Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

I made one trip to the bathroom at 3am and again it took a while to get to sleep.

Teresa woke me up at 7:30, I got up, had breakfast, showered, shaved and we left the finca at 8:30.  I noticed I had no internet connection before I left.

Teresa took a spray bottle of water with her but we got past the killer dogs undetected.

We saw a Caldas bus go by just as we were approaching the highway.  While we waited she called the taxi driver we used last time to make arrangements for another ride.  After a 10 minute wait we were on a bus.  When we got off we walked to BanColombia and used one of their 5 ATM machines.  I was a little nervous because there were a lot of people there and I withdrew 1,200,000COP in 3 different different transactions and handed all but 200mil to Teresa.  My daily limit with USAA is $600 so I was only able to withdraw this much because the COP/$ is so high – about 2060COP per dollar.  The 1,000mil is Teresa’s budget for household expenses, including food, for the month.  We’ll see how it goes.

At the grocery store, Merkepaisa Caldas, first she spent some time ordering a lot of meat while I walked around the store looking for a few things.  At 9:45 she informed me that we have to pay for the meat no later than 10am in order to get a discount.  I understand every Tuesday is discount day for meat and every Wednesday for fruits and vegetables.  We officially purchased all the meat (1.18 kilos Muchacho, 2.16 kilos Solomito, 1.74 kilos Posta, and 1.56 kilos Espinazo de cerdo) for 71,534 at 9:55am, saving 15,582.  They put all the meat in one big bag and put it in our cart and we went back in the store for the other things we need.  We paid 404,429 for the rest at 10:34.  Teresa picked up a large bag from the store which looked like a big potato sack.  We pushed the cart around the corner where our taxi was waiting for us.  He loaded almost everything in the front seat with the rest going in his little trunk.  

Teresa had him stop at another grocery store where she went in to pay the electric bill.  For some reason that didn’t work and she gave the money and bill to the driver and he went somewhere and paid it.  Then he stopped at a pharmacy where Teresa wanted to purchase something but they didn’t have it.  

He drove us back to the entrance to the side road, drove up without incident (he didn’t get stuck like last time) and parked at the top of the path to the finca.  He put about half the things in the sack and tied the top with what looked like a shoe string.  Then the 3 of us set off down the path with everything, he was carrying the sack.  The killer dogs didn’t come out until we were past the neighbor’s house, maybe because Carlos was working with someone, his son?, on the path so we didn’t get to test Teresa’s water spraying attempt.

I noticed the taxi meter showed almost 12mil and Teresa gave him 20mil and one of our small Cokes.

We carried everything into the finca by 11:30 so it was about 3 hours, door to door.

I noticed I had an internet connection again before we took a nap from 12:15 to 1pm.

I received an email from MBE that I understand I have package called “documents” waiting for me to pick up in El Poblado.  I hope that’s the pepper spray because we plan to stop there tomorrow.

I also received the latest issue of Medellin Living that had a few interesting articles I thought I would post later.  I wish I could copy their pictures especially the mound of snow and the snowmen they residents of Medellin built.

Laura came home at 3pm.

I haven’t been checking the weekly US movie releases for the last month so I took a look at what’s playing in the US right now and I would like to see Fury (8.1) and Gone Girl (8.5).

At 3:30 I had a nice lunch of cream of chicken soup, beef with rice, Chinese salad and juice.

I heard some thunder but no rain.  In fact I don’t think we’ve had any rain so far this month.  It seems like as soon as October ended so did the rain, and the “excessive” cold that accompanied it.

We took a nap from 4 to 5:20pm.

I watched a couple episodes of The Walking Dead while Teresa watched the local news and then a Colombian singing competition among children.

About 10pm Teresa asked me to switch my movie to the TV.  It didn’t take long before there was a particularly bloody scene and she asked me to put something else on so I changed the movie to Bounce starring Ben Affleck.

We didn’t finish the movie because we went to bed at 11pm.