Clases de Salsa y Merengue

We are familiar with the saying “White men can’t jump”. Well, in Colombia I am sure they have phrases that loosely translate: “Gringos can’t dance!” In a culture where Tango was born, the lack of rhythm is comparable to a mortal sin. Every gathering, including some staff meetings, there is music playing and couples dancing. Therefore, when fellow teacher Daisy started dating Carlos, her Colombiano dance instructor boy friend, his business boomed. Carlos comes to people’s homes for 1 and ½ hours a week and teaches us gringos how to wiggle our hips to the Latin beat. Heather had her first class tonight.

Pushing the rug to one side we jumped right in. Merengue was the first dance and surprisingly, within three songs I was spinning, twisting, and shaking my hips, (not shoulders, the upper body stays stiff while the bottom half does all the work). Salsa came next. In the process of learning where my feet should go I also learned some Spanish. Carlos doesn’t speak a lot of English so the lesson was taught in Spanish. Just like with our kids in the classroom, when you get up and get them moving or give them the motivation to understand, they learn faster. In no time I did not only understand what he was saying but also where my feet should go! And after an hour and a half, and three Nalgene bottles of water, (who needs to go to the gym after dance lessons), Carlos left saying, “This gringa can dance!”

Mt Shuksan in Colombia

For all those Bellinghamsters out there, as well as anyone who has been to Artist’s Point at the end of Mt. Baker Highway, this should be a familiar site. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the textbook I will be using this year in my 7th grade World Geography class!

The Case of the Missing Underwear

For those of you who have been worried about our safety while living in Colombia, we have a story. If you’ve read our posting about going to Dan’s place last weekend, you know that we took taxis to get up the mountain. Heather and I wore swimsuits under our clothes, hoping that we would get to swim. Therefore, we also brought a bag with a change of clothes. When we got out of the taxi, we forgot to take our clothes. We realized this just about the same time we realized that we were dropped off at the wrong toll booth. By that time, however, our taxi was long gone.

When we got home, we (actually, a Spanish-speaking friend) called the taxi company. Being a weekend, followed by a holiday, they were unable to track done the driver. Each taxi has 2 drivers – one for the day and one for night. The night driver looked and the bag of clothes was gone, so we resigned ourselves to the fact that someone had taken our clothes.

Then, yesterday, I happened to be talking to Nicole on the phone. It was at Nicole’s apartment that we had picked up the taxis to go up the mountain. Lo and behold, Nicole said that the taxi driver had personally brought our bag of clothes back to her apartment!

So I’m not going to claim that Colombia is completely safe. But, many people here are at least as friendly as people are any where else in the world!

Dan’s Place

Dan came to the Columbus School 18 years ago with intentions to stay for 2 years. Before he knew it, he had purchased 162 acres of mountainside at $4000/acre and began work on his dream home, based on sketches he had done in high school. Yesterday, we visited Dan.

Dan called us yesterday around 9:00 and asked if we could be at his house by 10:30 (one hour earlier than we had scheduled). Sure! we said. We walked to a friend’s house and called a couple of taxis to drive the eight of us (and Henley the dog!) up the mountain.

Dan said we should make sure, once we got to the round-about right after school, to take the right exit towards El Riotero, and stop right before the peaje (toll booth). He would meet us at the restaurant on the other side of the toll booth. (So we wouldn’t have to pay extra for the taxi). During the 25 minute ride we were engaged in great conversation getting to know our new friends. When we got to the toll booth we jumped out (leaving our change of clothes in the cab) and started walking through the toll. After about five minutes we all stopped and started to wonder, where is the restaurant? It was then we realized we had missed the turn and had gone 6 miles up the mountain towards the airport in the opposite direction of El Riotero. The good news: we got to walk through the flower country we missed seeing earlier. Beautiful! The bad news: we had to walk six miles down a mountain highway with narrow shoulders and insane drivers. Yikes!

Dan, not surprisingly, was not at the restaurant when we arrived at 12:00. Fortunately, it only takes one gringo to attract a crowd, and we had 8. We heard a shout from across the parking lot and saw a youngish security guard waving at us, asking, “?Amigos Daniel?” Ha, as if there was any doubt.

Dan, the security guard said, had left only 15 minutes before. We dug up Dan’s phone number and a few minutes later he pulled into the parking lot. Heather, Henley, Susan, and I were the first to be ferried to Dan’s finca (roughly translated, a farm or country estate). After pulling off the main road, we traveled up a windy, single lane, just paved road. The plans were to meet 4 others at his house and then go on a hike through his property. Of course, we were a touch late, so the others had started without us. So Dan drove us past his house and pointed out the particulars. Built on a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley, the house is situated near natural springs and a small river-carved canyon. Dan rents his main house out to teachers, and spends his weeknights at an apartment in the city, which is more convenient for night classes he teaches at a local university. On the weekends he stays in a small studio cabin he has built alongside the river, which is reached by following a cobblestone path along natural waterfalls and Dan-built catch basins. The cabin is windowed on 3 sides and has a covered patio on the roof, complete with built in fireplace/grill.

