Goodbye Medellin, Hellooo Bogota

We were sad to say goodbye to Medellin this morning, but we were excited to catch the next leg on the journey home. We spent most of yesterday with our friend Fabian and his girlfriend. Fabian walked with us to the stadium to find a needle for Alex's soccer ball to deflate it in order to put it in the suitcase. We didn't end up finding one, so we just left the soccer ball as a gift for Fabian. Alex has a new ball waiting for him at home so we didn't mind giving it up. Alex was a little confused about what was going on, but Monica explained the principal of giving. It's helped him in his understanding of sharing.

After we went to the park with Fabian we went back to the hotel to meet his girlfriend and then went off to get some bandeja paisa at "the hill" park where Alfonso had taken us last week. There is a restaruant there that overlooks the little town mock up. The food was awesome. There were two kinds of meat on my plate.....i asked Fabian what they were, but he said, I'll tell you after you eat it. I know what that means, so I just ate it and didn't bother reminding him to tell me later; figured it was better not to know. After the meal, we headed up to the overlook to check out the river of Christmas lights down below. It was an incredible view.

We got back to the hotel at about 7:30pm and started to pack for today's trip to Bogota. We were called downstairs during packing to watch some of the hotel staff and Fabian light some candles. It's a tradition on Dec. 7th to do that as it's the beginning of their holiday, and if I understood them correctly, is the date that the angel Gabriel told Mary that she was going to have a baby.

Anyway, after that we got to bed pretty late and listened to the sounds of fireworks and gunfire for the majority of the ENTIRE night. I'm not exaggerating. Fireworks were still going off when I got out of bed at 6am. It was nuts......thankfully, the wee ones sleep like teenagers already, so they didn't budge.

We had to take two cars to the airport in Medellin because of our luggage and oh yeah, two kids that we didn't have before. The taxi's are pretty small down here. I (darryl) have a hard time getting in and out of them......I enjoy watching the taxi drivers face when I flag them down. They all have the look on their face like "oh, you're not EVEN gonna try to get in here are you?" The two taxi's were larger than the normal yellow ones we get....more like mini SUV's; a bit more expensive, but well worth it to give me a little more space on the 30 min drive to the airport. At the airport, we had no problems getting our luggage on the plane; we didn't have to pay any extra as they weigh all of the luggage at once instead of individual bags.....we made it under the total weight limit. Monica broke down in tears when we said our final goodbye to Alfonso. He was everything to us in Medellin......a great man.

As for the flight itself, the kids were absolutely giddy, but under control. Jeni almost missed the excitement of the takeoff because she was too inthralled with the inflight magazine. She wanted everything in it. Monica had to take it away from her so she could actually experience the takeoff. You could see the excitement/anxiety all over Alex's face. He had no idea what to do with his hands.....he fidgeted between putting them in his lap and gripping the armrest and folding his arms.....then repeating the process two or three times. Once the pressure of the thrust hit him, he was all smiles. He thought it was awesome.

The flight itself was less than 30 min which was good for their first trip. It got their feet wet for the full day of flying later this week. We got to our new hotel around noon.....it's the Zuetana and is super kid friendly. We've met the other adopting families here already.....2 from Germany and one US family. Will post some picks tomorrow of the place when we get them. I've got some new pics on FLICKR of yesterday's events and the flight.


Later.