If you read this, which I'm sure you don't, happy birthday Ryan! If I'm not mistaken you're the big 2-0. Day two at French school went really really well. I can't say I feel like I'm not learning enough French. On the contrary I'm exhausted. I wonder if this is how it will be every day. Je suis très fatiguée. I'm incredibly lucky though to be able to study French nonstop for 3 weeks for 8 hours a day. I'm amazed at the number of Colombians in my classes. There are tons of Spanish speakers but none are from any country besides Colombia and Mexico. And I sneak in words in Spanish with them when the teachers aren't listening. It turns out that policy is not so strict after all. I think the teachers recognize what an opportunity for cultural exchange we'd miss out on if it were terribly strict. Not every second of every day has to be devoted to French.
Anyway, I guess I've never thought of Mexico and Colombia as particularly wealthy, wealthy enough to have a surfeit of kids to send to Canada to learn French, but I know they are two of the weathiest countries in Latin America. (The southern cone is doing well for itself too, but it's not represented here...I don't know why not). I went for a walk with the vague aim of finding the river if it were in the direction I wanted to go. I didn't find any river but I did find a poster advertisement for tourism in Cuba. I'm going to have to walk that way again and take a picture of it. Cuba. How weird. It exists and it's probably not a bad place to take a vacation. You don't realize how strange the absence of would-be commonplace things is until you are in their presence.
In orientation I noticed a fellow classmate reading a Spanish book, so we got to talking and I found out he's from Madrid. He's only lived in Madrid for nine years now; he's not a native speaker, but he has picked up a nice strong Castillian accent ("pisthina moJHada"...at least that's how I like to represent a super strong "j" [you know, like an "h" in English, but...strong{by the way, that means "wet pool", and it makes no sense]). So we went for coffee today (just for the record, don't get the idea that there are prospects here; he's at least twice my age) and he introduced me to his wonderful Castillian accent and a couple of Spanish expressions.
So where is the French in all of this? My hostess and I chat in French every day. I've been doing my best to think in French and I've been studying diligently. And already I'm feeling my comprehension skills gather speed. So trust me. I'm not just here as an extension of my trip to Colombia. Really, I'm just finding common ground.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
August 24
I arrived in Montreal yesterday afternoon after what I thought was a surprisingly short flight. For some reason no midwestern airport except Chicago has a direct flight to the largest city just over the border, so I had to do a layover in Chicago. It was really weird to take a tiny plane for all of 22 minutes and hardly stop gaining elevation before it was time to land. I had a bit of confusion at the airport in Chicago because I thought surely that can't be my gate to go fly international. It was tiny. So was the plane. That flight was only an hour and a half. So I arrived and looked all over for my hostess, and I couldn't find her. Turned out the school told her I was taking a taxi for sure. And she doesn't have a car so she made arrangements with a friend to drive and told her friend she could do something else. So there went $30 courtesy of my school. I never said any such thing to them, and I don't think she was just lying to be polite about changing her mind to pick me up because she offered to have me listen to her answering machine. But I guess it's for the best because I don't want to be imposing or whatever on my first day.
So when I arrived at my hostess's apartment (I have my own bedroom, it's about 4 times the size of my old apartment [though most things are at least 4 times the size of my old apartment]) I rested for a little bit and then we went out to explore the downtown area. It's big and bright and clean and spacious and pretty much the opposite of most of urban Colombia, and quite a change from urban Panama as well. It's taken me a few hours to get used to the idea that I can cross the streets at fixed times again without having to guess when to cross, walk out into the street and hope for the best, or be roadkill. I read that Montreal is a relatively inexpensive city to live and I don't believe it at all after less than a day here. A bus ride costs $2.75. That's right, one ticket like you would get at home that might last for a transfer within an hour or a half or whatever. That's just one example of things being more expensive. As far as I can tell it affects everything. I don't know why; maybe the weather means most food has to be imported? Or the price of importing gasoline affects everything else? Maybe it's just that it's a big fashionable city. My hostess tells me that people who live in Montreal 5 years have been a long time. It tends to be a place people pass through, maybe because of the winters. I have yet to convert -40C to Farenheit so I can get an idea of what the winters are like.
