Up early this morning – Magnolia picked me up at 8:30am and we took our taxi to the court offices where we met our lawyer, ready to sign the sentencia.
After a short wait, we were able to check the sentencia, but I found a small mistake in one of the passport numbers so we had to wait for them to fix it.
Another wait and I was finally able to sign the papers – Nicol is now legally our daughter! This legal document is honoured in Australia, so we don’t have to do anything to finalise the adoption when we return to Australia.
Finally, another long wait while our lawyer arranged copies of the sentencia and then copies of the new birth certificate with updated names.
We took the copies to the Notario (Notary office), but they told us to come back at 2pm – so we weren’t quite finished yet.
Magnolia and I then walked around the corner to a small travel agents office to ask if they knew where the LAN offices were – we needed to change the details of our return flight to Bogota
We got the address we needed and then our taxi driver took us around to the LAN offices where we talked with one of their staff for a while. We are not only planning on changing the date of our flight – but also want to change the departure city! We are planning on spending a few days up in the coffee region about 3 hours north of Cali – so rather than drive all the way back to get our flight to Bogota, we figured we could leave from one of the closer towns that had an airport large enough to fly jets (not small prop planes which wouldn’t have room for all our luggage!). Rather than wait for a few hours for her to do all the enquiries and work out what it would cost us to make the changes, we left it with her and she would call us back.
We then stopped off at a shopping centre so that I could get the rest of the lawyer fees out of an ATM. Seems that Bancolombia has taken a dislike to our Travel Money card, so I couldn’t use their 400,000 maximum withdrawal ATMs, and instead had to use a different bank which only allowed 300,000 pesos maximum. That meant six transactions @ 300,000 pesos each to get the 1,700,000 required for the remainder of the lawyers fees. It was a bit easier last time when we just paid in USD – it was also a lot cheaper back then!
We headed back to the hotel for lunch, I had a screaming headache, so ended up napping in the room for a while first.
After lunch, Leanne went with Magnolia to the notary office to sign the copies of the birth certificates, it turned out that they had already made the copies with my name on them, so Leanne had to come back to the hotel to find me and bring me back. Fortunately, the notary office is just around the corner from the hotel, so it didn’t take long for our taxi driver to come back with Leanne and pick me up. I signed the papers and left them with the lawyer and we headed back to the hotel.
We spent some time resting in the afternoon, Magnolia picked us up at 4pm and we drove up to Loma de la Cruz – the hilltop arts and crafts market. We bought some tshirts and other souvenirs for the kids.
We got back to the hotel in time for dinner and we all went to bed early, exhausted from the long day
Have written Nicol’s adoption date in our calendar – happy day for all the family.
Was it a Commonwealth Bank Travel Money Card? I got one before leaving and couldn’t use it anywhere. Didn’t expect to be able to in Ethiopia and possibly not Morocco, but certainly should have been able to in Spain as it had Euros on it. I had about $3k on it that I couldn’t access. Good thing I had 3 other backup cards, plus Mum’s cards if needed, so we had no worries about accessing money. Found out when back home that they’d neglected to tell me to activate a code before leaving. I was not happy and told them so. (I suspect the local teller may have been in trouble as a result.) It was an annoying (and slightly expensive) minor glitch on an otherwise very enjoyable holiday.