All went very smoothly. On Wednesday we tackled my cedula with our facilitator, Dana. I had to obtain a migratorio movimiento, which is a paper that tracks your exits and entries into the country, a colored copy of my passport page and the same of my visa page, and my passport. After a short wait all of my documents were submitted and ok'd. My cedula will be ready this Tuesday. Very nice.
We finished around 3:00pm and tried to find a pool for the kids as our hotel did not have one. I had tried to book a hotel with a pool, but there were no hotels available in Guayaquil that night. It was crazy!
We had been told that the Hilton allowed you to use theirs for a fee as well as the Grand, our favorite hotel. We first went to the Hilton as it was closer. OMG, the woman at the counter was so snooty. It really busted my chops. She told me in a very quiet voice that "the pool is only for the hotel guests." Whatever! Lol
Same thing at the Grand, but they wanted to charge us $30 per person. We were so pissed. What a bunch of a&$holes. We've stayed at the Grand several times and we love it. However, one time Finn cut his foot pretty severely on a large chunk of glass in the pool. Medics were called, etc...Did we make a big fuss? Nooooo.
I wish I would have tried to talk to the guy more, but when people treat us like that I just shut down and walk away.
So, we glumly went back to our hotel all sweaty with no fun pool time in sight. Next time.
Thursday we got up early in order to make sure that we were at the U.S. Consulate on time for our appointment at 8:45. There was a long line of Ecuadorians, but we were ushered to a shorter line for U.S. citizens. After three bag searches and two scannings and wandings each, we were finally allowed in. We waited about five minutes and were called up to the window. After about fifteen minutes we had our paperwork processed, and about another fifteen minutes later Mark and I had our new passport books with extra pages in hand. Tali's and Finn's books will be ready in ten days to two weeks. Much faster than the U.S.'s four to six weeks! We were very happy with the process and everyone at the Consulate was very nice and accommodating.
We drove to and from Guayaquil, but while in the city we used taxis. It is too hard to drive there and Mark hates it. I don't blame him. It's crazy.
We had the best taxi drivers! Our most memorable driver was Juan Paul. He was a young guy and he loved older "American" music. He played for us all of his favorites...Billy Joel, George Michael, The Beatles, Lionel Ritchie...He loved the melancholy songs that reminded him of his girlfriend who broke his heart. I almost thought he was going to start crying as he sang to the songs and reminisced about the good times they had together. It was too funny.
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We are leaving two weeks from tomorrow. Yikes! I went through all of our clothes today and purged a ton. We have two huge bags of clothes to give to our friend, Rocio, and her school, CETAP Lucy.
We have decided to go to Italy in November. We haven't heard from our friend, Robert, who had offered his villa to us, but we are going to go anyway. I hope he is okay. After that will be Israel with side trips to Jordan, China and maybe Turkey and Egypt.
With the refugee situation coming to a head we are rethinking the rest. I had a pretty extensive, but flexible, itinerary worked out, but I think now we will wait to see how the situation unfolds and plan accordingly. We are hoping by March, when we were supposed to head into Bulgaria, that things will have settled down, but time will tell. As of today, Germany has closed it's border with Austria, and there is a rumor that they may be shutting down the Schengen Zone. It's going to be an interesting trip, but as I told Finn today...if we get tired of it, we will just come home. No worries.
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Here are some photos of our Ecuadorian penthouse. It was nice and the kids had a great time playing on the terrace, but we were on the fourth floor and the traffic going by shook the entire building all night. I thought we were having a constant string of earthquakes!
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