More on Colombia

I know I haven´t finished writing about Germany yet, and I will indeed do that soon. But I wanted to update everyone on what I have been doing in Colombia since that last post on Cartagena. Overall, I spent a month there, which is crazy to think about! It went really fast, as everything has on this trip, but it was really nice to spend a longer time somewhere. I had friends there, and would see them around town and make plans to hang out with them almost every day, so between that and going to school in the mornings, it almost felt like regular life a little bit (except that I was staying in a hostel most of the time, and that Spanish was being spoken all around me). I stayed in school for about three weeks, and for most of it, had Leidy for my own private teacher, which was really nice. I learned some irregular verbs, and then some regular verbs, and then a whole lot of adjectives and nouns and felt like it just ended up that I needed to practice what I learned at the beginning before I kept learning more and more. It was a humbling experience, because I was the only beginner at the school besides Angie (from Boulder!), and she left me after about 7 days, after which I really was the only beginner. So many other people in the school have had years of Spanish lessons, or they speak several other languages and so Spanish just comes easy to them as far as speaking and listening. I felt so silly only knowing English basically! I have always felt this way when traveling, but it was definitely worse being in the school. It helped that everyone kept telling me how long it took them to learn, or how hard it is to learn a language, especially at the beginning. I really want to actually learn Spanish now, though, and hope to keep taking classes once I come home to the US. I have also met people who have been traveling for several months through South America and have learned a lot along the way, so of course I hope to keep learning as well. It is hard because in general, I meet other travelers and speak English with them, and the same thing happened at school. When we were out, we always spoke English.
I did get to experience living with a Colombian family for about five days while I was in school. Initially, I stayed in a hostel when I arrived in Cartagena. Then, I met Angie at school, and she invited me first to stay at her hotel for three nights, and then to go back to the family that she was staying with. She had arrived there and realized that she didn´t speak enough Spanish (she had two years back in high school) to communicate at all with the family, so she wanted to go to a hotel for a few nights and then return to the family after she had brushed up a bit. So, that was fun for me because I was able to head to a nice hotel and stay for cheap - or so I thought. She had told me to walk into the hotel and just head on up to her room. I took a taxi to the hotel, which really was a fancy high-rise hotel, right on the beach, and got out of the taxi with my big old backpack. I walked in like I owned the place, but I most certainly didn´t look like I belonged there! I walked up to the elevator, and was waiting for it when one of the porters came up to me and asked in English if I was staying there, to which I replied "yes." He then asked me what my room number was, and I gave him the number. Then he asked if I had a key, and I said that my friend was waiting up there for me. He said "ok" and I went up to Angie´s room. When she let me in, I told her that I think I may have gotten us in trouble! No sooner did I get those words out than the phone started ringing. They asked her who I was and told her that we had to pay more for another person, just as you would have to in the US. They called a couple more times, and she realized later that they had also called her cell phone! We told them we would come down there and talk to them. When we got downstairs, we went into the manager´s office. He spoke really good English, and was very interested in helping us figure out what to do. It was really pretty funny because he started out by telling us that it would cost $75 extra per night, which we thought was crazy, especially because Angie was already paying about $70 per night! So he just kept asking us what we would like to pay, and when we told him what my backpacker´s budget was and how long I was traveling for, and when Angie asked how much it would cost her to cancel her reservation, he came all the way down to $15 per night with breakfast included! What a difference! The breakfast was a huge buffet that was amazing, and it was awesome to stay in a room with air conditioning, a double bed all to myself, hot showers, and a rooftop pool with a view of the ocean! It felt like I was on a real vacation for once:)
After spending three nights there, we went back to stay with the family. We moved my bed into Angie´s room since it was the only room with air conditioning (VERY necessary in Cartagena!). Staying with the family was different than I thought it would be, but probably more so because I was with Angie and so we only spoke English to each other. The family consisted of the mom, and two sons who were 25 and 18. Eduardo, the 25-yr-old, actually spoke pretty good English and was really helpful to practice Spanish with. The rest of the family, including a live-in housekeeper, spoke no English at all. We didn´t see the family very often, and it was a rather strange vibe most of the time. For instance, they would set our meals out on the table, but they never ate with us or were even around when we ate. It felt more like we were paying for a bed and food rather than for the whole immersion experience, which was sad for us. Eduardo did take us one night to a soccer game which was fun. It was the youth world cup, and was France vs. Ecuador. Of course, the Colombians were rooting for Ecuador, and they knew one cheer which was just chanting "Ecu-a-dor" over and over! Colombians are also WAY better at the wave than anything I have ever seen in America! They love it, and every single person does it, and it keeps going and going, much longer than it does back home.
