Coffee Time LIVE 28 February 2021

Here's your story, let's begin. The water's fine, come on, dive in. The future's here, it's right before your eyes. Step by step, you're on your way, you're welcome to a brighter day. Don't you feel it's good to be alive? I'll just have a cup of coffee, then I'll go. Welcome to the channel Grand Columbia, and welcome back to another Sunday Coffee Time. And of course, it's another beautiful day, pretty overcast, fairly typical. Today, I want to talk about some things about this week. Just review a couple things. I've got some good and interesting news stories today, and then we'll go to Q&A. And as always, as I prepared for coffee time, I drank my one cup a day. And so today, I've got Ocean Spray. What is it? Cran grape? Yum. Yes, you can get Ocean Spray. You can get pretty much whatever you want. This week, we had great weather. Why do I bring this up? Audio, video, good, awesome. I bring it up because I'm asked all the time, what's the weather? What's going on? How's the weather? So that's why I've been starting off talking about the weather. Now, yesterday, you can almost set your clock to it, at 3.30 in the afternoon, we had this. And it lasted about 20 minutes. It's usually 10 to 20 minutes. And it'll be later in the afternoon, typically, or in the evening, or sometimes both, which leaves you the morning to go out, do your thing, and walk around, or go shopping, or whatever it is you want to do. And personally, I like it. Mike, hello, thank you. I like your personal pod. Great. It used to be very difficult to do anything personal like that, but it's gotten so I don't even give it much thought anymore. This week, I had two guests come and stay with me for the weekend. It's people that I met in Cuenca five, six years ago, a long time ago, excuse me. And they're from Colombia, but had been living in Cuenca, and ended up four or five years living, maybe longer, living in Cuenca, hated it, had lots of problems being Colombians, facing the ill treatment, because in Ecuador, you know, everything's not everybody, but the vast majority of people actually think that if you're Colombian, if you're a male, that you're a drug dealer, and if you're a female, you're a hooker. And, you know, it's kind of hard to get any kind of respect if you're there like that. But, you know, they were there for their particular reasons, and they just had had enough and had been planning, you know, to come back and have work lined up. They couldn't just afford to come back and hope things fall into place. So they set it up, and they've been back in Cali for, I think, a couple months. But as soon as they came back, she contacted me and asked, hey, can we come visit you for a weekend? She's working. And you may remember in a couple old videos in Cuenca, I've got a clip here. So if you don't remember, that's it. Here's a picture of them downtown by the big Armenia sign. Now, the daughter wanted to actually come on coffee time, but she decided that they needed to leave early today because she had all these things to do to get ready for work tomorrow. So there was that. It was nice visiting them. The only downside is I've got big tile, like two-foot tiles for the floor throughout the apartment. And there is long hair, I swear, on every single tile. There is so much long hair. But it's hard to complain really. Well, I don't know. I can complain about anything. But before she left, she scrubbed the place down yesterday. She must have spent two hours going through and scrubbing the place. So there's that. What else we got? Oh, the driving. When I did the update a few days ago, I talked about this. But I'm putting together the video that will go through step-by-step what you have to do and warn you of some of the pitfalls. And fortunately, for the sake of videos, I ran into a number of them. So I'll be able to give you some good heads-up on things that could go wrong. I'm going to get to the questions after I do the news. I'll get to all the Q&A. So hold on. And I've got some COVID update information that I think you'll like when I cover the news. So hold tight. I'll get there. Where was I? Driving. So I finished the medical. And as I said in the update, I was warned that I was borderline blood pressure. And here, if your blood pressure is high, you won't get a driver's license. They will fail you. It's an interesting way that they do things. They have these private medical centers all over the place that are specific for various types of licensing in Columbia. So in the U.S., you go to things that are government. And here, everything is private. But they're all into one computer system. So I went there, and I went for the driving test. So I got the visual, which was quite involved. I got the hearing, which is your usual beep, beep, beep, you know, that kind of thing. And there's a room that does psychological and break reactions. And you have to control these two things on the screen that are operating independently. And you have to kind of do both at once. And you can have a certain number of errors, but you can't have a whole lot of