para bailar a medianoche...

Just add el espíritu colombiano.

Santa Marta, Colombia

flea marketing.

Just when I thought we had seen everything at the Bogota Flea Market but the kitchen sink...

the kitchen sink showed up too.

Also, it's flooding here. It's either sleeping in a pool of your own sweat on the Caribbean coast or drowning next to a motorcycle engine in the chilly capital. Life can just be so difficult sometimes.

martinis, round two

Here are some things that can get tiring after a while:

*hostel rooms shared with handfuls of other loud douchebags and occasional thieves

*trying to survive on set menus every day ($2 for lunch is so cool, but the human body can only handle so much white rice and fried fish. It's like a science experiment)

*bargaining for beer. Colombian inflation is fairly absurd, so we set our beer range at $1,500-2,000 for a domestic. We refuse to pay more. Since $1,000 pesos equals 50 cents, this is totally reasonable.

After having bread and cheese for dinner on the walls of Cartagena and gazing across the drawbridge to a fancy wedding party, we felt SO. POOR. and realized it was time to start living outside of our means yet again. So we pulled the old Buenos Aires maneuver of finding the fanciest place in town and crashing it.

This time it was a beautiful hotel in the center of old town, where riiiiiiich old people and possibly "ladies of the night" go to drink expensive scotch and wipe their butts with our monthly budget. Acting like we belonged there, Mar ordered a whiskey on the rocks and I got a "martini biche," which I discovered contained mango and black pepper, and let me tell you, those drinks were like nectar from the heavens. Our kind waiter came over to make small talk and asked us what we would be having next. I laughed.

"Abject poverty for two, please."

Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself and the world that you cannot afford even the first drink, let alone another. But have I mentioned that Colombians, with the exception of some select FARC guerrillas and the ladies on Playa Blanca who kick sand on your towel when you refuse to buy a massage from them, are the world's COOLEST PEOPLE? Our waiter laughed at us and then whispered to the bartender, who promptly sent us over two more of our exact drinks, but with more expensive alcohol, on the house.

AH MANG. 72 hours left in this dream world of black guys with blue eyes and more generosity than Ireland and Mother Theresa combined. I'll be over here whimpering the Colombian national anthem in the fetal position if anyone needs me.

goodnight, cartagena.

Cartagena really is the prettiest city on the continent, in my humble opinion. Staying just outside the old city in Getsemani was an experiment in a slightly more humble living quarters, and our street was absoutely heaving with the hand to mouth experience of living-- people painting used shoes for resale with spray paint, skinny old men loading boxes into fading doorways, pushcarts selling arepas con queso and tiny plastic cups of tinto, the thick, sugary black coffee that Colombians drink from vendors' Thermoses, overripe fruit and unrefrigerated meat, pantsless kids running from sidewalk to sidewalk, fluorescent-lit cafes with endless card games within, homeless men peeing into the gutter, ancient boomboxes blasting samba and merengue, and the friendly shouts of neighbors as they begin and end their day... the grit of the street is really beautiful in its own way, and the noise and clamor is something unique that we'll miss when we get back to the quiet individualism of American city streets.

playa blanca

A boat ride out of Cartagena into a long stretch of white sand, turquoise water, and a big, bright moon to keep you company at night. Not even mad about this.

my new buddy.

These two solemn little boys watching a blimp hover over the track and field event today were very serious about watching pole vaulting. They didn't smile very much. I felt old and uncool next to them until Daniel asked me sweetly "Como te llamas?" after looking over curiously at my camera.

Daniel and I would be good friends, I think. He asked me lots of questions like, "What's it like in New York?" and "Why is the Peruvian runner so slow?" and "Do you know how to speak English?" ("Big. Loud. Fun." "No one can beat the Colombian runner today." "I'm getting there.")

He told me he had been in love last year, when he was eight, but his girlfriend moved away. He asked about what it was like to live in Seattle and why I was in Colombia. And finally, he scampered off, but not before leaving us with a bright break in his serious demeanor.

south american games.

We're lucky to be in Medellin when Pablo Escobar is NOT here and when the South American Games ARE here. We stayed extra time with new friends because the lure of every summer sport ever invented was too much to resist. Plus, the Brazilians and Colombians are specimens of creation and we're not even mad about being in the one South American city that's filled with the continent's best athletes.

Horseback police, military men, and RoboCop riot patrol. All in an average Medellin protest.

international smugglers: that'll happen.

I'll be succinct: crossing the border from Cotacachi into Cali, Colombia was an effort. After getting grilled by a creepy old man about our incomes and possessions ("I will be your friend! I invite you two to my house!" he offered effusively. "We have enough friends," we answered warily) and got offered a $10 taxi ride by the bus assistant that would most likely have turned out to be some kind of jaunt into the jungle to take all the white girls' stuff, we fortunately joined forces with a rotund Ecuadorian, his sweet wife and energetic baby and got our newest passport stamp with zero hassle.

Ok, it's not like we weren't expecting to get to know the military really well on our way through southwest Colombia, but the bus ride into Cali was REALLY a stop and go affair. Men with machine guns as big as my leg cleared the bus shortly after we left Ipiales, and we stood around on the side of the road as they examined passports, crawled around the luggage hold, and looked stern. This happened four more times on the journey, with variations. Once they tore apart the driver's area, banged on the ceiling looking for trap doors, and scowled at us as they gripped our passports ("They are looking for something specific!" our new friends said. "Something must have happened!"). At 3 am, as we pulled into the outskirts of Cali, we realized that WE WERE THE ONES DOING THE DRUG RUNNING FROM ECUADOR when our driver stopped the bus, a mysterious, darkened doorway appeared from a sketchy building, and he and his assistant lept from the bus, quickly unloaded four large packages wrapped with garbage bags and duct tape, and sped off into the city. UM? Pretty sure those weren't blanket donations for Haiti.

But for all the varieties of military and police and riot officers and other peace-keeping measures that are ubiquitous in this country, we have only been greeted by wonderful people on every side. After an uneventful day in Cali, we arrived on yet another overnight bus in Medellin and stumbled into the early morning light more than a little disoriented. The only other people we saw was a literal army of 18 year old army recruits, standing around with the aforementioned machine guns and looking like it was military picnic day or something. Within 30 seconds, we had a thick clump of about a dozen of them begging to help us. One particularly short one took it upon himself to hail us a cab as the others explained the neighborhoods in Medellin and were being all-around adorable. They loaded our backpacks into the cab trunk and waved goodbye sweetly. At that moment, we knew fully that we were in a superbly unique place that would be hard to leave.

We're on the three week countdown until we fly out of Bogota, and if anyone has any ideas on how to extend that to another two months, let me know.