Success (and failure)

As I implied yesterday, I managed to get my cell phone after two trips to the cell phone stores and a bunch of run around.  I got a great plan that will cost me much, much less than a cell phone plan in the US and I'm pretty happy with the phone so far.

Unfortunately, I went home to no internet.  The internet did decide to start back up at around 11:30, but I had to get up early today to head to the bank, so it wasn't much use to me.  Speaking of the bank ...

I still hate doing administrative tasks here.  To be fair, I hate doing them in the US, too.  But add the language barrier and I would rather be punched in the face than go to the bank here.  After waiting *FOREVER* for a woman to finish telling the bank employee what she was going to do this weekend with her grandkids [side note:  I have learned you cannot be in a rush here.  Even if you are in a rush, things will get done when they get done.  Things sometimes get done more quickly if you try to exchange a few pleasantries first.  But often, they just get done whenever the person doing them feels like it], I finally talked to the employee.  I explained that I have a foreigner's account, but now I have my residence card, so I want to switch to a resident account (so they won't charge me fees).  She took my card, my passport and my ATM card and spent about 20 minutes typing stuff onto her computer.  Then she went to look for some guy because she couldn't do one part of the switch, who wasn't there.  Then she took a personal call on her cell phone (not kidding).  Finally, she told me that she'd have to take my documents and make copies of them and then try to switch it later.  She said they'd call me ... we'll see what happens.  If I haven't heard from them in a week, I'll go back, maybe with a Spanish speaker to try to figure things out.

I also have to go to the post office today for the first time to try to get a package.  Inexplicably the post office is open 8 am-8:30 pm Monday through Friday and 8 am - 2 on Saturday.  This is a minor miracle considering everything shuts down early on Fridays (2pm or so) and most services like the bank aren't open at all on Saturday.

I also applied for my Tarjeta Ciudadana, which is a card you get that gives you access to a lot of services:  Discounted prices at the School of Music and Dance, discounted prices at sports facilities and gyms, free parking in various areas, Free WiFi throughout the city.  Hopefully that will arrive without too much trouble, and then I can be done with bureaucracy for a while!