them. And it actually reminded me of something back when I used to fly for the flight exam that you have to take every year, something that we had to do there for coordination. And so I was able to do it first time through. They told me that actually people will usually fail it at first. And so then they started giving you a practice run. And then if you do fail it at first, they'll give you a second shot at it, all while you're right there. You don't have to leave and come back. So, you know, so that was pretty cool. And I did it the first time, I think, only because I was used to that kind of test. Otherwise, you're probably going to fail it the first time. So there was that. And then you go in and you get your medical. It does your basic stuff, blood pressure and height and weight and, you know, that kind of thing. There's some questions that they ask. You've got a whole series of questions. So let me get to the questions so that I can kind of get through this stuff because I'm easily distracted. So please hold the question and then ask me, and that's a good question, and I want to answer it. So, you know, I went through that. But they also, if you, for example, you want to get a permit to carry a handgun, you would go through the same facility, but you would have a different set of tests. The psychological is much more emphasized. They don't care about breaking reaction, but there are some reaction tests. But there's a big psychological component to it. So any kind of licensing that takes place, I think there's three basic categories, and I forget the third one now, but it will be in the video, that that's where you go. So the whole episode was pretty fascinating for me and fairly impressed, although the four hours I had to stay in the line of transito was not impressive. That really sucked. That sucked. Okay. What else? Oh, you mentioned the personal video. Let me go over here. Where are we? Okay. I got a question, and let me, I copied it on here. Where is it? All right. Here we go. What is it like to grow old in another country? From 34 in the USA. I didn't copy and paste it. I actually typed this into this program. So what is it like to grow old in another country? So, I mean, you could take it a couple of ways. Is the guy trolling? Is he kind of mocking you? Or I took it as a serious question. I had no reason to think it wasn't. And it actually gave me pause to think about it. Now, this question came in when I was sick, when I got that food poisoning first time in Colombia. From that soup. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was self-inflicted. I left it out way too long, and it was hot when it got here, sat out there, you know, kind of lukewarm. That is not a thing that you want to do, especially when it's a cream soup. But that aside, so I poisoned myself. So I had, you know, several days, almost a week of feeling really bad. And so I pondered this question a lot, because on a day-to-day basis, I don't really think too much about that kind of thing. I just think about what's going on today. But it was a really good question, and I opened up and really answered that to the best of my ability, the conclusion that I came to. And it may not be the conclusion that you would think. Now, it's not on this channel. It's on my private channel, and you can find it if you type in YouTube search, SANE in Colombia. That channel will come up. And I put some personal things in there. I even put a couple political things in there. Or you can hear it on Anchor Podcast. I'm actually on, I think, eight or nine different broadcasts off of Anchor. So if you've got Apple Podcasts or you name it, there's eight or nine of the major ones, and it goes to all of them. And that's the web address for it. Why is it Cuenca-Ecuador? Because when I first started this channel and a number of other things, I was in Cuenca-Ecuador, and I didn't know. I just put down Cuenca-Ecuador. And, you know, that's one of the reasons I changed the name to Gran Colombia, because that encompassed Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, which someday in the future I would love to go to if it ever comes up as a possibility. So if you haven't heard it, go ahead and check it out. It's not very long. I think it's six or seven minutes. But, you know, if you like those kind of heartfelt, introspective responses, great. If you can't stand that kind of stuff, then don't bother checking it out. And no, I didn't cry. Somebody had asked me that. Did you cry doing that video? No, no. I was actually, I was pretty happy and upbeat, to be honest with you. I realized how happy that I am. I mean, I know I'm happy, but I mean, I really thought about it, because you don't really sit around thinking, am I happy? You know, I thought about it and realized to the extent of the happiness that I have, happier for a longer period of time than I've ever been in my life. And I'm very grateful as a result of that. So anyway, beating the dead horse here. Video's upcoming. I'm breaking my own rules. Some of you guys are going to absolutely love this. Current visa details for