Medellin Zoo and El Tesoro

Today Gloria took us to the Medellin Zoo and El Tesoro Mall. Besides the fact that a few of the animals were a little on the skinny side, the zoo was pretty nice and had a wide variety of animals. Joey had an absolute blast and Sam enjoyed the stoller ride and even took a short nap. After the zoo, we stopped at one of the malls. It was really nice to get out of the hotel for the afternoon and see a bit more of the city. Tomorrow Gloria is going to take us to buy some souveniers and on Wednesday we go back to Casa de Maria to meet with ICBF officials to discuss how the bonding process is going. Then our attorney will have all of the legal documents needed to finalize the judicial process in court. Once everything has been submitted to court, we just sit back and wait for the judge to sign off. It could take a week or more... it just depends on how quickly the judge gets through all the documents. There are 13 family courts in Medellin and we were told by our agency that courts #2 and #9 have new judges and have been taking a lot longer to sign off so we are praying we do not get either of the new judges. We should find out which court has our paperwork either today or tomorrow. Once the judge has signed off, we will go to court to sign the final adoption decree and Sam will legally be our child! Then we will get a new birth certificate and passport. At that point, we will travel to Bogota, which is about a 1 hour flight from Medellin and visit the US Embassy doctor and apply for Sam's visa. The visa will be ready 24 hours later and then we are free to come home!!! The past week has gone by very quickly so we are hoping the rest of the time here goes by just as fast.

Here are some photos from the zoo...

The mall was very nice... much nicer than any mall in ND but most of the stores were high-end and very expensive so we just did some window shopping.

This was the view of Medellin from the upper floor of the mall.