First Week in Cartagena

Last Friday when we first arrived in Colombia, I remember walking through town that evening completely overwhelmed by everything around us and feeling totally intimidated by this new world in which we had arrived. Both Kadie and I have never travelled in South America, or anywhere which can be described as "developing," "south" etc., so as a result we were uncomfortable and felt somewhat imtimidated by the language barrier. Now, a week later, things have changed pretty positively. We´re comfortable doing most things we need to around town and while our spanish is elementary at best, we can manage to communicate with a basic level of language and politeness. We´re doing pretty well with buying food, talking with cab drivers, reading menus and the regular day to day interactions. Language school has helped, and our host family has had a wonderful amount of patience speaking with us and encouraging us to improve.

Our language school has been going well, however, we were scolded by our dance teacher and told that if we don´t practice outside of class then she´ll cut off the lessons until we can demonstrate improvement. The volunteering is challenging, as the kids don´t speak much english, and we don´t speak much spanish. Unfortunately, space and time is limited with them, so basically we show up, try to chat with them, maybe play dominos or marbles, and 1-2 hours later we leave. While I think the kids do enjoy having company, they get gringos coming through all the time speaking broken spanish to them, being here one week and gone the next. With this in mind, it´s really difficult to figure out a way to actually give something to these kids and not just use them as excuses for us to practice our spanish skills. It´s an ongoing project, and while one of the volunteers has already quit out of feeling useless, I´m pretty sure we´re going to stick around, and hopefully by the time we leave at the end of this month, we´ll have been able to build some type of simple relationship or connection that both us and the kids will appreciate.  

Otherwise, living in Cartagena is pretty similar to any place, just with a lot more sweat, better juices, and a ton of activity, music, food and dancing in the street all the time. After a somewhat hectic first week, we were looking forward to taking it easy this weekend so we spent our Saturday morning doing typical tourist things like visiting the Castillo de San Fellipe, and the modest Modern Art Museum. After a typical Costano Colombian lunch (fried fish, rice, beans, plantains, soup and juice) we put on our nice clothes and once again snuck into the Hilton for a few hours of beach, sun, pool and reading. Being that neither of us is really excited about massive parties, we´ve decided not to try and deal with the melee at the Barranquilla Carnival  next weekend, and instead we´ll likely go out to a nearby island and spend a night at one of the calm hotels on the beach. Hammocks, fried fish, air conditioning, and a few Aguila´s (think Colombian Budweiser) and we´ll undoubtedly have a fine weekend.