Thursday March 1, 2012

Thursday Mar 1/12 update
Greetings from Quito where we are ensconced in the Casa Sol Boutique Hotel not far from our immigration lawyer's office.  Bella slept well but found it very warm.  I had an achy hip and leg that made sleeping very difficult.
We went to Gabriela's office for 9:30am to meet with her new assistant Rebecca who speaks passable English.  Rebecca then led us to the Censo office and luckily it wasn't too busy so it did not take us long to get a letter stating that we had applied for the Censo travel documents.  Usually this is the second step after getting residency approval but everything is delayed because they don't have new fancy encrypted paper to print the proper documents.
Armed with these letters we then went to the Cedula office which was very busy and we were about 150th in line.  Rebecca went back to plead hardship because we were "old", good grief!  But it worked and we bumped up to about 40th in line so that only took about an hour's wait.  We got permission for the one lady to handle us together for ease of translation, etc.  I would never attempt to do this on my own without an interpreter.  There are just too many nuances and customs involved, never mind the obvious language barriers.  Then they couldn't find either Estevan or Radville in their database so they wanted an hour to get the towns installed.  Imagine, we are the first residents of Ecuador to come from those two towns.  We went for lunch at McDonald's and returned and they finished off Bella's application then went to start on mine.  Somehow Radville wasn't installed yet so we had another 1/2 hour wait while they corrected that.  They fingerprint and photograph us for these Cedula documents.
Finally both sets of documents got completed and we are now told to return tomorrow to get our actual Cedula documents which is essentially the internal passport that every Ecuadorian carries. They want us back there at 3pm tomorrow and our flight home is at 6pm so we pray for no further delays. Now we will be officially documented residents.  Bella is real anxious for this so she can get put on the bank account at Banco Pichincha since they have a problem using her passport number for ID. 
We returned to the hotel and Bella had a nap while I snuck out, bought 10 more movies for $14 and got a good haircut for $4.
The area of our hotel is really the tourist area of Quito with many clubs, restaurants, hostels, hotels, and boutiques.  For supper we went to the G-Spot (yes, we found it!), run by a nice Californian  fellow and they were playing country music so we cleared a little room to have a few two-step turns around the floor.  The few Ecuadorians in the place were grinning from ear-to-ear as we strutted our stuff.
I just read a report that Cuenca is coming close to surpassing 1998 rainfall records!  That would not surprise me as we have been getting more than the normal for sure.  It is better than a drought as long as it doesn't cause any flooding.
I did take some pics today but forgot to bring my cord to download them so you'll have to wait for them.  The kids are so cute and I got one with a milk mustache that will be absolutely priceless.
That was today's excitement.  Hugs to all.