retirement visa. I'm going to cover it. I'm going to talk about renewals, because I'm in the process getting ready to go through that, and I'm preparing so that I can go through it without any problem. And last week it came up, well, I only got one year on a visa. And I mentioned I knew somebody who got two years. I got three years, and I'm getting three years. Now, this is what I found out. First of all, the officer that your visa request comes in front of at the Colombian consulate or whatever it is in Bogota, they actually have discretion to look at your information and decide if it's rejected, accepted with one year, two year, or three year. So they have discretion, but they do go by certain things. It's not like they just willy-nilly. The reason right now you're seeing a lot of one years is because they are now requiring that you have a health care policy. If you applied, you know that. They didn't used to do that. So because they're doing that, they're looking at what is the length of the contract. Now, if it's only for two or three months, you'll get one year, the minimum of the visa. And they are approving that. I mean, technically they could probably say no, you know, you've got to have it for the, you know, buy a contract for the full year. But they're not doing that. But if it's less than a year, then you're going to get a one-year visa. Now, it turns out that the guy that had the two-year, which did exist, didn't make it up. Somebody said, oh, you're making it up. Well, why would I do that? He actually had some kind of foreign insurance, and he had a contract date that ended after two years. And so he got a two-year deal, which is really weird, but that's what happened. So you're probably going to get a one-year visa. Now, what happens is once you get that visa, you're required to sign up for the EPS, which is $30, $40, $50, whatever a month. And once you have the EPS, when you go to get your visa the next time, it will automatically be the three years. I got three years because it was pre-COVID when they were just giving you the three-year visa. And when I go this fall to get my renewal, it will automatically be three years because I'll have complied with the EPS requirement, and so that will already be in place. Now, you say, can I get EPS before I apply for that visa the first time so I can get the full three years? Not really, because you really need the cedula, and you can't get the cedula until you get the visa. So you're kind of stuck. Now, somebody brought up, and personally, I think it's true, that's another way that they can grab some money. Yeah, because they got killed. Their economy was humming along, doing well, running in the black. Their health care system still is in the black. But there's financial issues all over the country, as you can imagine. And yeah, so laws that are on the books like the health care thing, that's not new. That's been there since 2017, I think, was the last big changes. And actually, it may have been there even prior to that. It's not new. They just didn't enforce it. They tend to just make it as easy as possible for you. They still are, but they're taking into account the laws that are on the books. So I'm going to be doing a video not so much about what I just said, but what's the actual process? What do you actually need? What are you going to face? What are you going to go through? What's the best? Should you get an attorney? What's the best way to do it? In that area, I'll give you my advice, and that'll be that. So I think you guys are going to like that. And what else do we have here? Am I missing anything? Am I missing? What am I missing? It's Q&A time. It's time to start asking your questions. Remember, four question marks first, then ask the question. Okay. Actually, what did I do? I just jumped the gun. All right. Just forget that I played that. It is not Q&A time. Sorry, guys. I got to cover the news, and that's going to cover some of the Q&A. So let me open that up. There we go. Number one, there was recently, just I think last week, a study in a big news report about a lot of the measures that have been taken in Columbia advised by the World Health Organization are bogus. And so they, to immediately end it, the temperature taking, which is everywhere, restaurant everywhere, was temperature, which is a farce. I was burning up with fever and had to go to the ATM last week, and I passed the temperature test. I just blew on the spot where they're going to take the temperature, and it registered cool. Anyway, they're going to stop that, the floor mats where you step in it and alcohol sprays and all this kind of stuff. They're ending it. The only thing really that's going to be maintained is a mask, and I don't think that's going to last much longer. I think what they're doing to appease certain people is the vaccines are taking place, and I think once they hit a certain number, then that will give a good argument against the people who want masks forever to stop doing the mask, because, you know, politics comes into play whether we like it or not. And speaking of vaccine, because