A Chance to be a Kid Again

Most of you would say that I am still a kid so the title of this entry is quite misleading, but my latest trip to Medellin really gave me the chance to let that little girl inside of me bust out and play. It is a fantastic city located more or less in between Cartagena and Bogota and is known as the city of eternal spring because the weather there is so nice. It is clean, big, and friendly, filled with museums and parks. I loved it.

To begin with they have a metro that runs clear across the city and also cable cars that run off it up the mountains surrounding the city making the city accessible to all. We spent one whole morning just riding around the city in them.

Lindsey, Iveth, and Josa Angel on the Metro

MetroCable

They have the sweetest interactive museums and I have sworn to find a job there as a bilingual guide if I ever have the chance to live in Medellin.

Rock climbing at the Parque Explora

Bubbles!

We also took the opportunity to just have fun, play mini golf and ride the ferris wheel in the mall.

Iveth rockin' the mini golf equipment

I found a little car...

...and Jose Angel found some swings

There was also the sweetest park called the Barefoot Park that had fountains, a forest, and a huge sandbox all for people to play in. I took off my shoes and really got into it (not surprising since shoes and I don't really get along) but I have no pictures from that because it was dark by the time we found it.

It is a beautiful place and I highly recommend a trip there. It is well worth it. Definitely my second favorite city in Colombia.

My Visitors

I have been so lucky to have so many visitors while down here! I am honored to be able to share with people the beauty, diversity, and culture of Colombia. It is a country that many people in the United States misunderstand and prejudge unfairly. While drugs, guerillas, and Plan Colombia are a reality, it is not a visible part of everyday life. People shop in both street markets and Target-like grocery stores, ride donkeys or drive private cars, eat traditional rice and beans and fish or MacDonalds... it is obvious that globalization has effected Colombia, but it still has a strong and independent culture, and even within the country there is tremendous variation in food, language, and traditions.

So, thank you to...

my family

Gaby and Bert (not shown)

Erin and her parents (not shown either... sorry!)

Megan

Lindsey

...and Emily Scatterday (for some reason I have 0 pictures of our time together here)

for taking the time to enjoy and learn about a new far off place. I hope you have all been able to bring good experiences and attitudes back to the USA to share with everyone there what an amazing place Colombia is and how welcoming and warm the people are.

If there is anything you are interested in learning about Colombia, please feel free to ask and I can go into anything in more detail (as far as my knowledge and my experiences, I don't claim to be an expert.) And ask those pictured above for their stories as well! I am sure they would love to tell their stories!

Peace,

Lani

Club de Conversacion

I am leaving Colombia in two weeks and I have yet to write anything about the real reason I came down here: to teach English. So now is about time. It ended up being a pretty sweet gig -I got to meet some really great, dedicated, super intelligent students and hang out with some sweet professors. The plan was for me to do a conversation club meeting 8 times a week so that students could go to the one that fit into their busy schedules, and then also do classroom visits to add a cultural, native speaker component to the classes.

A few teachers have invited me to their classrooms to help with oral exams or play games or teach idioms, but really most of my time has been spent on the conversation club and planning field trips for the students to practice English outside of the classroom.

I have a group of faithful students who are super dedicated to the language (and some who have never taken a class but rather have learned everything they know from TV and music, which is just so impressive!) and then other students who come and go. Sometimes it is frustrating because since it is an optional activity, I find myself alone in the classroom when exam time rolls around (or like Tuesday mornings, Wilson is my only student that shows these days, so we just decided to take club over to Juan Valdez for coffee slushies.)

In the club we cover topics of all varieties: Minnesotan vocabulary (eh, don'tchya know?, hot dish), the election process (why the heck do we still use the electoral college?), oragami and the story of 1000 cranes, tourist destinations in the USA and Colombia, dying Easter eggs, skits using the words "awkward," and "sketchy," etc. It's fun because I have no supervision and we just do what we want. Plus when I have visitors (which is OFTEN man!) I just bring them in and the students are fascinated just with asking questions.

Megan with the Wednesday afternoon students and their paper cranes...

...which turned into a paper plane contest.

On Saturdays I plan outings for the students so they can maybe have a bit more fun practicing the language (although what is more fun than a paper plane contest?) I make sure that whatever we do is free so that anyone can come. People usually bring friends and are excited to speak in English, so we always have a good time. We have gone to museums, gone out to coffee, cooked, gone to the beach, and my personal favorite, tie dyed!

Touring the colonial walls around the historic center.

The Inquisition Palace

French Toast for Breakfast!

Tie Dye in the beach!

Overall, it has been a really great experience and I am going to miss my students a ton. Thanks guys for a fantastic time!

The City of the Bikes

Bienvenidos a Mompos

Meg and I decided we needed a vacation from our constant vacationing, so we headed out for a relaxing weekend in Mompox, a sleepy town a few hours southeast of Cartagena. Honestly, the most exciting part of the trip was getting there and back (although back was much more entertaining because we were accompanied by a British man who spoke no Spanish, but definitely spoke his fair share of English, if you catch my drift...)

