Coffee Time LIVE- LIVE from Colombia. 25 September 2022

Welcome back to the channel Grand Columbia and welcome to another Coffee Time Live. Four plus years in the making. Okay, got a bunch of little things today, but I'm going to make it kind of short. I'm shooting for a half an hour. We'll go longer if we need to. Let's see. What do we got here? We got Rob. Hello. Hello, Rob. You get my message. I got to tell you that story. Ben from Circassia. Okay. Jukka. Jukka, thank you as always. And let's see. We got sound. All right. Looks like everything's good. George. Good morning from Northern California. Yes. As always, my sympathies. Text blue jeans. That's a new one to me, I believe. Good morning from Bogota and good morning to you. Okay. Weather. Right now about 72 degrees. Overcast. Yeah, I'll tell you right now. There's a website called weatherspark.com. That is the closest to accurate I've found on the internet. It's not completely accurate. For example, if you're looking up information on Armenia, it's good. It's valid for Armenia in general. But if you go to the north, you want to add a few degrees cooler. It looks like about three degrees cooler. And humidity is a little bit less in the north. I think that's primarily because of the wind. But when I had a disaster happen this morning, I don't know why. My beautiful, well, they're not new anymore. But my glasses with the very expensive lenses. I picked them up to put them on. I have no idea why. But the frame broke right here. The lens just fell out. I said, well, I had to help. So I go to put the lens in. I see the frame's broken. And since I wore them last, they've just been sitting in a safe place. I don't know. I don't know what happened there. So we'll find out. I'll tell you what happens when I go back and say, what's up with these? Turtle, how you doing? Mike. Hello, Mike. Sorry, I couldn't make it out. I didn't have a car for the weekend. And I'm just really busy with the how to build a channel project. And just a quick rundown. I'm expecting I'll probably be doing the Salomina trip the first part of October. In the middle of October, I'm meeting up with a longtime viewer for about three days with his son. We're going to make a trip to Manizales. After that, a few days after that, so probably around the 21st of October, it's where I'm tentatively planned to go to Bucaramanga. I want to mention these. Oh, is that coming out black to you? It's a green package. This is bizarre. On the screen, it looks black. I don't understand that at all. I was asked, why can't I find graham crackers? There's a lot of things I can't find. You said you could find everything. Why can't I find graham crackers? These are graham crackers. It's a local brand, Tosh. And it doesn't say graham cracker. It's in English, it's bran and honey. Galleta con salvado y miel. Bran, graham, it's the same thing. They don't use the word graham here. But you can make your pie crust, which is what he was asking, out of these. They come in a big package. They love to individually wrap things. So, you know, in the U.S., for example, if you get a container of Oreos, it will be like three rows. You open it up, and there will be three rows. It's not like that here. You'll get a similar size container, but there will be little packages of individually, like four maybe Oreos in a package, and there will be a bunch of those. I have no idea. They just really enjoy the wrapping. Okay. So what do we got here? George, thank you. Much appreciated. Also, we had, before we started, Mr. Anonymous. I know who he is now. Thank you very much. Mike, how you doing, Mike? It's black. That is the weirdest thing. Everything else is true color, and this is black. There's something about this wrapper, apparently. That is really bizarre. I don't know what to make of that. Okay, it looks like colors are kind of blown out today, too. This new software has had several updates since it came out. Every time it comes out, I have to reset a bunch of things. I spent about an hour and a half this morning trying to get everything up to speed, and I noticed my color is kind of blown out, maybe a little more than usual. So I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Weird. Is it a green screen color? No, this is not a green screen. I have no green screen going on. Okay, yeah, that would be a pretty good guess, actually. But no, there's no green screen anything happening. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe with the changes this morning, maybe it defaulted to some sort of background. I'm not going to take time to look right now. All right, so I told you about the graham cracker. This brand is really popular. They make all kinds, like if you like sesame seed crackers, or just all those different kinds of crackers, that brand has them. But you'll also find those graham crackers. I haven't seen any others, but I didn't look for any others. I don't find it that hard to locate things. I made a trip to PriceSmart a few days ago. And I went in there with a certain amount of money in mind, what you always have to, or you just get carried away. And when I got in there, I decided that I was going to throw everything into some ribeye steaks and some Angus ground beef. And so that's what I did. And you can figure this out, 51,000 pesos for one of the ribeye steaks, 51,000 pesos. And it was 1.4 pounds. So let me know how much that is a pound. And that's, let's see, we got Select Choice Prime. It's Choice Angus ribeye from the USA. I'm curious to know how that compares to the price you're paying for that in the US. Good day, brother from Tampa, Florida. How you doing? For a guy who loves this place so much, you're hardly ever here. What's up with that? Is Haymando still around? Of course they are. You'll find the link in the description below the video. You know, you go down there and you kind of open it up and the link's in there. Right there, Haymando Travel Insurance. Still around, still recommending it. All right, I got a few things to mention, a few things in the news. I'm not gonna go into depth in any of these because each one could probably be a topic, probably wouldn't be a very interesting topic. But primarily, I'm not gonna go into depth in any of these because these are simply proposals. And for any of these to come to fruition, there's quite a long process beginning with a mandatory five Senate or Assembly debates. Different times, it has to be five. So there's a whole process. That doesn't sound right. $19 a pound, 51,000 pesos. Are you saying that's the price in California? Oh, okay, the price in California. Yeah, what's the price I gave you? 1.4 pounds, 51,000 pesos. The pesos right now, 4,400. So divide 51,000 by 4,400 and then the 1.4 pounds to the whatever that was, and you'll go up with how much a pound. At your local Safeway, gotcha. Gotcha, $19 for ribeye a pound. Jesus, that seems really high. I've been gone a while, I guess. I've been gone out of the US seven years. I don't know, you get in here and you're living in this economy and prices like that just kind of give me a heart attack. The ones that I bought, that's way more than I ever spent. I mean, I've spent 51,000 for two weeks worth of meat. I hardly ever have beef and it's my favorite, but I don't think about it that much. I seem to be having a lot of chicken lately. I don't know, it's just easier. My wife calls Pricemark the paseo millonario because we can't go there without spending at least a million pesos. It would be, I could have done that. If I had had that to spend, I easily saw, I walked through the store and it's like, yeah, I'd like to buy that. Yeah, I'd like to buy that. I get about $8.28 a pound. That sounds about right. That was my guess, somewhere between eight and 10 bucks, just off the top of my head. And I think that's pretty good because I think that's what the price was seven years ago. I think I used to pay eight, $9 a pound when I was living in North Carolina for ribeye. Before COVID, ribeye was 12 a pound in California. And so in California, everything costs more than everywhere else in the country. So those prices come, yeah, it sounds about right. And the rest of the country is probably nine, $10 a pound. Gotcha, cool. I know that probably is no interest to you guys, but I get curious once in a while to get a little perspective of what's going on. Those of us in Pensacola is going to get hit by Hurricane Ian. Yeah, it's La Nina, remember I said, you're going to get more hurricanes on that part of the world, the Atlantic coming into Florida. So don't be surprised if you get a little more than usual. And hear the climate change, religion shouting from the treetops. Ah, it's easy, okay. All right, those topics. So they're only provisional, may or may not happen. Plus, they're not even fully formed yet, but they're in the news. So this first one, political reform, voting in Columbia would become mandatory. In Ecuador, it's mandatory. It hasn't been here. They usually get a pretty good turnout, I guess, of around a little over 60%. I don't think it's that bad. But there's a lot of people in Columbia, I mean a lot, that are angry about the thought of this. Because it's being seen as a way to tamper with what's worked in order to enhance a political party. So we'll see more about that. But this is not something that's being welcomed by throngs of Columbians. Then we've got here, this is one that's being played up politically. Solidarity income will be replaced by a new plan to fight hunger. Now, just to give you a little background, when COVID hit, obviously there were problems. And the government was sending out bags of food. And a lot of volunteer organizations were as well. But the Columbia government sending out trucks of food bagged up, you know, like rice and beans and all kinds of things bagged