Dan had to run so that he could pick up the others still at the restaurant and make it back into town for a class. So, he sped us up the hill until we met with the 4 others who had started out earlier. This part of the hike was up the previously mentioned just paved road. We walked for 15 minutes or so before reaching a small riverside park with picnic tables nestled between small palm and pine trees. A short walk up the river revealed a magnificent 40 foot waterfall, which Dan refers to as the “baby falls.” We had plans for swimming, but cool temperatures and frigid water kept us dry.

Dan soon pulled up to the park with the others we had left at the restaurant. After a quick snack, we started walking back to the house and he got into his jeep to head into town. As he was pulling by, though, he jumped out again. “Hey, I want to show you this.” He pushed aside some bamboo planted at the side of the road, skirted through some dangerously spiny bushes, and pointed down into the valley. “That dark pool is at least 30 feet deep, and you can take this trail, cross on that rock there, and climb up the other side so you can jump off that cliff!” We started down the trail as Dan returned to his car. Seconds later, Dan’s voice calls behind us. “You know, if you keep heading down that trail, you’ll cross over a tiny bridge. Right after the bridge, look for a black water pipe on your left. Cross under the pipe, then stay right. Then you’ll get to the BIG waterfall.”

Dan wasn’t kidding. After a 30 minute walk, complete with wrong turns and confused looks, we were greeted with an amazing fall, easily ten times taller than the “baby”. With this grand view to the left and open valley to the right, we sat down and took in our fill.

Dan’s place is pretty cool.

Frutas De Colombia

Heather’s class does not eat lunch until 1:00pm. Therefore, the kids eat a snack around 9:30 everyday to tide them over. While walking around the classroom it is amazing to see what these kids take for granted. Pina (pineapple) chunks, Mango, aguacate (avocado), chayote (a large overly juicy pear), papaya, babacoa (star fruit), sapote (persimmon), guava, curuba (passion fruit), sapadilla (related to the kiwi), Lulo (don’t know what to compare it to, it is just delicious take my word for it), and endless others pack the kids lunchboxes. It is no wonder the roadside it littered with fruit stands and juice bars. This plate of ensalada especial con helado (special salad with ice cream, salad here usually refers to fruit not greens) easily fed 5 for less than $3.00.

City of Flowers, Part II

Desfile de Silleteros
Flower Parade

The evening we flew into Colombia we landed high in the hills above Medellin in an area known as Rio Negro. As we wound down the hills Angela, our human resources director, told us that we were passing through flower country. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see the colorful fields of flowers as we passed through, but the scent, even in our exhausted, overwhelmed state, was amazing. This area, including the town of Santa Elena, is where many flowers are grown and exported to the United States and Canada. The one other reason for the year round production of flowers is for the Desfile de Silleteros.

The school organized tickets in the seated area for all of the new teachers. Buses picked us up at our houses at 10:30 and we slowly snaked our way through massive amounts of traffic to the downtown area. As we filed into the stands at 12:00 for the 3:00 start to the parade we were handed t-shirts, paper fans with the local rum decals, ponchos, and yes shot glasses on lanyards for easy access and sharing in the stands. We sat down in an area with a live band directly behind us. Venders circulated offering empenadas, (stuffed pastries), agua, coca-cola, cervezas (beer), fifths of Aguardiente (the local answer to moonshine), and Ron (Rum). Let’s just say the stands were a happy place to be and by the time the Desfile de Silleterso began everyone was extremely friendly!

Silla- is the Spanish word for chair and was the common way to carry supplies or people on Silleteros’s (chair carriers) backs from town to town. For the flower festival over 400 flower growing families stay up all night before the festival and design the most amazing flower displays, to be carried on the workers backs down the mountain and for 3 hours through Medellin in the biggest festival of the year. There are several different types of displays the Silleteros carry. The traditional, our personal favorite, are large bouquets packed into the Sillas weighing up to 150 pounds. Other displays look like large disks and the flowers are fashioned into pictures and sayings, similar to the floats in the Rose Bowl Parade. These pictures ranged on themes from Paz Para Colombia (Peace for Colombia), Viva Juan Pablo Segundo (Long live Pope John Paul II), and GOOOOAL Nacionales (one of three local professional futbol teams). These displays can weigh up to 250 pounds, and remember they are carried the 16 miles down the mountain and for three hours of the parade on someone’s back! The last type of display is a commercial display, and the only ones that are allowed use dried flowers. Therefore, these are often made weeks in advance, instead of the night before, and are posted outside restaurants and other businesses before and after the parade as advertisements. We recognized our bank, Bancolombia, our grocery store, Pomona, and the universal Coca-Cola emblem.