I had my first day of French classes today (after registration), they were really pretty good. I took a placement test, both oral and written, so I think they put me in just the right place, past the most basic basics but not as high as they would have mistakenly put me if they'd made the mistake of administering only a written exam. I have a conjugation class in the afternoon, followed by a class that focuses on vocabulary and pronunciation. I think the morning classes are basic and the afternoon classes rotate so they can have somewhat of a specific focus. I feel like conjugation is a bit basic and vocabulary/pronunciation is the kind of thing I studied in Spanish in my last year of college. It's amazing how many Colombians (and Brazilians) there are in my classes. Whereas Tom and I met Germans all over the place in hostels in Colombia, now I'm meeting the missing Colombians all the way in Montreal. It's too bad my school has a strict speak-the-language-you-learn only policy. I would love to chat with them in Spanish. But I guess that's not what I'm here for. (I did sneak in a short conversation in Spanish with the activities coordinator. She's not a native but spent a lot of the summer in Colombia, too.)
So when I arrived at my hostess's apartment (I have my own bedroom, it's about 4 times the size of my old apartment [though most things are at least 4 times the size of my old apartment]) I rested for a little bit and then we went out to explore the downtown area. It's big and bright and clean and spacious and pretty much the opposite of most of urban Colombia, and quite a change from urban Panama as well. It's taken me a few hours to get used to the idea that I can cross the streets at fixed times again without having to guess when to cross, walk out into the street and hope for the best, or be roadkill. I read that Montreal is a relatively inexpensive city to live and I don't believe it at all after less than a day here. A bus ride costs $2.75. That's right, one ticket like you would get at home that might last for a transfer within an hour or a half or whatever. That's just one example of things being more expensive. As far as I can tell it affects everything. I don't know why; maybe the weather means most food has to be imported? Or the price of importing gasoline affects everything else? Maybe it's just that it's a big fashionable city. My hostess tells me that people who live in Montreal 5 years have been a long time. It tends to be a place people pass through, maybe because of the winters. I have yet to convert -40C to Farenheit so I can get an idea of what the winters are like.
I had my first day of French classes today (after registration), they were really pretty good. I took a placement test, both oral and written, so I think they put me in just the right place, past the most basic basics but not as high as they would have mistakenly put me if they'd made the mistake of administering only a written exam. I have a conjugation class in the afternoon, followed by a class that focuses on vocabulary and pronunciation. I think the morning classes are basic and the afternoon classes rotate so they can have somewhat of a specific focus. I feel like conjugation is a bit basic and vocabulary/pronunciation is the kind of thing I studied in Spanish in my last year of college. It's amazing how many Colombians (and Brazilians) there are in my classes. Whereas Tom and I met Germans all over the place in hostels in Colombia, now I'm meeting the missing Colombians all the way in Montreal. It's too bad my school has a strict speak-the-language-you-learn only policy. I would love to chat with them in Spanish. But I guess that's not what I'm here for. (I did sneak in a short conversation in Spanish with the activities coordinator. She's not a native but spent a lot of the summer in Colombia, too.)
Friday, August 21, 2009
August 21
We have been back in the United States for about a day. For our last few days we did indeed skip Medellin and join the long list of people we know or met who kind of wish they had spent a little more time there. We're really happy with the route we took though. We left Taganga after spending a long time there (about four weeks total, ! we really liked the place, I guess) and took a bus from Santa Marta to Bucaramanga. If you look at a map of the roads in Colombia it's almost a straight shot, not many winding mountain passes, so I didn't suffer as much as I did on previous trips, thinking the bus was going to tip over and roll down the side of the mountain. I finally got it through my head that you have to tack on about 25-33% to any bus company's estimate of how long it takes to get anywhere (this doesn't make a lot of sense to me since the drivers are passing maniacs; what could these estimates possibly be based on then? as the crow flies?). So we did a whole lot of bus traveling, which was all right, since we got our last fill of the scenery.