up. And taking them to the lower stratus one, two, and somewhat three for distribution. And it was called, this plan was called Solidarity Income. And it was a temporary funding deal. Because Columbia is not big on establishing some tax and then keeping it. They're relatively tax free. And that's been the standard for Columbia. Well, the new government wants us to become a permanent plan, supported by new taxes to fight hunger. Now, we know how these things go. I mean, they sound great. But the more money that you put into the government, the more power the government gets. You know, it's a power grab. But it could very well be supported. Because who doesn't want to feed the hungry? So we'll see how this goes. This one might sell just because of the way it's positioned. Then we got what do we have here? Part of the revision tax plan, I was going to go over all the bullet points. No, I don't want to go there. Because then you take it as kind of like, it's all meaningful. And it isn't necessarily. And the only reason I'm talking about these, are these are the ones, the key points that have made the news. Like specifically made the news. A little backdrop on this. Bakeries and small shops will not pay tax on ultra processed food. Well, this category of ultra processed, not what you think. But what it boils down to is they initially were talking about a tax on food items, rather anything other than like a bag of rice or a bag of beans. But if it was Milo, well, that's a processed food. Adding tax, adding taxes to the various food items, not just Ho Ho's and Twinkies. And there was, even when it was first murmured, there was kind of an uproar in the government itself about that. And it reminds me, there's some good news of a bit of a split in the government. But remind me, what they're talking about now, is in order to sell this idea, is to exclude small businesses from this tax. And it will only be larger corporations that will have to pay this tax, which of course always gets passed along in pricing. You know, it's laughable in any country when they talk about taxing a business, because the business only has what the consumers of that business pay. So the idea of this is that there's an uproar on some potential big new tax on food, two strikes. And in order to sweeten the pot and try to get people to go along with it, but we're looking out for the small businessman, we're looking out for the little tiendas, so they don't have to worry about it. I don't know, we'll see where that goes. In last year, I saved it for last, starting tomorrow, scheduled for tomorrow only, there's going to be a march here in Armenia, but it's a national march. And essentially, it's Colombians that are pissed off about all of this stuff that's being proposed. There's a lot of people just saying we're not having it. We're not going to have you change up the election so that you get some kind of unfair advantage. We're not going to have you start pushing a whole bunch of new taxes on people. So we'll see what happens. I'm going to try to get out tomorrow. I had plans. But I kind of wanted to go and see the energy of this, see what it looks like. It won't be, you know, if you're in Colombia, don't worry about it. Don't fear it. It's in most of Colombia, it's party time. The exceptions will always be in Bogota and Cali. They just seem to like to break things. But in the rest of Colombia, these are kind of like excuses to go play. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm gratified to see that. This wasn't on the schedule originally. This is something as a response to some of these things coming out. Now, when I said there's a split, there's a liberal group. There's lots of parties in Colombia. God, I don't even remember. They come and go, 12, 15 political parties. And Petro had to put together a coalition, which anybody pretty much has to. And part of that coalition was the liberal party. Go figure. Except the liberal party is pretty pissed off at Petro over some of these things he's thrown out there. And there's a number of liberal party politicians that are out giving speeches in Colombia about how some of these things would be disastrous. So it may be liberal party, but they're not socialist party. They're not big government party. There's—it's a different—you know, if you hear a liberal party, then you automatically think a certain way. It isn't necessarily that. They're very pro-Colombian, and they don't want to see everything turned upside down. They don't want to see election laws change because they've been very successful. Why would you change the election laws when they've worked real well? Another thing to mention on that voting, they're running some trials. There's little votes that come up here and there in between the big ones. And so they're running some trial voting, mandatory voting on those. And there's going to be several of those, just kind of see