Day 28 - Zipaquirá

We have found out that we have become spoiled during our stay at Hotel Stein in Cali. This morning we went to breakfast and ordered scrambled eggs with cheese and tomatoes, and the waiter just looked at us like we were idiots, and said "Do you have cheese? Do you have the tomatoes?" It turned out that the hotel Halifax does not offer its guests any kind of meat, cheese, or vegetables for breakfast. They provide access to a big refrigerator in the kitchen, and the guests are welcome to fill it with whatever they want to have for breakfast the next day, if they go out and buy it themselves. Among all the hotels that we have stayed in, this is the first with such an arrangement. We wish they would have told us on our first day!

Other than that, the hotel is fine, and we do prefer it to the one we stayed at on the way to Cali.

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On the first day with cool weather, mami got a tan and daddy got really sunburnt on his neck and forehead. It wasn't really sunny, and it was cool, so we did not notice the sun, but of course, both Bogotá and Zipaquirá lie 2 640 m above sea level, and without protection we got burned even without direct sunlight and even after three weeks in Cali's heat.

Jakob was wearing a cap and long sleeves all day (doctor's orders: no sun!), so he is fine. He probably can't get sunburned anyway, due to his dark skin.

Jakob is now back with Paola. Today our two families rented a van together and went on an excursion together to a big park called Parque Jaime Duque, and to the old city of Zipaquirá and the Cathedral of salt there (Catedral de Sal Zipaquirá). From the outset, Paola (5) and Jakob (3) were holding hands, and they also kissed each other on the cheek several times. (Let's hope Marie in Cali is not reading this!)

Day 27 - The first flight

Today we paid the bill for the three and a half weeks we have stayed at the hotel in Cali with full pension and laundry service. They promised us a 5% discount if we paid in cash, so we said "why not", and while Jelena packed our bags, Ulf took Jakob on the arm and walked the 350 meters up the street to the nearest ATM.

There he took out several million pesos, all in 10 000 pesos bills, which was the biggest note the machine would give him. (The stupid machine would only let him withdraw a maximum of 400 000 pesos per transaction, so when Ulf finally had enough, a rather long line of impatient people had formed behind him, and they were pointing at their watches and glaring at him as he walked away.)

This amount of money was impossible to fit in a wallet, so Ulf filled his pockets and the lining of his trousers with wads of money, and walked quickly back to the hotel, suddenly very conscious of the fact that he was every mugger's dream. It went well, but his clothes were soaked with sweat and he had to take a shower as soon as he reached the hotel. (Not just because he was nervous about being robbed; the facts that he had to carry Jakob all the way and that it was 35 degrees outside, as always, probably also contributed to the perspiring.)

After paying the bill, we gave gifts (mostly money, plus cute personal cards that Jelena had made) to half the staff (the ones who had helped us the most) and said goodbye to all the other families at the hotel. Then we went to the airport.


Jakob did not mind flying, and the whole flight went very well. At the hotel in Bogotá we met the Dutch family who had left Cali three days before us, and five or six other families with children they are in the process of adopting. We spent a pleasant afternoon and evening with them at the hotel terrace, because the weather did not encourage us to go anywhere. Shortly after we had checked in, it started to rain. But we had almost forgotten what cool evenings are like, and enjoyed it very much.

Jakob immediately found some new friends among the other adopted children, so he seems to like it here. But most of all we are looking forward to coming home. Our current Estimated Time of Arrival at Bergen Airport is Wednesday at 5 PM!

Day 26 - Blood and sutures

Today we went out and bought wine so we could celebrate the end of our adoption case together with our new friends, the other four adopting couples at the hotel, and Alain and Bernadette, the French couple who stays here for two months every two years.

When we came back from the shop, we relaxed on the terrace with the other couples, while the children were playing. Suddenly we heard Jakob's voice crying from inside the hotel. We both went inside, and our crying child came running towards us, blood running down his forehead, nose, cheeks, and mouth, making a trail of blood drops on the floor!


We reacted as any sensible parents who experience this for the first time with their first child, would: We panicked!

We cleaned his face with water, localized the wound to his forehead, and put a band-aid on the cut. Then we took Jakob in our arms, and ran to the clinic 400 m up the street, where they have an emergency room. Despite the language barrier, we got the best possible treatment for our son once we showed them our Europeiske insurance card.

And though the visit to the emergency room was expensive (over 700 000 pesos), apparently we had not overreacted. The doctors said that it was a deep cut which needed stitches. But because Jakob is black, they did not want their regular pediatricians to do the sutures, they had to call in a specialist in plastic surgery, to sow up the wound in such a way that it will not leave a white scar on his forehead. (Incidentally, the plastic surgeon was white.)