Angie decided to go home earlier than she had planned, due to a combination of things, the main reason being that on our first day of school, we had walked to lunch. On the way back to school, she was talking to us and accidentally kicked a garbage bag that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk (pretty normal there). At the time, she said "ow" and kept walking, and a couple blocks later looked down and realized that blood was pouring out of her toe. She ended up going to the hospital to get it to stop bleeding, and had cut the whole tip of her pinky toe off on a broken glass bottle that was in that trash bag. Due to that, she wasn't able to do a lot, like swim, or salsa dance, or go biking with us, which definitely limited her ability to have fun. After she went home, I was the only student in the beginner Spanish class, which was good because my teacher could customize the class for me. As I said earlier, I needed to take some time to practice all that I learned, and I am still practicing and learning a few weeks later. It helps being around local Colombians who really only speak Spanish - it forces me to use my limited words and learn every day.
I met a lot of great people in the Spanish school, which made it really fun. Once we had a long weekend due to our teachers having appointments, so 5 of us girls decided to head to Parque Nacional Tayrona, which we had heard nothing but good things about. Getting there took much longer than we had anticipated, but I now know that pretty much everything in Colombia is that way. First of all, we took a local bus, that was supposed to take an hour, from the center of Cartagena, to the bus station outside of town. After an hour, we were no closer than we had been when we started - the bus just kept going around in circles, and we passed the old walls at least three times! It was SO hot in the bus and we kept trying to ask the driver if we were on the right bus, and when we would arrive to the bus station, but he wouldn't answer us! After two hours, we FINALLY arrived at the bus station; in hindsight, we would definitely have taken a taxi and arrived in less than half an hour! We then got on a bus to Santa Marta, which was fine but we arrived pretty late at night, and decided to stay in that town, at the hostel that I had stayed at a couple of weekends before that with Angie. The next morning, we boarded another bus that took us to the entrance of the Parque, and paid the almost $20 entrance fee (very expensive for Colombia!), and then took another mini van a couple of kilometers up the road, until the road ended. Then, we commenced our long walk towards our destination, which was through the jungle and past some beautiful beaches - it was amazing! It took us about 3 hours, and we were all pretty sure we had never sweat so much in our lives! Since I didn't have a good backpack for just a long weekend, I had brought my Thailand bag and had overpacked. That proved to be a bad idea - it is awkward and was way too heavy! I really felt my age on that walk as I lagged behind my younger (ages 20-27) friends and struggled to keep up! It didn't help that I had not brought tennis shoes, and so was walking with just my flip flops. It was really muddy in areas, and at one point I stepped in fairly deep mud and my foot sank in like quicksand. I then stupidly tried to pull my foot back out while it was still inside the flip flop, breaking the flip flop! Of course that was not good at all, and thankfully my friends had come better prepared and were able to lend me a flip flop in place of my broken one. Once we arrived to our remote destination, we realized that all of that sweating and walking was worth it - we were in the midst of paradise! The beaches were beautiful, with the classic tall and leaning palm trees, and the turquoise waters. They were also basically empty, and we felt that we were almost the only people there. We spent two nights there, and slept in hammocks, which was an experience I have never had before. It actually was better than I had anticipated, and I slept decently well both nights. We thankfully had mosquito nets over our hammocks so we didn't get eaten alive. The only complaint I would have is that the hammocks were strung so close together that if my neighbor turned onto her side, her knees were touching me, and therefore I couldn't turn onto my side. Our one full day there was spent lying on the beach and relaxing, which was great and very much needed. The next morning, we left at sunrise to start the long trek back out of the jungle - we did this so that we would not be walking during the hottest part of the day as we had done on the way in. Of course my flip flop was still broken, and so I was wearing my friend's pair, and at one point, I felt something biting me. I looked down and saw a spider-like insect wrapped around one of my toes. I tried to get it off, which took awhile, and once I did, my friends were frantically trying to take pictures of it with their cameras in case it was poisonous! Since we were in the jungle, and there were all kinds of strange insects, we wanted to be sure. Randomly, at that moment, an indigenous family was walking by, and my friend who spoke pretty good Spanish was trying to ask them if it was in fact poisonous. Apparently, initially he said something about death, and she in turn then started pointing at me and asking about going to the hospital and if I was going to die! Of course I tried to remain calm, but was really thinking about how bad it would be if it really was poisonous - we were in the middle of the jungle, hours away from help. The man just kept looking at us with this little smirk on his face, and was shaking his head. Eventually, his daughter who was probably about 7 walked over and picked up the insect with her fingers, and she had a huge smile on her face. Thank God - this meant that all was well with the world again! It was a funny experience in hindsight, and served me right really for not having brought the proper shoes. In the end, we think it may have just been a really huge ant, by the way!