It is a nice town on the banks of a river (requiring a ferry ride to reach). We really didn't find much to do there, so we mostly ate and read. Not a bad weekend if you ask me. One interesting thing I found was that there were hardly any cars there; most everyone chose bicycles or motocycles as their mode of transportation. Megan and I indulged ourselves in a moto ride one afternoon, and our new friend took us all over the town, pointing out the highlights (like, "Here is a church. Here is another church. Here you can buy cheese. Here is church.")

We also took a boat ride up the river. Since it is not high tourist season right now we ended up being the only people on the boat ride with our guide, a friendly man who loved to point out all the wildlife and share all of his knowledge about the river (and so naturally we ended up talking about politics and the upcoming presidential election and the changes that need to be made in Colombia. An excellent conversation.) Basically, we got to see a zoo-full of animals, but with no bars, no glass, and no protection from flying poop...

King Fisher

Iguana

(We saw too many of these for my liking.)

Our guide and a flock of birds he scared out of the tree for us.

Monkeys!

(Yes, poop throwing was attempted.)

Cow

(Never a complete trip in Colombia without a cow.)

Just beautiful.

I love el horno!

So I am pretty sure I mentioned before that I bought an oven to pursue my baking dreams. I just wanted to update on how fantastic life with an oven is. Mind you, it is a toaster oven, but it is just a treat to have.

We bake many things in the oven (as well as other people in the hotel since it is common knowledge that we have one and it is often out on loan.) Megan has become an expert experimenter with her bread (http://allthingscolombia.blogspot.com/2010/03/mamando-gallo.html), while I have perfected a brownie recipe, now available with Peanut Butter, arequipe (like caramel), or coffee flavor. I have also collected a little gang of helpers (who even fight over who will wash the dishes!) Basically the oven (and anything that comes out of it) is a big hit here, and it makes me super happy to have this simple pleasure in my life here.

Megan's bread

The Brownies

Pedro, David, and Theo breaking eggs.

P.S. Not everything that comes out of the oven is a masterpiece. The other day Meg and I tried to make a cucumber bread that was just nasty. After trying to convince ourselves it was delicious by covering it up with loads of peanut butter, we deemed it inedible and ended up throwing half of it away. All a part of the learning process. Successful items include: pumpkin bread, poppyseed bread, muffins of all flavors, cheesecake, toasted sandwiches pizza, raspberry bread, banana bread, chocolate cake, granola, etc.

A Frisbee Update

I have continued to play frisbee with a team here in Cartagena and I love it (besides the fact that all of my sunscreen got used up and I got burnt for the first time in 7 months yesterday during practice). Lately my team has been going through a bit of an evolutionary phase and so we have been playing with a couple of other teams in the area. This picture is from a tournament we had a week ago in Barranquilla. We played with a crazy fun team from Santa Marta. We had a blast and played teams from all over Colombia and Venezuela. I learned a lot about strategy and met some really cool people. I also learned how to play poker.

The Team Caribbean - if that kid in the red hat weren't so dang tall you would be able to see me... :)

In Cartagena we have begun practicing with the other team located in the city, called Jiva. They are really cool and really good. The only problem with this is that if we combined teams we will no longer have a team to play against since our games last semester consisted always of us vs. them. I'm not worried about it though and I am super excited because this semester they scrounged up some girls to play on the team and they are adorable! And get this, their names are Jessica and Alba. I'm not joking!

(Jessica Alba playing beach frisbee...?)

Anyway, all good on the frisbee front; it is definitely a huge part of my life in Colombia. Lately I have been thinking a lot about how much I miss the Commons in Excelsior and throwing around a frisbee with my friends there, but for now I will just have to be content with the beaches of Cartagena. I think I will survive.

Another tid-bit about La Guajira

Manon and I also had the chance to hang out with some members of the Wayuu, the dominant indiginous group in the northeast of Colombia. They shared with us some traditions such as the traditional dress, face paintings, dance, and legends. Here is Manon displaying proudly her new make-up, and then me in the colorful garb. (I have videos of us attempting the dance, but they just don't want to load!)

I thought their stories were the coolest part of everything that they shared with us. There was one story about the women spirits who live in the river and enter into your dreams as the person you most desire in the world. She seduces you to a point of intimacy, but if you are not careful and go to the river with her, she will drown you. There is another story about a large, cannabalistic woman who lives nearby the ranch where we were staying and who comes out every once in a while looking for prey. This story sort of reminded me of Paul Bunyan... although he was not a cannabal. I just thought they might be good company for each other, being lonely giants and all. The last story was about a species of people who only have one leg and the foot on the leg is on backwards, so when walking in the desert upon seeing the tracks the strange being is actually headed in the opposite direction then you would logically think. Apparently these species are vicious and impossible to kill, so of course there is a story about a man who did not believe this and set out to kill one. Obviously he did not succeed. Oh yeah! One more thing about these guys- when their eyes are closed that means they are awake, and when their eyes are open that means they are sleeping.

I don't know, sometimes I think the woman was just making these stories up as she talked, playing with our little gullible tourist-minds. I mean, I have no way of knowing if these really are the legends of the Wayuu or not, but I'm just going to trust her and keep away from hopping, apparently sleeping people with a backwards foot.