Later, we heard from the other children what had happened. The bigger children had been playing with Jakob, pushing him around in a baby stroller, which he enjoys a lot. They had lost control of the stroller on the stairs outside our room, and it had raced down the wheelchair ramp with Jakob in it, so his head hit the cast-iron bench at the bottom.

After we came back from the hospital, Jakob wanted to play more. So Marie came to our room where they played peacefully until his bedtime. Then all the parents gathered in the sitting room and drank some wine and had a really nice chat about the things that we are all going through. We were even able to laugh about Jakob's dramatic last evening here, knowing that it won't be the last time he gets hurt. But the first time is really tough on the parents!

In the end the day ended well, just like our stay in Cali. (Tomorrow at 10 AM we will be leaving for Bogotá.) We like to think that we have made some new friends during these three weeks!

Day 25 - Jakob Lunde

This evening there is one more family member with the name Lunde than there were this morning! All the documents and all the paperwork here in Cali are now done! Hooray!

This morning everything happened with breathtaking speed! Our case has been standing still at step 7 (see Day 9) for over a week now, first because the ICBF first couldn't get their act together to appoint a new attorney for our court, and then because their newly appointed attorney didn't feel ready to sign our documents yet.

But today at 10 AM, just as we got off the phone with Adopsjonsforum's office in Bogotá, who promised to help us get in touch with our contact person in Cali, we got a call from our lawyer (who speaks a little English herself) saying that one of us had to be ready to show up in court in ten minutes! She was on her way in a taxi to pick us up, and there was no time to wait for the translator!

Ulf quickly changed from shorts to nice pants, grabbed our passports, and was picked up outside the big steel gates of the stone wall surrounding our hotel. In the meantime the translator called and explained what was going on.

Our lawyer has been pleading, pushing and nagging the ICBF persistently until this morning the attorney finally signed the adoption documents (and only those), probably just so she would stop harassing him!

Once that happened, the rest was downhill. The secretary in our court is an old friend of our lawyer's, and he pushed our case through step 8 (which usually takes at least 10 days) in less than an hour, and (since today is Wednesday) step 9 as well! So now it was already time for step 10, the big milestone that every adopting couple (in Spanish: adoptantes) is waiting for: For the parents to sign the sentencia!

We could hardly believe it and were beside ourselves with joy and excitement! But we have seen other families here have setbacks just when they thought they had had breakthroughs, so we weren't about to change our tickets until we had actually held the signed and stamped documents in our hands.

Ulf spent the rest of the day running from one office to another together with Elena, our lawyer. They were in luck, and managed to catch all the necessary people, time all the meetings, pay all the fees, and meet all the deadlines with fine precision, so that by noon we had actually finished steps 12 and 13 too, with the exception of one final stamp and signature from a specific notary public on the new birth certificate!

We thought we would have that, too, done before they closed down all offices for lunch at 12:00, but the last clerk to check our sentencia, at 11:55 AM, discovered an error: on one (just one!) of the pages today's date was written as Veinticinco de Marzo instead of Veinticinco de febrero! So they refused to give us a birth certificate.

So we had lunch and started all over again, going to all the same offices after having fixed the error! Ulf had to come along this time, too, because the page with the erroneous date was one with his signature on it. When we finally got it done and returned to the notary public's office, the person who needed to sign the document, had left. But they said he'd be back at 4 PM. So our lawyer took all our documents and gave them to our translator, who returned at 4:00 PM, got the necessary last signature, and delivered everything at our hotel in the evening!

So although it formally takes three days before the ruling takes effect, we are in practice done in Cali and will finish the last steps in Bogotá on Monday and Tuesday!

It does not matter that we cannot finish the last steps this week, because this weekend is the end of a French holiday, so all Air France flights from Bogotá to Europe are completely full, and we can't get on them. Luckily, we have reserved seats on the flight to Paris on the evening of Tuesday, March 3rd (which we until this morning thought we'd probably have to change to a later date), and we will try to be on it, because none of the flights on the days just before and just after that has any free seats.

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While all this was going on, Jakob went to the zoo together with his friend Marie and her parents. (Mami also came along.) By the end of the day, he had broken our camera (but we don't care, since our stay here is at an end), his name was no longer Jákob, but Jakób, he no longer called us mámi and pápi, but mamí and papí, and our son had finally mastered the art of skarring, pronouncing Marie in a very French-sounding manner!


When it was time for him to go to bed, he got his first kiss from Marie, and he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her back!

Day 24 - Blood and frustration

This morning we took Jakob to the hospital to deliver a feces sample and to take a blood sample, to check him for any locally known diseases and/or parasites, even though he seems perfectly healthy now.

He loved riding the elevator at the hospital (which, by the way, has a big sign next to it, informing elevator passengers that no guns are allowed there).