For hour after hour exhausted silleteros of all ages intermixed with local dancers paraded in front of the grandstands where we were sitting with thousands of new found amigos colombianos. Throughout this long and energized day we discovered the true meaning of the flower festival, it is not a celebration of the local flower production and Antioquen culture, the county Medellin is in, but yet another reason to party!

Bienvenido a Mercado de San Alejo

Welcome to the San Alejo street market!

The first Saturday of every month in Parque de Bolivar, a park in the city center of Medellin, there is the Mercado de San Alejo. A large arts and crafts fair with venders selling everything from garden plants to imitation Nike hats and shirts. It would be easy to become overwhelmed with the site of taxis jamming the streets, the park so full of vendors and people it is impossible to move without jostling someone else, and the imposing figure of Simon Bolivar on horse back peering over the colorful chaos all shaded by the largest cathedral in South America. After the initial awe, quickly we pressed on. We arrived with strict instructions to watch out for pickpockets and be prepared to haggle for a good deal. Our mission was simple: a hammock for the backyard and a basket for our dirty laundry. (The floor of our Spanish tiled room was looking a little bit too dorm roomish.)

While ducking between venders following us chanting; “Agua, Agua, Agua” and others selling fresh frozen juice pops we set our sites on one of many basket venders. Here was the chance to test our limited Spanish.

Cuanto Cuesta? (How much?) We asked pointing to one of the first baskets that peeked an interest.

Veinticinco mil (20,000 pesos or about $9.00 US). We looked at each other shook our heads and started to walk on quickly followed by the vender and shouts of dieciocho mil, diecidocho mil (18,000). The basket wasn’t that interesting so we kept on walking, both smiling at each other with the newly discovered power of bargain shopping!

Within an hour we had purchased a bright green hammock and the perfect laundry basket. Both purchased with a successful drop in the initial price. Even more successfully we avoided any other high pressure sales as well as the notorious pick pockets. We also gave an interview with two University Students in English. As well as meeting two young 20ish entrepreneurs making and selling discrete shoulder bags perfect to hide bottles of rum for the weekend street parties. After a fun and somewhat confusing conversation in broken English and Spanish we turned down their wares as well as a gift of rum and coke on the sly for another time.

Another day done, another new adventure. Bring on the biggest festival of the year: Desfile de Silleteros, the flower bearers parade. Until manana…

City of Flowers, Part I

Medellin has a multitude of nicknames (the most popular of which is City of Eternal Spring, though Heather and I would change that to City of Eternal Bellingham-style Summer.) Running a close second is City of Flowers – La Ciudad de las Flores. On Thursday, we received our first installment. The school organized a field trip to the Botanical Gardens in downtown Medellin. The Gardens are situated in a large park, parts of which are open air while other areas are covered, similar to a giant, high-ceilinged greenhouse. We arrived on the first day of a flower competition. While there were dozens, if not hundreds, of types of flowers, the main draw were the orchids, of which there were many varieties (I am being somewhat vague in quantity here only because I am not a flower buff and really have no idea how many types of orchids exist, much less how many were present for our viewing pleasure).

What was much more incredible to me was the number of people who showed up to see the flowers. Literally thousands crowded the grounds, all pressing to get a view of the blooms. Once in prime position, many would force out a digital camera to snap a shot of the red or magenta or pinkish blossom. We were in the grounds for at least two hours, and the stream of people was constant. In North America, this type of show wouldn’t draw a fraction of the crowds present here.

After exiting the exhibition proper, we were spit out into capitalism heaven. With no way to escape but to follow the throngs, we along with everyone else ran a gauntlet of vendors – selling flowers, beer, jewelry, paperweights, “I love Medellin!” T-shirts, food, rainsticks, and a multitude of other various and extraneous nic-nackery. And then, once through the maze of vendors, we entered another area of the gardens and did it all over again. And again. I felt as if I was a pig at the Clinton County 4-H Fairgrounds, traveling from my holding pen to the showing arena, with various gates opening and closing in front of me, no idea where I am going, only forward, forward, and wait, I am not in the fairgrounds, I am in a shopping mall, and the mall is in Las Vegas, but gates are still opening and closing as I wind my way through, never sure if my destination is around the corner or far far away.

We finally burst though the last gate and drained into the parking lot, thoroughly exhausted from the ordeal but equally enlightened by this amazing culture that truly loves its art, but, as is the world over, loves its shopping too.

A note on pronunciation

As you learned in high school, in Spanish a double L is pronounced as “y,” such as in the word “tortilla.” However, here in Medellin, the “y” sound becomes a cross between a soft “j” and “sh.” I cannot think of a corresponding sound in English – though I am sure something exists. The best I can come up with is the “j” sound in “muhajadin” (as in the Afghan rebel fighters that have been so popular in the news over the past few years). Therefore, “Medellin” is pronounced “Medejin,” not “Medeyin.” A straight “y” also uses this soft j sound – for example, the name Yolima is pronounced “Jolima.”