From Bucaramanga we went to Giron, where I think we stayed a little too long, but that was ok, both of us caught a virus and were under the weather, which we worried way too much about having to cover up at the airport to keep from being detained for potential swine flu. We met more hard-of-hearing people in Giron than we did anywhere else, and we think we know the reason for it: We stayed across the way from a basilica where somebody decided to ring the bells indiscriminately at all hours of the day, including at about 5 in the morning every day we were there. On the last morning a parade of cars with honking horns and music playing (almost completely drowning out the bells in the background)went by us when it was still dark outside. What a crazy town. It was pretty charming though with a ton of colonial architecture and cobblestone roads everywhere and a pretty little plaza.
After a couple of days we left Bucaramanga/Giron for Tunja. We meant to just connect to Villa de Leyva there but after a spell of confusion it's not worth recounting we ended up staying the night and leaving in the morning. In retrospect, that was a good thing because Villa de Leyva was the most expensive place yet to stay in because of the kite festival going on that weekend. We didn't quite understand the magnitude of the festival while we were there, but after we left we saw so much festivity...it was kind of like a county fair diffused across that region of the country (to the northeast of Bogota). In Villa de Leyva though we just saw a few people flying their kites in the plaza...some were pretty cool. It was a great town to walk around in, save for the near-boulders that comprised the roads. We sought to do some souvenir shopping and ended up inadvertently in a huge clothing and produce market for locals, which was quite a sight. We ended up spending barely a day there; more time would have been nice but it was a place that demanded more of an upper-crust budget so we're not too sad.
From Villa de Leyva we went on to Zipaquira, which is typically a day trip for Bogota visitors. We just wandered into Zipaquira only vaguely certain that there were places to stay, so I guess we were lucky in finding good accommodations. Zipaquira is semi-famous for its huge salt cathedral. It really is huge. I didn't believe it would take us an hour to tour the whole place but it did. It's dark and cavernous and eerily blacklit and really quite beautiful though not in the sense of traditional cathedrals. There's something ironic about building a place of worship in a dark pit underground, since in most Christian circles as I have it, heaven is represented by the sky, and hell by the underground. There's also something ironic about dressing up such a place with a 3-D animated movie theater and a rock climbing wall (with more attractions to come!). Still we loved the place.
After Zipaquira we found ourselves back in Bogota, where we were flying Wednesday. We tried to revisit the Casa de la Moneda art museum and the nearby Andy Warhol museum that we spotted an ad for at our hostel, but both were closed Tuesdays. Too bad. We made a trek out to the Harley-Davidson shop for a last souvenir purchase and saw the very ritzy north side of Bogota. We had dinner at our favorite little cafe just down the street from our hostel and kind of a rough goodbye since we're not going to see each other much again for a long time. Barring a somewhat scary flight that looked and felt like we flew right through a lightning storm, we made it safely back home from three months in Colombia with no more troubles than a stolen (if beloved) tote bag worth 70 cents.
So what now? Tom's going back to school to get his bachelor's degree in elementary education (at least that's the plan; they haven't admitted yet that he's accepted for lack of technical documentation that he finished high school, but I think they will). I'm really happy for him and I think he'll be a marvelous teacher; he is very excited to help young people learn to think for themselves (or as he would try put it comically, getting them at the right age to brainwash them). I'm happy for him that he's back home for a while now after all of his adventures in Germany and Latin America.
As for me I decided to learn French to boost my rather long odds of making a career of being a translator, or pretty much anything related to language that offers a decent wage. I figured now is as good a time as any to throw in another language-learning trip, so in a couple of days I'm off to Montreal to take three weeks of intensive French courses. Shortly after that I'm headed to Haifa, Israel to take a volunteer position at the Baha'i World Center. I've been a member of the Baha'i Faith for a while now but I've never managed to integrate spirituality into my life as much as I'd like. It feels like a good foundation for the rest of my life (provided my life does not end while in Israel), both personal and professional (I'll be taking calls in Spanish and French [depending on how much I learn in Montreal I suppose] and volunteering to do translations too), as long as I'm not quite sure what I'd like to do with it, but if I can manage to root it in spirituality and build up an ethic of service I ought to do OK. Anyway I think I'm going to keep up this blog to talk about my own life and continued travels, so if you find my life at all interesting, mark the page and keep checking back for posts.