Either he is not used to people sticking needles in him, or he has some bad previous experience with that, because Jakob was extremely reluctant to let the nurse pull blood from his arm. It took four grown-up people to hold him still on the doctor's bench long enough to get the job done.

Afterwards we bought him a blue ice cream cone with hundreds of little pieces of spearmint bubblegum in it, and he was happy again! He ate it so slowly that it melted before he was half done, because he meticulously picked out all the pieces of bubble gum from every lick he took, and placed them on his napkin on the table.

Then he walked around the shopping mall and proudly showed the little piece of band-aid on his arm to the ubiquitous armed guards.

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We watched the news broadcast on RCN at lunchtime, about the Australian family who is adopting four children. We couldn't understand much of what was said, but we think it was a news report with a positive angle.

Later, when walking around downtown with their adopted children in the afternoon, the French couple was approached by people who commented on the story, and we've had some paparazzis trying to sneak into the hotel today, but the armed guards have been told to keep them away.

Nat and David themselves told us that when they visited the airport today, a cute, little, old lady inched closer and closer to Nat and finally asked her "Will you take me too?" with a wide grin.

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Our so-called "contact person" from the adoption agency has made herself invisible again. She has not replied to any of the messages we have left her, and she has not given us any progress reports on our case. She is supposed to help us with everything and look after us here in Cali. But in fact we have heard from her only once (last Wednesday) since our case went to court on February 9. Now it is Tuesday evening, February 24th. We are not too happy with that.

She had not even given us her phone number so we could get in touch with her, we had to get the hotel to call our lawyer (whom we are not allowed to contact directly) to get it, and that's the number where we have been leaving messages. But when we called that number today, a strange lady answered the phone. Apparently, we still don't have the right phone number of our contact person!

We tried calling the adoption agency's main office in Bogotá for help, but it was after 3 PM and we only got an automatic message in Spanish. We will try again tomorrow.

Day 23 - A new girlfriend

Jakob is now eating well, and if we thought his energy level was high before, we now have to realize that it was far from its maximum! He shows no signs of illness anymore. He is high and low, always laughing, running, and socializing. Everybody in the hotel now knows who he is. He looks very happy.

He has been playing a lot with the four siblings who are going to live in Australia, and although he is the youngest in the group, he tries to boss them around and throws himself into all their games and playfights. Mostly it goes well, and if he falls and hurts himself, he is back in the game after ten seconds in mami's arms. He loves those kids!


The Australian family was interviewed by several TV channels today. (They will be on CNN, RCN and other channels, as well as in several newspapers, because apparently this is the first time a family has adopted four kids at once, at least in Colombia.) It was all we could do to keep Jakob out of their midst while they were filming!

Our one kid is a handful, and we're so glad we outnumber him two to one. We are very impressed that Nat and David from Australia (even with help from their other son) can manage four at once, but they seem to be coping just fine. But Jelena thought she sensed a trace of anxiety in David's voice today as she and Nat were going shopping together:
"Aren't you forgetting something?" asked David.
"What?" said Nat.
"The kids!"
"Oh, we'll only be gone five minutes!", Jelena reassured him. "But be sure to check on the children every half hour while we're out!"

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One of the other guests at the hotel is an elderly, white gentleman, who is either creole or a gringo who has been living in Colombia for many years. Today when Nat had joined Ulf for lunch while Jelena was looking after Jakob during his nap, this gentleman came over to their table and said: "What I like so much about those four wonderful kids, is that they are always minding their own business!" Then he went back to his own table.

Later today, at supper, one of the kids was sent to her room without finishing her meal because she was misbehaving. Then the same gentleman got up from his table across the restaurant, crossed over to the Australians' table (next to ours), and asked: "Is everything OK? Why did one of your children have to leave the restaurant?"

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After Paola left yesterday with her Italian family, Jakob has discovered the quiet, but very charming, French girl Marie (who is 5 years old, like Paola), who is here to get a new little sister. They have no language in common, but they play together very affectionately. This evening he refused to go to supper until Marie and her family were going, too!

He willingly lets her push him around in her baby sister's stroller. Papi tried to tell him that he'll have women pushing him around all his grown-up life, so there is no need to start so soon! But he wouldn't listen.



Papi has sung different songs for Jakob every night when it is time to go to sleep, but one in particular has been sung every evening. Tonight Jakob surprised us by joining in (very loudly) on the first two lines of "Byssan lull, koka kittelen full" just as we thought he was beginning to fall asleep! The more we laughed, the louder he sang. We had to choose a different way to calm him down tonight.

The new Swedish couple got their beautiful little Manuela (9 months old) today. When we asked them how their first day had been, they said: "Oh, everything was just perfect... but then she woke up!"

Day 22 - Cristo Rey

Today was a very nice day! The weather was great, we did nice things, we were all feeling well again after our bout of illness, and Jakob behaved very well all day and had a great appetite at all meals!

