Saturday 10th - free day!

This will be a short post because today, I spent on my own. I went back to Arbolera Shopping Mall and spent a lot of time window-shopping. Then later I went to la 14 close to my apartment to buy some food.

Maybe this is a good place to write about communications because it has been a disaster! I bought a SIM for my spare phone which is an old Sony Xperia and a SIM for my personal hot spot. But the hot spot either showed no signal or 2G!! The Sony phone wasn't much better. I left my Samsung S6 with its normal Spanish SIM.

In the end, I tried a different network, Claro. In the shop, we swapped SIMs but they ended up breaking the contacts inside the SIM socket by using adhesive tape. So I bought a new phone, Samsung J1 which is about 100 euros but it was a huge performance registering it. And then the reason for my problems became evident, the phones and networks are controlled by strict laws here. You can't simply buy a free phone and stick a SIM in it, the phone has to be registered. And to do that, I needed a Cedula which is the Colombian ID. And of course I don't have one. Finally, the girl in the shop used her own Cedula. The J1 is dual-SIM, so I put my Spanish SIM in there as well for anyone who wants to contact me from Spain.

I put the Claro SIM in my Samsung S6 and that works fine with WhatsApp which I use a lot. But now my personal hot spot won't come "live" when I return to Spain because, in my attempt to get it working, I did a hard reset and subsequently lost the PIN.

OK, that's enough about the technicalities, I will write more about my visit now.