From Bucaramanga we went to Giron, where I think we stayed a little too long, but that was ok, both of us caught a virus and were under the weather, which we worried way too much about having to cover up at the airport to keep from being detained for potential swine flu. We met more hard-of-hearing people in Giron than we did anywhere else, and we think we know the reason for it: We stayed across the way from a basilica where somebody decided to ring the bells indiscriminately at all hours of the day, including at about 5 in the morning every day we were there. On the last morning a parade of cars with honking horns and music playing (almost completely drowning out the bells in the background)went by us when it was still dark outside. What a crazy town. It was pretty charming though with a ton of colonial architecture and cobblestone roads everywhere and a pretty little plaza.
After a couple of days we left Bucaramanga/Giron for Tunja. We meant to just connect to Villa de Leyva there but after a spell of confusion it's not worth recounting we ended up staying the night and leaving in the morning. In retrospect, that was a good thing because Villa de Leyva was the most expensive place yet to stay in because of the kite festival going on that weekend. We didn't quite understand the magnitude of the festival while we were there, but after we left we saw so much festivity...it was kind of like a county fair diffused across that region of the country (to the northeast of Bogota). In Villa de Leyva though we just saw a few people flying their kites in the plaza...some were pretty cool. It was a great town to walk around in, save for the near-boulders that comprised the roads. We sought to do some souvenir shopping and ended up inadvertently in a huge clothing and produce market for locals, which was quite a sight. We ended up spending barely a day there; more time would have been nice but it was a place that demanded more of an upper-crust budget so we're not too sad.
From Villa de Leyva we went on to Zipaquira, which is typically a day trip for Bogota visitors. We just wandered into Zipaquira only vaguely certain that there were places to stay, so I guess we were lucky in finding good accommodations. Zipaquira is semi-famous for its huge salt cathedral. It really is huge. I didn't believe it would take us an hour to tour the whole place but it did. It's dark and cavernous and eerily blacklit and really quite beautiful though not in the sense of traditional cathedrals. There's something ironic about building a place of worship in a dark pit underground, since in most Christian circles as I have it, heaven is represented by the sky, and hell by the underground. There's also something ironic about dressing up such a place with a 3-D animated movie theater and a rock climbing wall (with more attractions to come!). Still we loved the place.
After Zipaquira we found ourselves back in Bogota, where we were flying Wednesday. We tried to revisit the Casa de la Moneda art museum and the nearby Andy Warhol museum that we spotted an ad for at our hostel, but both were closed Tuesdays. Too bad. We made a trek out to the Harley-Davidson shop for a last souvenir purchase and saw the very ritzy north side of Bogota. We had dinner at our favorite little cafe just down the street from our hostel and kind of a rough goodbye since we're not going to see each other much again for a long time. Barring a somewhat scary flight that looked and felt like we flew right through a lightning storm, we made it safely back home from three months in Colombia with no more troubles than a stolen (if beloved) tote bag worth 70 cents.
So what now? Tom's going back to school to get his bachelor's degree in elementary education (at least that's the plan; they haven't admitted yet that he's accepted for lack of technical documentation that he finished high school, but I think they will). I'm really happy for him and I think he'll be a marvelous teacher; he is very excited to help young people learn to think for themselves (or as he would try put it comically, getting them at the right age to brainwash them). I'm happy for him that he's back home for a while now after all of his adventures in Germany and Latin America.
