Public Urination, Tight Pants, and other Tenets of Monastic Living

Here on the monastic home front, it's about a three-minute walk of staring up at the mountains that surround Bogota to get from the guesthouse where I live to the monastery where I join the monks in prayer and chowing down. At the outset of my time here I was all juicioso (which is Colombian Spanish for a good kid), getting to prayer long before the bell rang, sometimes even bringing a book into the chapel to read while the monks filed in before prayer started. I had fistfuls of time back then as an assistant teacher with few responsibilities who didn't know a lot of people outside the institutions at which I lived or worked. As the weeks turned into months, however, I would regularly hear the bell ring as I unlocked the door to the monastery. Well into 2016, with more tests needing grading and more people needing meeting, the bells were known to frequently snap me out of my mountain stare. Even more recently, there have been bells on the hill that I haven't even heard ringing since there was less and less time spent in the monastery.

The first part of my morning commute.

Last Tuesday brought the second edition of Gringo Tuesdays, the conversation nights that take place at a bar called La Villa. We convinced Wilmer, the English teacher I assisted last year, to come along. In fact, it took little convincing, as he was also excited to brush up on his French. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before he bid us adieu and spent the last hour at the French table. Though contrary to our plan, we did end up staying a little longer and dancing after tables and chairs were cleared, much to my delight at watching Wilmer dance.

After our Wednesday afternoon faculty meeting, I set out to meet Tatiana and her gang down in La Candelaria, the nicer, touristy area of Bogota that’s about an hour south of the monastery. Our mission? To attend a play at a theater in the area. Our result? Getting there twenty minutes after it had already started, deciding to simply go to a movie theater to watch The Jungle Book, finding out the movie was sold out, and walking around eating ice cream before finally finding a theater that wasn’t sold out. The only downsides were that we had spent nearly four hours on our Bogota tour here, and the only movie that had seats was a horror movie called La bruja, (The Witch). Oh, and the remaining seats for the film, a horror movie, were all separated from each other.  Not having any of that, we all sat down on the stairs in the theater and, one by one, pawned our singles off on those who came alone (brave, going to a horror film solo) and convinced entangled couples to scoot down, making room for the four of us. Falling in line with what I generally think about horror movies, La bruja was an assured flop of a film. Good thing I only spent about a dollar on it, what with Wednesdays being cheaper and having recently bought a movie theater card that gets extra deals. On my Rotton Tomatoes scale, I’d give The Witch a rotten tomato.

I’d like to say that Friday started out like any other day, but that would be ignoring the addition made to my dancing repertoire at the beginning of the day. You see, I play a less than integral part of a team of teachers focused on promoting the environment's importance to kids, giving presentations and leading activities that get them to recycle, not waste water, being conscious of consumption, etc. Since Friday was the last day we were all to be gathered as a school before Earth Day, we gave a presentation about waste before, well, this wonderful dance happened…

Those pants were meant for Peter Pan.

It’s called El baile de las legumbres, the dance of the legumes, and the lyrics basically just say, “Look at the beans, they’re dancing and they’re healthy for you.” Think of it as the Spanish equivalent to “Beans, beans, the magical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.” In reality, it has very little to do with Earth Day other than the fact that it indirectly supports small scale farming through its bean praise. Also, it should be noted that those pants are most definitely not mine. I had to dress up like a pea pod, and I only knew one other teacher that had green pants. The result was that they looked more like leggings, and I had to leave my shirt un-tucked since I couldn’t button the pants all the way. No worries, no Janet Jackson slips occurred.

But the dancing didn’t stop there. I am also apparently signed up to dance tango for the school’s “Love and Poetry” night in July. We’re evidently taking lessons and trying to do it right, so our first practice was on Friday after classes. Have you ever seen tango performed and thought, wow that looks really hard? Um, yeah, it is. Basically, it’s an insanely intimate dance and the couple’s bodies have to be touching almost throughout since the shifting of the lead’s weight decides where the couple goes next. Stay tuned for more JJ embarrassing moments!

Friday was also game day for the basketball teams, and it wasn’t long before another challenge was thrown my way. The opponents’ bus was late, and our girl’s coach couldn’t stay. So he comes up to me as I’m helping Alex with the boys, and says, “I have to go. Can you coach the girls? This is how we play, and those are our better players.” I walk over to the girls’ huddle blind and say, “Alright, well. First things first, names!” Unfortunately, I didn’t get to test my skills with a team I’ve never spent time with, since the opponents never showed up (it was discovered later that there had been a bad accident on the main road that made traffic completely stop for a couple hours, preventing the teams from arriving on time).

Billiarding it up.

So what do coaches do after a home game gets cancelled? Apparently, head to the local watering hole. We made our way to a bar near Alex’s house called El Zorro (The Fox), and it wasn’t long before we were playing billiards (with three balls, not to be confused with pool). After a few shameful rounds, Tatiana texted me asking if I wanted to hike a mountain in the morning with her and a friend. We had done this a few months ago, but the mountains are always worth a return trip, there and back again. I waited until our billiards skills were dwindling almost as quickly as was our Poker beer stock before hopping on a bus to a section of the city where Tatiana said she and her parents, whom she was with at the time, could pick me up from. I would need to crash on their couch in order to get up early enough on Saturday and be on the mountain before they stop letting people enter around 9am-ish.

I arrived at said bus stop on Calle 63 (where I had previously been with Sergio and his friends months ago) to find no one. What I did find was that I had needed to go to the bathroom for about an hour. The dilemma was that I was surrounded by bars and clubs where you had to buy something to be able to use their bathroom while at the same time not exactly being able to drop trou just anywhere – which is normal here – because of the very fact that I was surrounded by bars and clubs with lots of witnesses. I wandered around looking for the perfect street, pretending I was either going somewhere or waiting for someone. But the real trick to public urination is finding a street that’s off the beaten path just enough to avoid hecklers, but not too far off that you’ll risk getting mugged. I managed to find a nice, quiet, well-lit street just off a main drag past Bogota's scantily clad finest that suited me just fine. I returned to the bus stop to find Tatiana waiting for me. “Where have you been?” She asked. I replied, “Just taking another tour!”

While it's true that going out with friends, meeting new people, and doing exciting things is a load of fun, I do lament the drift that I’m making away from spending enough time with the monks of the monastery. For one thing, the monks have supported all the volunteers who have come through - including me - with exceptional generosity, patience, and kindness. For another, they are some phenomenal dudes who are more than worth spending time with, and I need to do a better job of making time instead of excuses. Here’s to beating the monks to prayer once again!

Spanish word of the day: The verb alcanzar is  pretty versatile verb.  It can mean reach, like me alcanzas ese esfero? (Can you hand me that pen?) Or ella no alcanza (Literally, she doesn't reach. But means more like, she's not tall enough.) Or even "Sera que alcanzamos?" (Do you think we'll make it in time?)

Song in my head recently: While I admit that this song hasn't exactly been in my head the last week, Purple Rain sure will be after today, when the flamboyant and funky Prince died. One of Minnesota's greats, Prince gave rise to the synthy, funky, new wave of the Minneapolis sound and joins a long list of musicians to die recently, well before their time.