Dan comes to Colombia

Hello friends!

Sorry again for the late posting. My excuse this time is that I wanted to wait until after Semana Santa -- that is the week leading up to Easter -- because Dan came to visit and I wanted to talk about what we did!

A quick note: most of the pictures are panoramas of Dan, somewhat intentionally. I got a little into taking panoramas and quickly realized that he would be a great social media sensation - #panoramadan ;)

Dan at the springs in Minca

So, Semana Santa here (as in other Latin American countries) is a big deal because mostly everyone is Catholic. School is out and many offices shut down for the entire week, and everyone heads out for a week-long vacation. Since I had the week off, Dan flew down to visit me!

I met in him Barranquilla, where his flight came in, and then we headed to Santa Marta, several hours up the coast of the Caribbean. We first spent a day in Minca, which is a small town that is a drive a little bit up into the Sierra Nevada, and swam in some spring water and tried some of the coffee that Minca is known for. Our second day we went to Parque Tayrona, a national park in Colombia that is really cool because it's basically jungle meets beach. To get to the beaches, you have to walk/hike for several hours. I won't lie, I was cranky by the end --  but the beach was worth it! The beach was beautiful, and we saw some monkeys on our walk in.

Parque Tayrona, where jungle meets beach!

We then headed down to Cartagena so that I could show Dan a little of my city. We spent some good time wandering around the walled city -- the old colonial part of town that is still standing from the Spaniards -- and we hit up the Castillo de San Felipe, a lookout castle they built to fend off pirates and other countries wanting access to Cartagena, one of the entry points to Latin America!

Atop the Castillo de San Felipe

Dan got to meet my host mom and my co-teacher, in addition to her entire family. They took us out to smoothies one night and we had some great conversation about the differences between the U.S. and Colombia, our cultures and the good and bad points of each. My co-teacher loves American culture and has visited several times, and she had some great points to make.

On our last day in Cartagena, we went out to Playa Blanca, the beach that is quickly becoming a weekend regular spot for me and a few friends here in Cartagena. It was a bit crowded because of Semana Santa, but that didn't put us out. We even payed a few bucks each to rent some snorkel goggles to take a look at some of the coral just a short swim out. And Dan got to try the typical beachside lunch that is famous at Playa Blanca, with coconut rice and fired plantains. I love it there because each tent for rent sort of doubles as a restaurant, so we get our lunches and beers delivered right to our spot! Not to mention to the plate of fresh fish that I got to pick from, straight from the sea! Playa Blanca is a magical place ;)

About to snorkel on Playa Blanca

On our last day, we headed back up to Barranquilla and caught a Colombian soccer game! This was an Olympic qualifier game, so it was just the younger players of the national Colombian soccer team who were playing. Even so, Colombians love their soccer. It's a great experience being surrounded by fans who are truly dedicated and glued to what is going on in the field.

Soccer game!

Some friends in my program

The next day, Dan was headed home, which was difficult for both of us. But, his visit was so fun, and we were glad to have had the chance to spend some time together. Dan loved Colombian culture, and is hoping to come back in September maybe so that we can check out Bogota and maybe the coffee country and Andes mountains.

OK, I am going to stop there and then do another update on other things soon so I can break things up into pieces!

Love and miss you all!

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!

In the beginning

Hello friends! First post from Cartagena, Colombia in the books! For those who did not know, I neglected to post during my three week training in Chia and Bogota because of lack of internet access. But now I have wifi and can be my true millennial self again, hooked into the social network and ready to tell you all about life on the Caribbean coast. Woohoo!

 I am not sure where to start so I'll start with what I am up to right now.

 I live with a nice host family in a Barrio (neighborhood) in Cartagena called Blas de Lezo. My host mother's name is Nydia, she is a school counselor, and my host father's name is Ciro, and he works in the jewelry business (Ciro's Spanish is more difficult for me to understand so that is all I know about him right now). I also have a host sister with beautiful eyes named Angelica. Angelica is super wonderful because she owns here own store in the Centro, which is the historic walled city on the north side of Cartagena where most of the tourists go.

 My school is called Bertha Gedeon, and I will be co-teaching English mostly 9th and 10th graders. I met my main co-teacher and mentor, Rosalia, on my first day in Cartagena and she is wonderful. Rosalia speaks very good English and sings, "Hellllloooo!!!" every time I call her on the phone. Her son, Michael, spent a year in Boston and also speaks very good English, so it has been really nice getting some info without having to decode it from Spanish.