how it goes. But like I said, not a whole lot of support, let alone the idea that people tend to be a little independent here, and the government's going to tell me I have to go vote? What if I don't like either of these? And last election, there were too many people that didn't like either of those candidates. And that's part of how Petro won. So I don't know. We shall see. That's that. Enough of that. My Colombian housekeeper went with me to Pray Smart last week. She tried the Vlasic pickles. Now she's hooked. You know, that was one of those things. I'm looking down at this big jar of Vlasic pickles with chunks of garlic floating around in it. It's like, oh, oh, I want that. I want that. Okay, ribeye Vlasic pickles. It was a real toss up. It was a toss up. And another thing, in those ribeyes, you had all these big fat packed ribeyes, good size, like two meals in one. They had one that was essentially a rib roast, but it didn't have the bone in. It was like the bone cut out. So they were equivalent of three, maybe four ribeye steak, but it was all one hunk of meat. And that was tempting just to get it as a rib roast. But by the time I would get around to eating all of it, it would end up being kind of stale tasting. Meat's only good when it's fresh. Okay, we're almost up on the half hour. If you have any questions, throw them out there. And, oh, this looks interesting. Today's public sales price in Florida, boneless ribeye steak, $12.99 a pound. So $13 versus, what'd you say, $8.28, $8, $9, $10, $11, $12, $13. Wow, so good price here. Regular price, $15.99. Bone in, $9.99. Yeah, so you're just paying for the bone. Regular, $14.99. Wow, Greenwise, I think organic, I don't know. Angus ribeye steak, bone in, $12.99. All right, so bottom line is you can get USDA, U.S. Angus beef ribeye cheaper here than you can there. Now, you never know when you're in another country if selector choice is a thing. As a matter of fact, the only reason it's any of those is because it's from the U.S. If you get in other countries, they don't have that kind of rating. And you get what you get. And you don't know necessarily what it's going to be. You have to look at it. And if you know marbling and you're looking at the blue skin and look at the grizzle that's running through it, you have to kind of guess what it is. Here, it was actually marked on the package. And these are vacuum packed from the U.S. So if it says choice on it, I think it probably is choice. Now, the one that I ate yesterday was I cooked one up. It was I had it for lunch. And then I had the rest for dinner. It tasted like choice. You could tell it wasn't prime. But it certainly wasn't select. It wasn't all fatty and grizzly. And it was really tasty. It was, man, when you don't have it very often, but it's one of your favorite things, it's pretty awesome. And then Friday, I made homemade meatballs with the Angus ground beef. Those are pretty crazy. I made up a batch. And I've got several meals worth in my refrigerator to heat up. All this stock of ribeye is making me hungry. Yeah, see, the thing is, it'll be at least another week, maybe two weeks before I have the next one. Jumbo has a great meat selection. Lots of American beef. Yeah, we don't have one of those here. Here in Armenia, you can go to Lorales Supermercado. And very often, they'll have U.S. Angus. But not always. And then Pricemark in Breda. I will say a few months ago, they didn't have any. But there was a lot of things from the U.S. that it just wasn't coming through. And I guess it wasn't getting through to you guys either. I heard about all these shortages. So we weren't immune from that. But now everything was fully stocked. I was looking like half a cow of ribeyes in there. So that's all you could want. All right, any questions? We're on a call date this early, dude. I mean, at least got a few more minutes. Blackberry again. Back on it. Back on the sauce. Last call? Oh, I'm starting to build a channel. Good question, Peter. I'll get right to it. I'm starting to build a channel. Our first session will be this next Saturday after lunch. My time may be around 1 o'clock, which is central time in the U.S. right now. That changes. But right now, it's central time. And the people that have signed up, I'll leave the last names off, are Jerry, Daniel, Reese, Ron, Vin, John, and Luz. Now, three of you are in my WhatsApp now. Please, the others, the other four, I emailed you. I sent you my WhatsApp number. Please put me in your WhatsApp. That's the number one choice of communication outside of the United States. I've set up a group in there so that I can communicate certain things about what we need to do. So I've got seven of you. That's a couple more than I expected, but that's fine. I've got room for seven. The screen will get a little crowded, but I'm fine with that. And what we're going to do is have some conversations about, well, the reasons