I spent my last couple of days in Cartagena just relaxing and enjoying some time with friends and some final sunsets from Cafe Del Mar, my favorite place. It is a bar on the top of the old city walls, with great music and ambiance, and a view over the ocean with perfect sunsets almost every night! After a month in Cartagena, it was finally time to head on. I took a night bus to the city of Medellin, which took about 13 hours. Since I was scared about riding buses in general in Colombia, not to mention night buses, I was really happy to have found a friend to accompany me. The bus ride was completely fine, other than the usual discomfort of attempting to sleep on regular seats while bouncing all over the place. Also, in Colombia, for reasons I have yet to figure out, they keep the temperature inside the buses at a frigid level. Who knew that I would have needed to pack winter clothes just for bus rides?! Medellin is a big and very modern city, and has literally perfect temperatures basically year-round. They are known as the city of the eternal springlike climate. After the heat and humidity of Cartagena, arriving there was amazing and I thought right away that I might never leave! On my first full day there, I went to meet my friend Lis from Bolivia (who had taken the night bus with me), and we took the metro (yes, there is a city with a metro in Colombia!) to the cable car. This is an actual gondola like the ones we have in Colorado that carry skiers up the mountain, but in Colombia! We took one, and then got off and had to pay to get onto another one, which carried us way up above the city, to a national reserve at the top of a mountain. The ride up was interesting because it took us over some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, but supposedly the whole cable car system has fostered peace in the city, so that is good to know. Once we got to the park at the top, it didn't even feel like we were near a big city anymore. In fact, there were times that I felt like I was in Colorado! There were hiking trails and evergreens and flowers and a lake. We just hung out up there for a few hours and enjoyed ourselves. That day was definitely the highlight for me of my time in Medellin. My remaining days there consisted of me trying to figure out what to do and where to go next. I had also gotten sick with yet another cold and was pretty miserable with that. I also tried to venture out on my own to see some sights one day, which I of course had been used to doing all the time thus far on my travels. I got off at one metro stop to take some pictures of a cool church and some statues, and I just had an uneasy feeling the whole time, and was also (I think) warned by a man in Spanish to be careful with my camera. I had wanted to walk further through the town center alone, but just didn't feel comfortable doing so, and really hated the feeling of not being able to be independent and just wander around. It felt like I couldn't even take out my camera for ten minutes without worrying that I was going to be robbed! I descended into what I called a traveler's "funk" during which I actually considered either going home or flying right away to Bolivia, but then I realized that I need a visa to go there, which I hadn't known before. Then I started looking into group tours, and was very close to booking one that would have left in just a couple of days from Lima, Peru. It was a 3-week tour that would end up in Quito, Ecuador, and I felt at the time that it was just what I needed - someone else to do the planning and figuring out of things for once. It ended up not working out, because it was just too last-minute. They told me that I had to pay the deposits but that they still wouldn't be able to confirm anything since they would have to check into hotel space for me at every stop on the tour, and by then it was also going to be pretty expensive for me to buy a last-minute flight to Lima. It ended up being really great that I didn't go, because I then left for some beautiful places with a couple of friends from Cartagena that would have been a shame to have missed, not to mention that I saved a lot of money by not going on the tour. I will write about my last couple of weeks in Colombia (I am still here!) in another post, because I have now been having a great time! Hopefully the next post will be the rest of Germany though!