Day 32 - Home, Sweet Home

We are home, after what seemed like an endless journey home from Colombia! (We changed flights in Paris and in Amsterdam.)

Jakob was on his best behavior on the entire trip, and the trip was uneventful (i.e., long and boring).


Friends and family greeted us at Bergen airport. This was very touching. Jakob immediately recognized his cousins Victor and Thea from the pictures we have shown him! Their mother drove us home, and then everybody left us alone.


Now we are one tired, but happy family!

We are especially glad to see that Jakob and our dog, Vita, get along very well. We waited until after we had eaten supper before we anxiously allowed the two of them to be in the same room, but we needn't have worried — they became friends right away!

Now we just hope that our luggage, which got lost in Paris, will also make it home soon!

Many thanks to all you who have been reading our blog and sending us encouraging words during our trip! We haven't replied to all of you, but we have appreciated every comment from you!

Day 31 - Going home

Jakob knows that we are going to fly again today. He is looking forward to it a lot and talks about it all the time.

Today all we had to do was to return to the Norwegian embassy in Bogotá to pick up Jakob's new passport, pack our suitcases, and go to the airport. Simple, we thought!

The embassy is half an hour from the hotel by taxi. They had asked us to come after 09:30, when Jakob's documents should be ready. Ulf and Jakob were there at 10:00, but did not get a passport. The person who issues passports had not come to work today!

They said that they expect him to be in the office around 12:30, and told us to come back then. So we went back to the hotel and ordered a taxi for 12:00. We have to go to the airport at 3:00 PM. We are cutting it kindof close now, so we are a little stressed, but optimistic.

We can't go home without his passport, so if we don't get it today, things can get interesting! But if all goes well this time, these are probably the last words we will be writing on our blog before we are home in Norway!

Day 30 - Jakob's first passport

We made some new friends today, a very nice couple from New York who is here to adopt a baby girl from Bogotá. They joined us when we went to a hammock factory after lunch, and then we took the aerial tramway to the Monserrate hill (3 152 m) together. The view from there was spectacular!

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It only took half an hour to get a Colombian passport for Jakob this morning. Reinaldo (see Day 2) accompanied us, and we didn't have to wait in any of the long lines of people, he just walked straight to the head of the lines because he knew everybody in the office.

Now we need only one more document, the Norwegian passport for Jakob, and we can go home!

Day 29 - Walking around in Bogotá

Today we walked around the souvenir market in Bogotá together with another family who is staying in our hotel (Tommy and Anita from Halden and their four year old son from Bogotá). It is a very nice market, but we probably ought to have haggled more than we did!

Later we went to a park near our hotel with a playground,



together with the Dutch family we know from Cali. The park, which was surrounded by many good restaurants (we had lunch in one), was very clean and safe, with park guards patroling all the time. This is obviously a very nice neighbourhood. We missed that type of parks in Cali!

Looking thru the hotel's guest book, we found greetings from many, many Norwegian couples who have become families here at this hotel. Right now we are two Norwegian, three Swedish, and three Dutch families here. Most families stay here for six weeks or more, because adoption in Bogotá takes longer than in Cali. Some choose to spend two or three weeks on an island in the Caribbean, where (unlike here) it is warm and sunny, while they wait for the court's decision.