you might be interested and, you know, what's your purpose, what's your goal. We'll talk about equipment. We'll talk about software, all of the things that you need to know to get started if you want to get started. So if you're one of those people that I just named, check your email. I sent you my WhatsApp number. Send me a message saying, hey, it's so-and-so, and I'll put you in that group. Okay, what alternatives do you have to Amazon for ordering online? Well, first of all, I can order with Amazon. It's changed a lot in that many things have no tax or have no shipping or both. I check various things. My favorite is MercadoLibre. You search on there because there's a lot of difference in prices and things like that. But I found it to be, I've used it for a number of years now. I've yet to have any problems with them. And so MercadoLibre, Amazon itself, and Aeropost, which is software belonging to Pricemark. And as I mentioned before, the cool thing about Aeropost is you can go to Best Buy or Walmart or Amazon, whatever. You click on the product that you're looking at. Let's say it's a camera. So you click on that specific camera. You take the page from the website, the page address, you copy it, and you paste it in the Aeropost. And it will come up with what it'll cost to get to you, including whatever fees there might be. And then you can compare that to each other if you want. You can compare it to MercadoLibre. Now, for simple things, like I use a teaspoon of Hershey's syrup in my coffee. I buy it through MercadoLibre. Now, I can buy it in the supermarket here in town. You can buy a package of two at Pricemark. But I can get it for the same price delivered to my door in a package of two. And that's just that much less I have to carry in my bag. So I get it from MercadoLibre. So it could be anything. I mean, I bought sage through MercadoLibre. Sage is if you want to make Southern breakfast sausage, gravy and biscuits kind of thing. A lot of people say, I can't find sage. You can always get anything. And MercadoLibre is my weapon of choice. Amazon will be my next. But I'll plug it in because sometimes it's cheaper to buy it through Aeropost than it is through Amazon. So if it's anything of any cost, like a camera, you know, I'll put it in Aeropost. I'll see what it costs there. I'll see what it costs getting it through Amazon, maybe a couple other competitors. And then I'll order it from, you know, best price. I found that with Aeropost, one of the advantages is very often, if there may be an import tax on a camera, for example, if I buy it through Aeropost, sometimes there is no import tax. And it's because it's stuff being added into Price Smart's shipping. So they have their own airplane, leaves out of Florida. So they'll buy the thing. Let's say they buy it from Amazon, whatever link you gave them. And it'll come into their depot, gets loaded on their airplane, comes into Price Smart, and then Price Smart will turn around and deliver it to you. Sometimes that bypasses that tax. So it's not any one thing. It's just choosing what's best. On Amazon, keep orders below 150 to avoid import taxes. If you're ordering more, break it into two orders. Somewhat true, but not exactly true. It has more to do with a category. So electronics, for example, versus clothing, versus a food item. There's a chart for import tax. What you're saying isn't wrong, but it isn't the whole story. Different categories will have different levels of tax or no tax at all. So you have to take that into account also. Good day, Lauren. Cowboy hat face. You're a little overexposed. Yeah, I mentioned that. I don't know why. Best to always compare Amazon to MercadoLibre. Yeah, as a basic, if you're in a hurry and it's something simple, absolutely agree. But if it's something pricey, like every once in a while, I contemplate something that might be $400 or $500. I usually end up never buying it. But that's when I'll go and I'll check all these different options. And it's surprising the difference in prices that you'll see. It's also surprising how more times than not, I'll find it cheaper in MercadoLibre. I really scratched my head on that. Why would that be? But that's what I find true. Yeah, the chart, the category. Yes, it has a lot to do with that. So yeah, there are minimum dollar ranges, but it's per category. I noticed that MercadoLibre is being toured as a hot long-term stock with huge growth potential. Apparently it's biggest in Mexico at this point. I don't know, they're all over the place. They were in Ecuador. They kind of sucked in Ecuador and I never used them there. But one of the greatest advantages for Amazon is free returns. Yeah, MercadoLibre, it depends. It'll tell you. Returns probably half to three quarters of the time. Well, I'd say maybe half of the time it's available, but it could very well be it's not available. Unless you have a product that's broken or