The costenos (people who live on the coast) here have very difficult accents to understand because they basically only say half of each word. So something like, Vas para la playa? Becomes, Vapalaplaya? The silver lining here is that I figured if I can master costeno Spanish, I will be set for any Spanish speaking country in the world!! Aside from Spain ... And Argentina. haha.

 Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the first day I will actually be in my school, but I will just be introducing myself and observing for the week, and then digging in to planning and giving real lessons in the next week.

It is actually a very exciting time to be an English teacher in Colombia because this is the first year that the country's Ministry of Education is implementing a giant plan to make the country bilingual in English and Spanish. The movement is called Colombia Bilingue. The government has recruited 600 English speakers from all over the world to teach throughout Colombian classrooms this year. During my orientation, we spent one week in a hotel in Bogota with 400 other people from around the world. Tooo many gringos haha.

 In the sense of being a part of something that is sustainable and not so in-your-business-American, I love how this program works because the country wants us to be here. We have had a number of press events (I was in the Colombian news, nbd!) and promotional items in the past few weeks, and many Colombians I talk to (taxi drivers, neighbors, waiters) are very happy to hear that I am here to teach English.

This is me and the Cartagena crew -- front page!!


Still, being an effective teacher is probably my greatest worry here. I have had a lot of crash courses and a small practicum with real Colombian students, but at the end of the day I am not an experienced teacher, and I don't want that to be a disadvantage for my students.(They already have quite a few here. The average class size is about 50 students, and high school classes go on in the afternoons, which are the hottest time of day. Air conditioning is a luxury here, so that means students have to sit at their desks in 95-degree heat and 90 percent humidity. There isn't usually an overhead or TV; just a white board. And, schools don't have anything like copiers or laminators -- students must reimburse the teacher for the copies they make, meaning copies aren't as common as classrooms in the states, either). Not to make everything sound dire -- I have heard a lot of great things about Colombian students. One that I love is that bullying is much less common in Colombia because the culture here focuses so much on togetherness. Most students get along with all other students and don't form the cliques that are so well-known in the U.S.

 I live about a 20 minute cab ride, depending on traffic, from the Centro, which really is beautiful. I haven't yet taken photos, but it is all colonial architecture (thanks, Spaniards) literally within stone walls. There are balconies covered with flowers, ladies in colorful dresses selling fruit, and tons of places to eat, dance, drink and be merry. One of my favorite things is that there are no rules on open containers, so people just bring their parties wherever they want. In the Centro the restaurants put tables outside on the cobblestones, and it is a custom here to just go to a plaza, pay for a beer out of a cooler on the street and enjoy sitting outside.

 I don't think I could count the number of things that caught me a little off guard here or that reminded me of the time I spent abroad in Costa Rica, but they all add up to remind me why I love Latin America! Here are some fun ones:

 1. Street performers on a whole new level. People juggle with bowling pins in the middle of crosswalks here to entertain drivers while they wait for the stoplight, then run really quick to get tips before they are off. It was so bizarre at first to see someone juggling in the middle of the road!

 2. Moto taxis and driving. There are literally crowds of men on motorcycles on every corner in Cartagena. They are taxi drivers for one. They have an extra helmet and you get on the back and go, for a much cheaper rate than regular taxis. But, they are very dangerous. In some parts of Colombia, they have actually been outlawed on main highways. As for the driving ... I'll just say that I would have had fifteen heart attacks at this point if I had been driving the streets of Cartagena -- and I have been here for three days.

 3. Juice. The juice here is amazing! It is all fresh, all the time, and of every variety -- mango, papaya, passionfruit, blackberry, strawberry, watermelon. We shouldn't even call it "juice" in English because putting it in the same category as Sunny D is just nuts.

 4. Tinto: So tinto is a very small cup of coffee here and it is very common. Tinteros sell the little cups (they are like 3 ounces) on the street everywhere. But the hilarious thing is the confusion surrounding the word. Depending on the Colombian I talk to, tinto is either already sweetened or not sweet. Depending on the person, too, you either can or cannot ask for cafe if you do not want a full cup of coffee with milk or sugar. Lots of options here for the coffee, but it's definitely all delicious! 

OK, so I know that was a long post but it needed to be done. I'll try to fill in the details of orientation later, but the adventure is really beginning now!