Weekendsssss

Hola!

Sorry it has been a while since  my last post! As I was just telling a friend, life here is weirdly passing very quickly at the same time that is not. I have spent a lot of time sitting and doing nothing (riding the bus ... Oh, man. So much time on the bus) but then my day runs out of light!

But, I can't complain. Life is good!

My Carnaval outfit the first day haha

Me falta decirles que hice durante mis fines de semana! Spanish is FINALLY coming a tiny bit easier for me, and I am getting back into the groove of thinking about some Spanish words before English ones, woohoo! As I said in Spanish: I still need to tell you about my weekends here!

A few weeks ago was Carnaval, the Latin American version of Mardi Gras. In Colombia, there is a city called Barranquilla that claims to have the second-largest Carnaval after Brazil, so my Cartagena buddies and I took a two hour bus ride north to check it out.

The main attraction was the parades (long, multi-hour parades with very detailed costumes and soooooo much dancing, handmade-looking floats and a five-man band playing music behind each dance troupe), but equally fun was the party after. Once the highly-attended parades end, everyone pulls out giant speakers and puts them on the patios of their houses or outside of their tiendas -- little stores, very common here -- and starts a dance party in the street. This is accompanied by giant cans of espuma, which is this foam that people spray at each other during and after the parades, and people throwing this flour and cornmeal mixture at everyone. It's a very dirty and very fun experience! There is also meat on a stick and empanadas on every corner, and people dress up sort of like they do for Mardi Gras but with different folk figures and more colors.

The before picture

After espuma and maiz!

This past weekend and one of my first weekends here I also trekked out to Playa Blanca, one of Cartagena's most beautiful beaches, about 40 minutes from where I live. It is truly beautiful! Very blue with calm water and white beaches. There is no running water on Playa Blanca (It is technically on an island) so we can only really stay for one night before feeling pretty gross, but it was definitely an awesome experience to wake up to beach sounds. There are lots of cabanas and hammocks for backpackers to stay, but Colombians sometimes make it out too. The specialty on the coast, especially the beach, is fried fish with coconut rice and patacones, which are fried and flattened plantains. Delish!

And of course, I have spent some weekends in town in Cartagena. The walled city, the main tourist attraction, is very beautiful. It is an old, little city built by Spanish colonials, so it is sort of Spanish/European looking but has its own modern, Colombian twists. Its probably what pops up first when you google Cartagena. I love the walled city and the Centro -- that downtown area -- but it is very different from the rest of Cartagena, which is much less "quaint," if you will, but still has its own character. For the most part, the locals here don't make it to the Centro often. The  younger people head out to Bocagrande, where there is a (less "nice") beach, tall buildings and it is the ritzy part of town. Most everyone else spends Friday night having a beer at a tienda at a plastic chair/table, or spends it with family. A friend and I here were talking about Cartagena, and we decided we would almost call it a rural city, despite the fact that one million people live here haha.

My friend Teresa at Playa Blanca

So, weekends are fun, but during the week I definitely earn my keep. I am finally getting comfortable being in front of a classroom ... sortof haha. I am also totally losing my voice (to Trina, Stacey, and my mom and dad: I know you guys have smirks on your faces right now :) ). I have even taught a few classes by myself while my teacher was out of town! I won't say they were great because they weren't -- I honestly don't even know if the students actually absorbed anything I talked about -- but it was a good step, and while I am here I have really been trying to focus on the tiny (tiny, tiny, tiny) triumphs haha.

I will say that I really love the students. I at first was mortified to be teaching high school kids, but Colombian students seem much more respectful of authority overall. Many students actually help me when I am trying to get the class to be quiet. Many are also excited about   English (I have a big group of kids coming to English Club on Monday mornings before class) and they love seeing how much Spanish I know, which is fun. They are incredibly interested in my favorite singers and stuff, which is unfortunate for them because I don't keep up very well with U.S. trends, but I try to hold my own haha.

OK ... Enough for now. I miss you all, (and American food, and leafy green vegetables), like CRAZY!!

A thought

So, I've been having a lot of deep thoughts in the shower recently. 

There's something about a nice, cold shower when it's real hot and humid out to get the mind going. Of course, in Cartagena, Colombia, those are the only kinds of showers taken!

I wish I could remember all of those deep thoughts when it comes to actually sharing them with friends and family. But I would like to share one today that I think also helps contextualize my experience here.