the vaccines promised by the United States from Pfizer and Moderna have been chopped for political reasons in the USA, they won't be coming here, or it's greatly reduced. They're filling in the gap with the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, and a couple thousand are arriving in Condio. That's the first delivery. So, yeah, so there's that. You know, I'm sure we could have a lot of fun with that, but we're going to move on. And next. Oh, this is another thing, the curfew hours. Mayor has modified the night curfew hours. Now, what we had was for a short period of time, much longer throughout Columbia, particularly Medellin. You guys that are in Medellin know this. The curfew was 10 p.m., and then lifted, what was it? I think 5, 5 a.m. or 6. Here it was 5, I believe. And so there was that. And then here in Armenia, they lifted it. After a week or two weeks, they changed it to 12 p.m., midnight. Is that p.m. or a.m.? That's a.m., 12 a.m. And then you would think I would know that, you know, growing old and all. I should know that. But I blame it on senility. So then it was lifted to 2 a.m. a few weeks ago. And he just announced now that he has extended it to 3 a.m. So you got from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. The curfew is there, and things are open. There's a noticeable difference. A lot of things have been back to normal. But, I mean, if you took the mask away, we would be back to normal. So that's pretty cool. What else we got? Oh, yeah, you're seeing this all over Armenia. They're out painting all the stripes in the road, the Kotorsi, the walking area of central. Very pretty area. But I was down there, I don't know, a month ago, and noticed how seedy it had gotten. I mean, the sidewalks were just kind of looking grimy. It's not like there was garbage everywhere. Armenia is not really like that. But it just felt grubby, and it didn't ever feel that way before. Well, this past week, the scrubbers went through. They went through with buckets of soap and water and scrub brushes to scrub down the sidewalk. And this goes down, what, 10 blocks, 12 blocks? And they scrubbed it all down. The little bridges that go from one area of the walking area to the other, these little, remind me of the Japanese garden bridges, they repainted those. It's looking pretty nice down there. But you're also seeing a lot of the road signage, striping, things like that are being refreshed. And it's a really nice feeling. It's all adding up to we're coming out of a dark time, and everybody's anxious to freshen. And then what's all the last one? This is pretty interesting. In all of Latin America, the first department or state, every country, be it Peru or Chile or whatever, every country is made up of states, and they call them departments. The very first one in all of South America, Latin America, is the very first state to have 100% electric coverage no matter where they are. In places where they were far from the grid, they threw up some windmills and, what do you call it, solar panels because it was too expensive to get out there. And their goal was they realized how important connectivity is if you've got problems or disasters or whatever. And so they're wiring up the entire department so that everybody has access to Internet, even if you live out in the middle of nowhere. Now, you wouldn't have thought that Condeo ever had, that it wasn't ever like that. But if you think about it, in the U.S., there's lots of places where people go out and they set up cabins, hunting camps, things like that, that don't have electric unless they set it up themselves. So it's not like it's a really strange thing. Colombia is a very modern country. But here they have addressed every single instance of that. And that's why it's the first in all of Latin America because, you know, to a lot of countries, it's like it's not worth it. Well, here they've done it. So that's pretty cool. What else? Okay, that's it for the news. And now I'm going to dive into, let me get rid of that. And let's make it official. It's Q&A time. It's time to start asking your questions. Remember, four question marks first, then ask the question. Okay, I'm going to try to go back through here. So go ahead and feel free to put any questions up, and I'm going to run back through. I enrolled at the CEA Del Cafe driving school in Armenia. They didn't require that I sit through any classes or do any driving at all. I had a license within 10 days, 850 mil. I had a similar experience, but they did require a driving test, which is perfectly reasonable. I mean, it was an hour to go out and show that I could drive, and, of course, that wasn't a problem. Hello from Puerto Rico. Hello from New Hampshire, Florida. Coconut water, $50, yep. I'm slowly dying here in the concrete jungle. Also, the people here suck, spoiled brats of an empire. Okay. It's a big change coming from the U.S. here, but it's a lot nicer than New York. I don't know. It depends where in New York. I'm from upstate New York, and people were fantastic there. Now, New York City, if you're from there, you see