As for me I decided to learn French to boost my rather long odds of making a career of being a translator, or pretty much anything related to language that offers a decent wage. I figured now is as good a time as any to throw in another language-learning trip, so in a couple of days I'm off to Montreal to take three weeks of intensive French courses. Shortly after that I'm headed to Haifa, Israel to take a volunteer position at the Baha'i World Center. I've been a member of the Baha'i Faith for a while now but I've never managed to integrate spirituality into my life as much as I'd like. It feels like a good foundation for the rest of my life (provided my life does not end while in Israel), both personal and professional (I'll be taking calls in Spanish and French [depending on how much I learn in Montreal I suppose] and volunteering to do translations too), as long as I'm not quite sure what I'd like to do with it, but if I can manage to root it in spirituality and build up an ethic of service I ought to do OK. Anyway I think I'm going to keep up this blog to talk about my own life and continued travels, so if you find my life at all interesting, mark the page and keep checking back for posts.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
August 9
Just a quick post to say happy birthday to my grandma and grandpa and update a little bit...though there is not much to say about the last couple of weeks. We've spent a lot of time on the beach and just enjoying part two of our visit to Taganga, a small fishing town. On Tuesday we're moving on to Bucaramanga (it's taken me a long time to pronounce that right...it's for some reason really natural to say instead "Bucamaranga"), in the northeast in the department (like a state) of Santander. We're treating it as sort of a hub to allow us to visit small towns nearby, e.g., Villa de Leyva, Giron, Zipaquira and Pamplona (lots of towns and cities in Latin America are named for places in Spain). Doesn't seem to be much within the city itself, but I guess we'll see. Less than a week and a half remains before we head back on the 19th. We're a bit sad but we're not too sad. The trip hasn't made all our hopes and dreams come true; it hasn't perfected my Spanish and it hasn't made Tom a fluid speaker overnight, but it's made us both come a long way and we're getting to learn about Latin American culture firsthand. Somebody stole Tom's bag from the beach the other day; and it was a nice bag and a stupid thing to do, but fortunately neither the bag nor anything inside it was of much value. I'm glad that's been the worst of our troubles; hope it stays that way. We're hoping for the best memories of our last few days here.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
July 31
July 31
After a long but easy trip from Boquete to Panama City on Sunday morning, two days before our flight back to Barranquilla, Colombia, we went back to the hostel we'd stayed at to find it was full. We could have planned better, I guess. The guy at the front desk cheerfully sent us to hunt for a place to stay among some hotels a couple of blocks away. We were nervous when we entered one and it looked a little ritzy for our budget, or a lot ritzy, but it wasn't much more expensive than the hostel...prices here are really unpredictable. We went to the movies on Monday because we figured it was our chance to watch a movie in English; we'd heard that generally in Panama City English-language movies are undubbed with subtitles. In Colombia dubbing is pretty much a given, and there are no movie theaters in Boquete. Tom made a friend of a native Panamanian on the bus ride back who referred us to Extreme Planet, which turned out to be more over-the-top than most American movie theaters. We had to pay $2 extra apiece to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with subtitles so Tom could follow along, in "the VIP room", which was a massive room with several veritable reclining armchairs and a great deal of unused space...oh, and every chair had a service button like the flight attendant button on an airplane. We half expected the room to fly into the air and shake us up a little to match the action scenes in the movie. So it was excessive, almost enough to make us fall over laughing (especially when they showed ads for what you could get if you pressed the service button, apparently a gourmet meal), but at least the extra money wasn't just a gringo tax.
Neither of us slept very well on Monday night, so we were pretty tired when we flew out. It was a long day, and one piece of my luggage stayed in Panama, so they sent it through on a later flight, and we waited for it in the airport for some three hours. I mentioned to the lady at the counter when I finally picked it up that we'd just be going to catch a bus to Santa Marta, from the terminal then, and then on to Taganga. She looked at me like I was utterly crazy so I asked, "So...is that a bad idea?" She said yes, it certainly was, take a taxi, or spend the night in Barranquilla. I asked her if there were any hostels nearby, and she debated with her coworker for a while about what a hostel was. We still don't know if Barranquilla has any hostels, but both of them eventually asserted that it doesn't. The taxi ride straight to Santa Marta (an hour and a half away) would obviously have been really expensive, but the guy at the counter made some calls, and it was cheaper than a ride to a hotel, a hotel, and a ride to the terminal in the morning. We were still on the fence, though, because it was just more than we could afford, and we figured there must be a better option. Tom tried very hard to convince me that we should stay up all night in the airport, but we both really needed sleep, and I had memories of our overnight in Miami in my head, which was a miserable time for both of us.