One such thought came when I was chatting with my host mom, Nydia, this week. As I have said, Nydia is a wonderful woman who further proved her wonderful-ness to me the other day when I got food poisoning (for the second time!!) and lay in my bead in a helpless heap of a mess, and she went to the store and bought me pedialyte and brought me a little cup of it every hour to be sure I didn't get dehydrated, then made me soup. (So mom, don't worry, I am being taken care of!)

Anyway, Nydia was telling me a little about her past. She and her family are actually from the interior of Colombia. (OK, sorry, another sidenote here: I know that Colombia seems small to us Americans, but it's actually pretty big -- like, the size of a few Californias. It takes about 20 hours in a bus to get from where I live to Bogota. And the cultures on the interior and the coast are SO different. The coast is loud, full of music everywhere, different traditions, different accent. So moving from the interior to the coast would be like moving from Colorado to the South). 

Being the naive gringa I am, I asked Nydia if they moved for work or family or a change of scenery. She explained that she and her family were displaced by guerrilla violence in her pueblo about 15 years ago. Today, things are better. As Nydia explains it, a recent Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, really kicked the shit out of the drug cartels, and cleaned up a lot of places. Most of the country operates freely from the influence of cartels, save a few very remote areas, plus some areas where the Colombian and Venezuelan borders meet. Still, there is a great deal of "petty" corruption in Colombian government. And a pending government peace deal with FARC -- once the largest and most dominant trafficking group in the country -- probably won't result in the kind of justice that Colombians are hoping to see.

But what struck me the most as I talked with Nydia was the fact that this was her recent past. I wasn't talking to someone who had fought in World War II or even Vietnam. This wasn't a roundtable history discussion or anything like listening even to my grandparents talk about their lives during warfare. Nydia is young. She is old enough to by my mom. If I were her daughter, I would have moved with her, at about the age of 15, to get away from incredible violence just a house or two away from my own. 

That realization really brought home to me what it means to be a Colombian today. While things are improving at an incredible rate (I'm currently trying to remember some stats to tell my visitors, like the ridiculous amount of growth that this country experienced in just a few years), the wounds here have just begun to heal. Politics in Colombia is always personal, because everyone here knows of someone who was hurt, physically or otherwise, or even killed because of drug violence. It is incredible and heartbreaking.

But it is also why, if you pick up any guidebook or a book on Colombia's recent history, it will surely mention the "resilience and hope of the Colombian people." It sounded phony to me the first time I read it, but it does accurately describe the mood here. The amount of hope and optimism, from Colombia's public schools to hearing the taxi drivers talk about their neighborhoods to listening to speeches from Colombia's local and national representatives, is overwhelming. Really, the people here aren't just hoping for a better future -- they are counting on it. 

There are a lot of problems in the U.S., from government to cultural issues that really burn my butt. But when I think of everything that Colombia has overcome in the past few years, and the optimism that they have for the future, it's hard not to feel spoiled. A lot of the problems that we have in the U.S. are problems because we don't have things like drug trafficking, horrible infrastructure, and a government that just now learning how to operate as a true democracy. Our problems, in some ways, are a luxury.

OK, stopping with the mushy gushy stuff. I am tired of writing so I figured I would post some pictures of the time I spent in Bogota and Chia. Chia is the little farm town where I spent most of my orientation. The entire group stayed in little dorms and spent 24/7 together. We definitely got to know each other really, really well! 

 This is the farm house in Chia where the whole group of 23 stayed, ate and took most of our sessions.

 The backyard. Some sessions were outside! Sorry it's blurry.

 This is Dante, one of the dogs who lived on our farm :)

 This is the church at Monserrate, a 10,000-foot lookout above the city of Bogota.

 The view from just outside the church

 Bogota is ridiculously huge! You couldn't even see where the city ends. About 9 million people!

 The Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota

 I am an idiot and can't figure out how to rotate. One of the many churches in Bogota!

Fernando Botero is easily Colombia's most famous artist. He always draws/sculpts/paints really fat people haha. His museum in Bogota is free!

 Tried to get a shot of one of Bogota's many cool looking streets in the Candelaria neighborhood

 This is the view from the church in Chia, which is perched on a hill after climbing incredibly steep stairs! It became our morning workout.

 The Chia church (notice the makeout session on the stairs)

First taste of Aguardiente, Colombia's specialty liquor, in Bogota with many World Teach friends. Aguardiente is like a clear, better tasting version of Jager. Colombians chase it with water!