We decided to go to the Consulate today to register our residency here. While we were waiting for the taxi to take us downtown, a parade broke out!
(FYI - this is the street level view from our apartment entrance.) We saw a few of these parades around town. Apparently, July first is a day for celebrating, although we're not exactly sure what.
Into the taxi and on to the consulate! The other day I posted that the US Consulate was next door to a building with a really strange motif on the front; I was wrong. The Consulate is the building with the strange motif:
Getting in requires going through two separate security checkpoints. At the first checkpoint, we removed everything from our pockets, had our bags searched and had to take the batteries out of our cell phones. (Not sure why on that one.) We were wanded down and sent to the next check point. Here, they took all of the items from our pockets (change, breath mints, phones, keys, etc.), put them in a little open cubbie and gave us a claim ticket for the cubbie. After walking through a metal detector, we were able to reclaim our backpacks but not the contents of the cubbie. Our phones, etc., basically sat on an open shelf while we conducted our business.
Registering with the consulate was less than impressive. The guy behind the window made copies of our passports and had us write our contact information on the back. No forms, no formal procedures. (We had tried to register online but web site could never confirm our registration.) After ten minutes, we were back outside with our cubbie contents reclaimed.
Since Emily and I must have a masochistic side to us, we went to two more banks to try to open an investment account. One lady told us that we could only open an account if we worked for an Ecuadorian company. (If that were true, however, we wouldn't need the account.) The receptionist at Banco del Pacifico told us that we could open an account only after we had been in the country for six months. Besides the fact that she never asked how long we had been there, our tourist visas would have expired long before then. At least the excuses are getting more creative! If there is a standard list of requirements for opening a bank account in Ecuador, it must be a secret.
(Later, Emily was playing with the translator and found the phrase, "I would like to purchase a CD". We're going to try that one the next time we go downtown. I don't know if it will make a difference, but it can't hurt; we're 0 for 6 so far.)
Lunch today was at a restaurant across the street from the apartment. If you look at the top picture in this post, it's on the ground floor of the three story white building in the middle. The sandwich board advertised shrimp soup and roasted chicken, and that sounded good! They were out of the shrimp soup, however, and we were served something along the lines of onion soup with parts:
By "parts" I mean the extra items that they put in the soup to flavor it. There were chunks of bone and pieces of corn cob to add to the flavor. The main course was fried chicken, rice and potato salad:
All this, along with a glass of juice, for only $2.50! Life is good!
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