So we literally debated the issue for an hour and a half with the staff and between ourselves, until the guy at the counter, Jhonattan (don't ask me about the spelling, I don't know) offered to let us stay in his house for the night. At that point we both thought it was a capital idea to go home with a stranger, if it saved us money, so that's what we did.
It turned out to be a really fun night. We met his girlfriend, Carolina, and we were all hungry so we asked them to show us a typical Barranquillan meal. So they fed us some weird fruits from their kitchen, that were a little bit like chewing gum in a shell with a pit, but better than it sounds. Then they took us to meet a lot of Jhonattan's family, then out to a restaurant, where, as I understand, you explain which types of meat you want and they chop them all up together for you. When we were there Jhonattan's whole family consulted together on what would be the best typical Barranquillan dish for us. They decided on chicharron, which is a fried pork sausage, with bollos, which are made of crushed white corn mixed with water and shaped into logs, and dipped in sauces. We had a really really nice conversation with the couple, which was a bit difficult at times because most of us were monolingual, but we got along ok. Carolina told us that she's studying cosmetology and she does facials, massages, and liposuction (yes), but she doesn't cut hair. They were very confused that we don't like dancing. We were very confused that they liked us so much, they were so friendly even thought they just met us. We all struggled with the concept of lemons in Latin America ("Oh! You mean an orange!") Carolina loved Tom's jokes. She told us before she left that she's going to be in Santa Marta this weekend so we're going to try to see each other again.
Speaking of Santa Marta, that's where there's a huge "festival of the sea" going on for the next few days. Yesterday we went into town and caught a parade featuring military forces and beauty queens (we're pretty sure they were all former beauty queens). We also went to see a pretty sad aquarium. The tortoises were cool, and neither of us has seen such huge ones, but the dolphins and sea lions didn't really have quite enough space. The place had the nerve to charge $45 to swim with the poor dolphins for 15 minutes. We went with a couple of French Canadian girls, and some guy asked them if they wanted to swim with the dolphins for free. We had a laugh at that because there was an obvious reason no one made the same offer to us. We were pretty depressed by the end of it, though the dolphins put on a pretty good show, with jumping and whatnot, and I've heard that learning to do tricks is good for dolphins. At least we were helping to keep a few people employed, and the museum was out on an island, so we went on our first boat rides of the whole trip. The museum was the oddest thing I've ever seen, it had replicas of relics from the Titanic and miniature terra cotta warriors and Egyptian pharoahs and I don't remember what else. It was a tourist trap, but the sheer oddity of all those things together was delightful anyway.
After a long but easy trip from Boquete to Panama City on Sunday morning, two days before our flight back to Barranquilla, Colombia, we went back to the hostel we'd stayed at to find it was full. We could have planned better, I guess. The guy at the front desk cheerfully sent us to hunt for a place to stay among some hotels a couple of blocks away. We were nervous when we entered one and it looked a little ritzy for our budget, or a lot ritzy, but it wasn't much more expensive than the hostel...prices here are really unpredictable. We went to the movies on Monday because we figured it was our chance to watch a movie in English; we'd heard that generally in Panama City English-language movies are undubbed with subtitles. In Colombia dubbing is pretty much a given, and there are no movie theaters in Boquete. Tom made a friend of a native Panamanian on the bus ride back who referred us to Extreme Planet, which turned out to be more over-the-top than most American movie theaters. We had to pay $2 extra apiece to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with subtitles so Tom could follow along, in "the VIP room", which was a massive room with several veritable reclining armchairs and a great deal of unused space...oh, and every chair had a service button like the flight attendant button on an airplane. We half expected the room to fly into the air and shake us up a little to match the action scenes in the movie. So it was excessive, almost enough to make us fall over laughing (especially when they showed ads for what you could get if you pressed the service button, apparently a gourmet meal), but at least the extra money wasn't just a gringo tax.
