Cartagena

I am in Cartagena, the place I know about from the Love Boat. I decided to come a week early since there is no school, where I am volunteering, this week. It is a national week off for schools in Colombia. I enrolled in a language school and will be taking classes every day with some cultural activities in the afternoon. I could only volunteer if I was here for 3 or more weeks. Boy am I glad I did not sign up for that! It is sooooo hot and humid here. Just another thing to make me look like a tourist - red faced and sweaty. All the natives are wearing pants and look cool, calm and collected. My classmates and I are red faced, sweaty and fanning ourselves with the local newspaper - Donde - which is similar to our Eugene Weekly. I was expecting 90’s but not the humidity. AARRGGHH! Well at least I have changed for the better since I was a child. I remember being a big whiner and not fun to be around when it was hot and humid and I was not in the water. Now at least I can smile and still have a good time. Regardless of the fact that I am dripping without there being water around or that I start dripping after I dry myself off from the shower, or heck it probably happens as I am drying myself off. Anyway, I just realized now instead of whining, I make jokes about it.

My host family is great. It is a single mom with a 25 year old son and 2 daughters 15 and 9 years old. Last night we had a ladies night out and we went to the Centro - a new shopping mall. Now must I say, I knew I would try new and different things down here but I had no idea some of them would entail going to a mall, drinking an entire bottle of CocaCola and eating meat. But there you have it. I am doing all of these things and still having fun - thank gosh for the fun part!! After the mall, which is so similar to the US shopping malls with sales and 40% off signs, Halloween decorations, etc, we luckily went down and explored the Old Town.

The Old Town is absolutely beautiful - rich in architecture, history and culture. One of my classmates said it reminded her of Spain which makes sense because it was Spain who built the walls which still surround this section of the city and tried to protect all the gold and treasures of the natives (and what they were trading) from the pirates. Never having been to Spain, it reminded me of New Orleans with the narrow streets, terraces and/or balconies filled with flowers. The streets are also all cobbled - no blacktop and they have horse drawn carriages here - los coches. In Colombia cars are los carros and horse drawn carriages are los coches. In Spain los carros are horse drawn carriages and los coches are cars. So don’t get them mixed up, okay?! They had lots of vending happening on the sides of streets, a plaza where there was some native dancing which seemed African in nature and these awesome sculptures made from recycled metal. There faces were so expressive!! I have included some of them down below. The dancing makes sense that it has an African background because there was a huge slave trade going on here. Actually there was a time when the white skinned people lived within the walls of the Old Town and the dark skinned people lived outside of the walls. There are 2 huge Catholic churches here and there was a huge inquisition where people lost eyes, body parts etc. Some of the sculptures depict this as well.