her at the fiesta last Saturday, I’m not interested in starting a relationship with her.

I made an appointment with James Lindzey for tomorrow afternoon to begin working on my Pensionado Visa/Cedula renewal.

The currency exchange rate is up to 1950 pesos to the dollar.  Every little bit helps.  The following are 2 recent postings on the subject on Colombia Expats:
“It changes all day and night from Sunday night till Friday evening. What is used as the official rate of the day I don't know.”

“That's what I'm looking for - the official change rate. in other words if it closes at 1950 on a Monday and on Tuesday it drops to 1930 do I get the 1950 all day or do I get whatever the value is at the time I change money.  I'm excluding all fees in this question.”

I took a nap from 2:15 to 3:15.  Still on crackers and water but I did make some popcorn (no butter, little salt) this evening.  I’m just taking it easy in the apartment.

I hope to more mobile tomorrow as I have my appointment at 1pm.

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