Saturday, June 18th, 2016

I see that the US plays next Tuesday night in Houston.  I assume that means Colombia will play Wednesday night in Chicago.

The Colombian Peso closed at 3,006 to the US Dollar.

The ladies headed to the health club while I went to the park to play chess.  On the way I noticed 4 young girls (about 4’ tall) walking around in what reminded me of French police uniforms.  In the park none of the cement boards had chess pieces with them.  (I think I was too early.)  On my way back to the apt I picked up a free copy of a newspaper called “adn” that a lady was handing out at the corner then I stopped and bought 2 credit card protectors – one in red and the other in blue (he didn’t have any in white).  The blue one is for my USAA debit card that I sometimes carry with me and the red one is for my emergency Citibank card that I will keep in Wilson’s apartment.

Back at the apartment I picked up my Nook and headed for a local bakery where I had a café con leche and pastel con arequipe for 2,700 pesos (about 90 cents).  This was the first time I could remember that my café was more coffee than milk.  While sitting there I felt a bird’s wings brush my shoulder and then I saw a young dove on the ground at my feet.  I think it just flew out of the nest and wasn’t quite strong enough to fly yet.  It walked to a corner where there was a 3’ high wall and it eventually jumped/flew to the top and then glided down to the other side.

Of course the “adn” newspaper had an article on Colombia’s qualifying for the semi-finals and another article that DIM (the other Medellin football team) is playing Junior tonight for the league championship.  The paper said there will be 1,200 policemen at the game for security purposes and there will be 3 large screen TVs showing the game in Parque Laureles #1, Parque Poblado and Parque Desos.  The most interesting article was titled “Clave para leer mas” (Key for Reading More).  It mentioned something about using Blendle to read individual articles from The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Barron’s (among others) for 9 to 49 cents each.  I googled Blendle and found, from Wikipedia: Blendle is a Dutch online news platform that aggregates articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines and sells them on a pay-per-article basis. The key differences to similar websites are the participation by otherwise commercially unrelated news services in a single platform and the ability for registered users to easily pay a small price per article. It has been called an "iTunes for news" in various media.

I see they are still in Beta mode but I gave them my email address in order to reserve a spot in line.

More information: Blendle offers users access to articles of newspapers and magazines which can be purchased individually, although entire issues can be purchased as well. The transaction of the former is seamless; it automatically occurs when the user opens an article. The price is then deducted from the user’s account balance, to which they added funds prior to the transaction. The service immediately reverses the transaction when the user closes the purchased article quickly after opening it or requests a refund which is only available for 24 hours after purchase.  Purchased articles can be accessed at no additional charge.
The prices are determined by the publishers and range between €0.09 (snippets) and €1.99 (feature stories) and are often around €0.25, 30% of which is paid to Blendle. Users can top up their accounts manually or set up an automatic top-up.

I believe that strange symbol is for Euros which equates to 10 cents and $2.25 for the above.

We left the apt about 7:30 and walked about a dozen blocks to a restaurant where Teresa and Laura ordered chuzo and I ordered empanadas.  Laura and I had a Colombiana to drink and Teresa had a couple rums with water.  It started raining but only lasted a couple minutes and then started up again.  We actually had 3 orders of empanadas we all shared and one time the dish even included a couple mozarella sticks.  The total check came to 45,000 pesos (about $15).

We took a taxi back to the apartment and the rain stopped just after we returned.

T-shirt of the day: Shut up and kiss me.