Neither of us slept very well on Monday night, so we were pretty tired when we flew out. It was a long day, and one piece of my luggage stayed in Panama, so they sent it through on a later flight, and we waited for it in the airport for some three hours. I mentioned to the lady at the counter when I finally picked it up that we'd just be going to catch a bus to Santa Marta, from the terminal then, and then on to Taganga. She looked at me like I was utterly crazy so I asked, "So...is that a bad idea?" She said yes, it certainly was, take a taxi, or spend the night in Barranquilla. I asked her if there were any hostels nearby, and she debated with her coworker for a while about what a hostel was. We still don't know if Barranquilla has any hostels, but both of them eventually asserted that it doesn't. The taxi ride straight to Santa Marta (an hour and a half away) would obviously have been really expensive, but the guy at the counter made some calls, and it was cheaper than a ride to a hotel, a hotel, and a ride to the terminal in the morning. We were still on the fence, though, because it was just more than we could afford, and we figured there must be a better option. Tom tried very hard to convince me that we should stay up all night in the airport, but we both really needed sleep, and I had memories of our overnight in Miami in my head, which was a miserable time for both of us.
So we literally debated the issue for an hour and a half with the staff and between ourselves, until the guy at the counter, Jhonattan (don't ask me about the spelling, I don't know) offered to let us stay in his house for the night. At that point we both thought it was a capital idea to go home with a stranger, if it saved us money, so that's what we did.
It turned out to be a really fun night. We met his girlfriend, Carolina, and we were all hungry so we asked them to show us a typical Barranquillan meal. So they fed us some weird fruits from their kitchen, that were a little bit like chewing gum in a shell with a pit, but better than it sounds. Then they took us to meet a lot of Jhonattan's family, then out to a restaurant, where, as I understand, you explain which types of meat you want and they chop them all up together for you. When we were there Jhonattan's whole family consulted together on what would be the best typical Barranquillan dish for us. They decided on chicharron, which is a fried pork sausage, with bollos, which are made of crushed white corn mixed with water and shaped into logs, and dipped in sauces. We had a really really nice conversation with the couple, which was a bit difficult at times because most of us were monolingual, but we got along ok. Carolina told us that she's studying cosmetology and she does facials, massages, and liposuction (yes), but she doesn't cut hair. They were very confused that we don't like dancing. We were very confused that they liked us so much, they were so friendly even thought they just met us. We all struggled with the concept of lemons in Latin America ("Oh! You mean an orange!") Carolina loved Tom's jokes. She told us before she left that she's going to be in Santa Marta this weekend so we're going to try to see each other again.
Speaking of Santa Marta, that's where there's a huge "festival of the sea" going on for the next few days. Yesterday we went into town and caught a parade featuring military forces and beauty queens (we're pretty sure they were all former beauty queens). We also went to see a pretty sad aquarium. The tortoises were cool, and neither of us has seen such huge ones, but the dolphins and sea lions didn't really have quite enough space. The place had the nerve to charge $45 to swim with the poor dolphins for 15 minutes. We went with a couple of French Canadian girls, and some guy asked them if they wanted to swim with the dolphins for free. We had a laugh at that because there was an obvious reason no one made the same offer to us. We were pretty depressed by the end of it, though the dolphins put on a pretty good show, with jumping and whatnot, and I've heard that learning to do tricks is good for dolphins. At least we were helping to keep a few people employed, and the museum was out on an island, so we went on our first boat rides of the whole trip. The museum was the oddest thing I've ever seen, it had replicas of relics from the Titanic and miniature terra cotta warriors and Egyptian pharoahs and I don't remember what else. It was a tourist trap, but the sheer oddity of all those things together was delightful anyway.
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