Had a reasonable night of sleep, although Andres was a bit restless in the early hours of the morning which kept waking us up. Andres turns 8 months old today – he’s a big boy now!
I got a call from Patricia not long after breakfast telling me that she had checked with ICBF and the corrected papers were ready for us to collect and that since she was busy this morning, she had arranged for Carlos to pick me up at 10am and take me there.
So I went with Carlos (a taxi driver who speaks reasonable English) back to ICBF and he escorted me to the offices (acting as my interpreter). After a quick check to see that the document was now correct, they asked me to complete a survey about the adoption process. Finally, I signed their copy of the document and we headed back to the hotel, our adoption process in Colombia is now complete. All we need now is to collect a visa for Andres at the Australian Embassy in Santiago when we get to Chile on our way home.
After lunch, we went for a walk around the area to stretch our legs and familiarise ourselves with what facilities are around. The Hotel Halifax is in a great location – a very up-market part of Bogota with a good supermarket just around the corner, a small shopping mall with banks and other services close by, and a short walk to a beautiful park surrounded by nice restaurants and coffee shops (and a McDonalds). We sat in the park for a while enjoying the sun (which poked its head out from behind the clouds briefly), and watching the locals.
Eventually we headed back to the hotel – via the supermarket to get some other things we needed. The internet was still down at the hotel, which was very frustrating. Just before it went down I got some messages from American Express asking me to call them – I had experienced difficulty using my card at the supermarket the previous day (it worked once, but then a second transaction failed to go through). I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to contact Amex (without making an expensive call from the hotel) and that I wouldn’t be able to use my Amex card until I did. Finally the technician arrived to fix the problem in the late afternoon, and I was able to make the call using my VoIP service and answer Amex’s questions (yes, we are in Colombia, and yes, we stayed at the Pension Stein, flew Avianca and shopped at Carulla supermarket).
Just after 5pm, the hotel put on a “happy hour” with drinks and nibbles provided, and a two-man band singing local songs rather loudly and trying to get everyone up to dance (the kitchen staff love to dance it seems!). It was all rather loud and noisy – but kind of fun.
After dinner I managed to get a little bit caught up on emails and things that had accumulated over the past couple of days.
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