people as being very nice. But if you're not from there or if you're a transplant and you could have lived there for a period of time, you're going to see them as, you know, extremely rude. It's just it's hard to explain, but, you know, like a friendly greeting will include the F word, and, you know, it's a different place. It's very blunt. It's very to the point. There's a lot of teasing that goes on. I'm comfortable in the New York City environment, although I carry the manners of upstate New York. They actually have a culture in Columbia. Yeah, there's very much of a culture here. We don't like politics. Awesome news, no more temperature check. Yes, I agree. Concoctions, okay. Guinea pigs. Good morning, Mike. Genetic code, yeah, okay, okay, I got it. Curfew too. Essentially what he's done is there's a recommendation of curfew, and what he's done is he's peeled it back to the point where they're, I mean, the curfew doesn't apply if you have an overnight job. And so if you don't have an overnight job and you're living like most people, who's out or needs to be out at 3 a.m. to 5 a.m.? Two hours. I mean, if you're out drinking and drunk, you're going to stagger home or stagger into a taxi by the time 3 o'clock comes around. So, I mean, it's a non-issue. When we were there, we were surprised that the grimiest sidewalk was in front of Mocawa. Yeah, you know, it's, I'm not sure. That's with a C, by the way. But I agree with you that there's been, over the past, even before COVID, a little bit, the sidewalks kind of have been grimied up, but it's nice that they're out cleaning them. I think, you know, when I moved back to Armenia, everything was, like, spic and span. A lot of people make comments about how clean it looks, and in some of my videos you would see that. But I think what happened was over, you know, a few years, it started getting grimy, but nobody really noticed. Then COVID hit. Now everybody's coming out of COVID. They've been for a while, but, you know, there's more activity to do things. And I think people that kind of didn't notice those things, it's staring them in the face now. And I think that's why you're seeing all this private effort to go around and trim up plants by the road and scrub things down. Are there good public libraries? No, that's a system that is unique to the United States. There are some other countries that have certain libraries. No country has a library system like the United States. If there's one out there, let me know. But there are unique things about the library in the United States that no one else has duplicated. Now, some countries have public libraries available. They just don't have the extent of services. Most of the world does not have a public library system. There is one library in Armenia I'm aware of. But these are private operations for the most part. They may receive some funding, but they're mostly private operations. So it's not like you can go in and check out any book that exists, and if they don't have it, they'll order it for you. It's not really like that. And I think part of the rationale these days is, well, if you've got the Internet, you don't really need to have that big expense. But it's an interesting observation. But as far as e-book, online classes, magazines, like you're saying, then, yeah, of course, anything you can get there, you can get here. And you've got an advantage of, well, I won't go there, because some of the VPNs are instigated on the other end. But anything that's open, you can get here. And if it's blocked on the other end, like Hulu, for example, then you can get a VPN here that will unblock it. Have you heard any discussion there regarding dropping the PCR test requirement? Yeah, they've been talking about it for ever since they instituted it. And about half of the people in government are against it. It did go through because of the fear of the new hybrid strain, you know, so that gave a little impetus to the people who wanted to institute it. We had dropped it for a number of months, and then it came back. So, yeah, I think it's going to go away pretty quick. Canadian, UK libraries on par with USA. I won't get into that here, but I would have to disagree. And I live right across the border from Canada and spent a lot of time in Canada in my youth. And some of the services in the library, well, that was a while ago. So I guess I shouldn't talk about things that maybe I'm not sure, because perhaps it changed. I know that maybe 40-some years ago and back, it was not on par in that there were a number of services in the U.S. that were not available there. But that could have changed. So that would be good to know. But then again, now that you've got the Internet, you almost don't need it. My picture froze. The sound's still coming through? Okay, well, if the sound's still coming through, I'm just going to keep going. Yeah, I see that it's frozen. I hadn't noticed. Audio's okay. All right. Well, you don't see, you don't need me moving my head around. So all right, I didn't, when I ran back through, I didn't see it. But somebody asked me about editing