something like that. And the way MercadoLibre handles that is you contact MercadoLibre. They will then set up a communication with the seller so that it's their part of it. And then you try to work out that issue with the seller. I had one where I ordered a box of something and it came and there weren't as many in there as was advertised. However, I didn't want to return it because I had already started using one of the things and they're not easy to get and it's already here. So I told the seller, I said, that's fine. Just figure up the price per unit, which is such and such, and give me a refund on the balance. Well, they kind of smelled blood in the water. He doesn't want to return it. So they're going to make it difficult and make that a requirement. So we wrote back and forth a couple times and I said, no, we're not going to do that. And he said, well, then that's your choice. So then I wrote to MercadoLibre and I said, look, here's the deal and they're refusing to do it. MercadoLibre gave me the refund. They gave me the difference. I don't know what they did with them. I don't know if they gave them a black mark or a warning. I'm sure that they collected the money from them. So it's a nice thing about MercadoLibre is they have this plan. The way it's set up is they'll act as your advocate. It reminds me of the way eBay was many moons ago. Maybe not necessarily now, but what do we got? Does MercadoLibre offer COD orders? They do. I don't ever do that, but it is a category. I don't know if there's probably some kind of rules and restrictions or regulations on that, but they have a million ways to pay. For example, you can buy the item and then you get a certain period of time. You can go to one of these money transfer things and put the money down with the account information and come back and check online and they'll show that they've received the money through a money transfer thing. You can use various debit cards. There's like a dozen ways to pay. COD is one of the ways, but I honestly don't know. There must be some kind of restrictions on that. What are the health insurance requirement for pension auto visas? I'm not sure what you mean. What are the health insurance? You're required to have it. I'm not sure what you mean. You have to have something the equivalent of traveler's insurance until you get your cedula and then you're required by law to get the EPS insurance here in Columbia. I've tried to buy food items like hot sauce here in the U.S. on Amazon and send it to relatives in Armenia and Amazon won't ship it. Can you buy food items from Amazon in Columbia? I don't know because I haven't looked, but you can buy them in the store and you can also buy it through Mercado Libre. You can buy hot sauces and pretty much anything that you can buy, you can get it through Mercado Libre. Amazon, I don't know. I don't know. I never thought about food items. Turtle, no. Okay, I assume he's responding to that and so if it's no, it's no, but there's no need for it. No, Amazon won't ship food. Okay, Mercado Libre will in country. Now, can you order from Walmart through Aeropost and get it? Because I know Walmart ships food items. Would they ship it that way? Because as far as I'm concerned, it would be going to Florida and then from Florida, it would be coming on the Pricemark plane. So you could probably do it that way. Craig, COD is good if you're skeptical of a vendor. Well, the thing is they rank vendors and they have purchase protection, like I just explained. It's really not necessary. Like I say, I've had a few glitches, not with Mercado Libre, with sellers and the minute I contact Mercado Libre, they handle it. I had one where I bought something and then they said, well, we don't have it anymore. We sold it. I said, all right, that's fine. Give me a return. Okay, a couple of weeks went by and they weren't returning. They stopped answering messages. I sent one message to Mercado Libre. The next day, the money was in my account. When you sign up for Mercado Libre, you have an account and they'll dump the money there. Now from there, you can collect it any way you want. When those things happen, I just leave it there for the next time I buy something. You can have Amazon ship free to Florida and then ship it third party. Yeah, if you could ship like hot sauce, for example, within the United States through Amazon, I would think that would be a way to do it. Like I was saying, AeroPost is like a third party. That's some pretty good questions. All right, I think we're gonna end it here today. Please, Daniel, Ron, Vin, John, hook up on my WhatsApp. My number is in your email. I don't know if I put it, plus five seven in the number if you're in the U.S. And next week, yeah. I'll see you next week. We're gonna come up soon on Sunday. I probably won't be doing a coffee time, but all right. Thank you guys. Appreciate you as always. And I'll see you soon.