Saturday, April 16, 2011

30 days later and maybe a solution in sight.

My last post over a month ago acknowledged the end was in sight for our residency paperwork and that the legal stuff had been completed. Well here's a update on that process. In the last 5 months we have continuously been submitting documents, paperwork and waiting on the political system that has changed the process for residency 3 times since we started the process, the latest being 2 weeks ago. Barb and I both have our Censo cards which register us in Cuenca and is a prerequisite to the Cedula which is a national ID card in Ecuador and we have the little silver stamp in our passports. To this point we are into a 10 day process that has taken 5 months and still isn't complete. We are legal but not registered. This isn't a real big problem except that the national ID card is required to be able to do some stuff like buy a car, get a drivers license and open bank accounts. The point is the political system here is constantly changing in ways that affect everything - it's a frustrating system that is hard to get used to - I guess that is why there are so many ways around things here, at some point the way around may be the law.

On the building front in LaPaz - zero progress because of the redo, undo, restart and new regulations involved in our residency statis. Someday something will get done but I am no longer willing to speculate on when that will be.

The flower market on Mariscal Sucre in Cuenca.