software. I use a couple. But my favorite is called Wondershare Filmora. I have both versions, the version 10, because you get free updates. I bought the lifetime version of that software. I don't do the monthly thing. I can't afford the subscriptions. Mouth is gaping. Yeah, well, I'm drinking my cran grape ocean spray. So what's this say? Oh, your cam has stopped. Okay, I'm getting notices all over the place. I've got people sending me personal notices. I just got a software telling me that my camera has stopped. Yeah, I don't know what to say about all this. Hold on just a second. Let me reply to that, because it may clear up. I'm not going anywhere. All right. I don't want to take up the time for this. So I got a frozen thing. When I show, when I show, you'll be able to see it. But I'm done with those anyway. So let's just finish this up. The software. So my favorite is Filmora 10, the lifetime program, with the constant free updates. That's my favorite. It's my fallback. Now, I have the Filmora Professional that a few years ago I thought it might be a good thing to do. All right. I suck at these distractions. Okay, yeah, except I don't know where that question is, so I'm answering it as I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I also, yeah, so I had Filmora Professional, and that's, it's got a few added features, but Filmora 10 has everything that you would really need unless you're doing some particular type of movies, some real production. Why couldn't it freeze with those pretty girls? Well, I'd go make that happen. But all right, let me get through this. See, I just don't deal with distractions. Part of growing old in a foreign country. I also have CyberLink, which is useful for certain things, and I'm glad that I have it. But if I were to do it over again, I wouldn't buy it. I would just go with Filmora 10. The reason I even have the other ones is the older versions of Filmora that is now 10, the older versions, there were a number of features that it didn't have and that I needed from time to time. So I bought these other programs to do certain modules and then insert them. But now Filmora 10 does pretty much everything that you can imagine. And so I highly recommend it. It's also very reasonable. I would absolutely stay away from what you see. I'll call them professional YouTubers. They'll either use the Apple program or I forget the name of the other one. It's the Adobe program. I've used both of those. And to be honest with you, they kind of suck. They're resource hogs. You have to have a very high-end computer to do that. And they're problematic. You have to pay subscriptions for the Adobe one. And Filmora has come up to the point where – Premiere, yeah. Filmora has come up to the point where it's got almost all the things that those have. I mean, yeah, of course it's lacking a couple things, but like I said, unless you're doing – I mean, if you're doing the kind of stuff I'm doing, you don't need to do a two-hour feature-length movie. Okay. We have any other questions? Anything else? Last call. This is the last day of the month. I got some contributions this past week. I thank you. I don't have it in front of me, but those who contributed, I thank you very much. Definitely appreciate it. Went out and checked out my car the other day, and it's kind of a mess. It's been sitting too long. No, there's no image. The camera froze. You must have stepped away for a while because we talked about this. And you're the one that asked me about the software, and I just covered it all, so you're going to have to go back and listen to that. I don't know why the camera froze. It's in the connection between the software and YouTube, and YouTube is – like that personal video that I did, you'll notice that the voice, the lips that are moving and the sound are out of sync pretty significantly. When I uploaded, it wasn't, and that happens once in a while on YouTube. There's issues, and those issues, sometimes everything's flawless, and then for a couple days, things act up. Well, that just happened, and I'll bet this camera freeze is related to whatever goes on YouTube, which, you know, I can hate YouTube for a lot of things. It's hard for me to hate them for that. When you think about the millions of people that are accessing at any given moment, I mean tens or hundreds of millions of people all around the world, it's amazing that they don't have more problems. So as much as I'll hate them for some things, I can't really hate them for that. All right, I guess that's it. So we're going to call it a day. Thank you all for tuning in. Again, thanks to the people that contribute and support the channel. A lot of you are here every week. I really appreciate that. And, yes, I know that there's no image. Ha, ha, ha. Appreciate it. And what else can I say? Watch for the Visa video. Watch for the driving video. They'll be coming up. One will be next week, and one will be the week after. And I'm not sure in what order yet, whichever one gets closer. Yeah, I sometimes work on two or three at a time for technical reasons. Okay, thanks. Ciao.