Yesterday we finally understood what it means when he says "tengo calor aquí" and touches his belly: that means he is nauseous and about to throw up. Understanding that has helped a lot!

After having vomited after (or during) at least one meal four days in a row now, today Jakob felt sick only once, and that was before breakfast, so he had nothing to throw up. We read the signals correctly this time, and gave him only half a glass of saft and then waited a while (and took a hot bath) before having breakfast. Then he was feeling much better and ate with such a ravenous appetite that we had to hold back some of his food.

We try to teach him some Norwegian every day, and today at breakfast I tried to teach him the word for "bread" (brød), but that almost made him throw up again, because the sound he made when trying to pronounce it with a skarre-R like daddy, was exactly the same as when he vomits!

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After having Fernando (on the left in the picture) take a group photo of us with the Australian family with four adopted siblings and the Italian family who was leaving today, we said good-bye to Irene, Alessandro, Armando and Paola. Paola, who is five, kissed Jakob on the cheek, and at first he wiped his cheek and went "yuck", but a minute later he kissed her back. It was very sweet. Then we had Hans, the guard (on the right in the picture), open the gate to where Larry, our driver, was waiting for us.





Larry, whose father Carlos also worked for the same hotel, took us on a little tour of Cali today. We visited among other places the 25 m tall Cristo Rey statue on top of a hill by the city. (The roads are as curvy and narrow as any in Western Norway; We were glad we went in a private car and not by the chiva you see in the picture!) There we were met by a bunch of catholic fanatics who were chanting and praying and shouting to the devil that he shoud take the financial crisis, the homosexuals, and the prostitutes and begone from Cali!















































After three weeks of eating in the hotel restaurant, we politely turned down lunch from the hotel today. First we went and had passport photos taken at the mall for Jakob's passports (one Colombian and one Norwegian), and then we went and got good junk food at El Corral. That was the tastiest hamburger and chicken burger either of us has ever had at a fast food restaturant! We can definitely recommend El Corral as a better alternative to McDonald's or Burger King! Jakob ate and ate, but did not get sick to the stomach.

After lunch Jakob fell asleep and slept for three hours! It definitely looks like the illness is losing its grip on him. He hasn't had any fever today, and he has been in a good mood all day.

At supper he again had a surprisingly good appetite, and he was calmer and happier than he has been at any meal in the restaurant before. Now we are thinking that what we thought was just his impatient nature, may have been an illness-caused distress of some sort (perhaps a pain in his ear), making it hard for him to sit still and eat with us at the table.

It was not easy for him to go to sleep at his normal bed-time, but he was a good boy and didn't try to fool around after we told him it was too late for that. But he was tossing and turning, unable to find a sleeping position, both because he was not sleepy and because it is terribly hot at night here. But Ulf can sing anyone to sleep, and after a few verses of "Byssan lull" even Jakob succumbed!

The pension is getting two new families tomorrow, a Swedish one and a German one. The Swedes, Eva and Thomas, will be our next-door neighbors. We met them just before we turned in for the night. They are getting a lucky child from the orphanage in the morning. We know the feelings they must be having now, and the joy they will experience tomorrow!

Day 21 - The Yakú farm again

During the weekends nothing happens in the courts in Colombia. Then we adoption families try not to think of our (lack of) progress with our court cases, and instead focus only on the more important matter, viz. the bonding between parents and children.

Today we went with our newfound friends Nat, David, Tanner, Camilla, Justin, Luz Clarita, and Maria Angela (the Australian family) to the Yakú petting zoo, together with Alexandra (10 years, Germany), Marie (5 years, France), and Camille (11 months, France) and their families.


It was a cloudy, but warm and humid day. The most exciting thing that happened, was that the black sheep broke out of its pen at the petting zoo.



Also, an interesting range of military airplanes flew over the farm while we were there. We only managed to take pictures of a couple of them.



Oh, and a little, jumping spider appeared on Ulf's hand as we were having lunch under a tree in the garden. (Under the same tree as when the bright green spider from our previous blog entry landed on Ulf as we were having lunch yesterday.) You can't really tell from the photo, but is was gold-colored and really shiny!



That's how exciting a Saturday in Colombia can be!

Actually, we spent most of the day in the hotel room trying to get well. Jakob took some pictures of his daddy, who was discussing Jakob's health with his farfar.




Tomorrow we are going to have a tour of the city while the others go to the country club to play in the pools. We are starting to miss home, but we just have to take one day at a time. Please write comments if you are reading our blog! It helps keeping our spirits up!

Day 20 - Pictures of Cali

After a few days with almost no pictures, today we'll compensate by only showing pictures from the last couple of weeks, and almost no text! :-)


1) Around Cali


















2) Aguaparque