A lot has happened between
the sowing and reaping of this blog post. For starters, the U.S. once again
dominated the Olympics, a feat to be celebrated with tempered pride since we
vastly outnumber other countries in terms of athletes competing. Also, though
Colombian Olympians were few, all Colombians know of and are exceedingly proud of
each of their Olympians – win or lose – where Americans would be hard pressed
to name more than a handful of their own outside of swimming and gymnastics.
 |
| Because who doesn't want to spend their Friday managing 70 sixth graders in public? |
>We had our last class field
trip of the year, spending an exhausting but meaningful day with the sixth grade class in
Villa de Leyva, Chiquinquira, and Raquira (all much more pleasant on my fourth trip…). ‘Twas a
glorious day filled with whining, prepubescent hormonal fragrances, and multiple kids
vomiting thanks to the winding bumpy roads.
>Teddy Bridgewater is out for
the season, an event that falls right in line with Minnesota sports luck. But,
really, I’m much more interested in what the rest of the world calls football.
>Speaking of which, I played
in a football (soccer) tournament yesterday that lasted eight hours. My
sliding, clumsy goal eventually sent us to the semifinals, though we ended up
losing the next two to finish fourth out of eight teams. We were all content
though, since our hodgepodge team of dads and teachers were no match for young
semi-pros who’ve been playing together since high school.
 |
| Tangoing. |
>Our school had our annual poetry
night, this year adding in tango routines by both students and teachers. I was
supposed to dance, and had gone to many of the rehearsals a few months back.
Then I messed up the good ole left foot, causing me to miss so many rehearsals
that I told the rest of the teachers I just wouldn’t dance since I would have
so much catching up to do (also, I’m not a huge tango fan. Give me salsa or
bachata any day). Since it was also poetry night, we were all given paper and
pen to try a hand at our own poetry. My attempt can be read at the end of this
post.
>The remains of Jacob
Wetterling, a boy abducted while biking home in St. Joe 27 years ago,
were finally found. As a kid who also biked those streets growing up, this is
huge in terms of bringing this case to a close. Though, since the Wetterlings are
family friends, I can’t imagine the mixed emotions Patty and Jerry Wetterling
are going through right now, as this truly eliminates the remaining shreds of
hope that he might yet be alive somewhere.
>Brock Turner, Stanford student who was accused of raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, is out of jail after just three months, while others are serving years for petty theft or drug charges.
>The Colombian government
finally established a peace accord with the FARC guerrilla forces that,
together with pro-Colombian military groups, have killed over 200,000
Colombians in the last fifty or so years and helped create the worldwide
stereotype of Colombia being dangerous. Colombian citizens will soon vote yes
or no on this accord. More on this later.
>And, last and easily least important in the news, I promised my sixth grade homeroom that if they get the best GPA for the thirds straight trimester at the end of this year, I will cut my hair. Gauntlet thrown down!
But, the moment you’ve all
probably given up waiting for: one of the strangest weekends to date.
Thanks to the strong
relationship between church and state here in Colombia, we have many long
weekends corresponding with various feast days and other Biblical happenings.
This is a pretty strong contrast to our stars and stripes approach to holidays
e.g. Flag Day, President’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Veteran’s Day,
My-god-we-love-government-and-war Day. You get the picture. The difference is
that here in Colombia, these ten or so holidays are actually observed in
schools and most places of work. What that means is that Colombian children
don’t have the intense pleasure I had growing up of trying to understand the
irony between getting a holiday while sitting on the bus going to school. It
also means that when these long weekends do come around, Colombians – who can
afford to – flee Bogota as if the city were under attack. Joining the flood a few weeks back, I
decided to go swim in my own sweat down in Villavicencio.
 |
| A "quick" 3 hour bus ride away. |
Just outside the Andean bowl
that Bogota is situated in, steamy, 80 degree Villavicencio is considered the
“Gateway to the Plains” of Colombia (la Puerta al Llano) since it’s located in
the foothills between the Andes and the Amazon. There’s not much else notable
about this city, though some consider it’s well known nightclub, Los Capachos,
to be one of the better clubs of Colombia. More on this later. But while we
didn’t know what exactly we were going to do, we were most likely looking to
get out of the big city life for a breather.
I teamed up with some more
foreigners this time around. All together, we were three Americans, three
Brits, one Aussie, and one Colombian. And the squad was in for an interesting
weekend right from the start. Steve and I missed our
bus thanks to traffic from the long weekend exodus. That, and our taxi driver
didn’t know where the bus terminal was (Really? Really…). Off to a bad start
here, folks. We get to the terminal with arrogant hopes to simply change our
tickets for a later bus, a feat complicated by the fact that neither of
our names is on our tickets, but Laura's who had already departed on an
earlier bus. But, amen I say to you, the universe smiled upon us that day, as
right when the lady at the desk was giving us the “yeah, how do I know you
didn’t just find these tickets on the ground?” the manager pops up and just tells
her to change it. “With no fee?” asks pulled-tight-ponytail-lady who really
wants us to pay for a ticket change. “Just do it,” says our savior. Sure, that
later bus meant we wouldn’t get to Villavo until almost midnight. But,
hopefully, the rest of the squad would have living quarters figured out by
then.
 |
| Actual photo of my journal while attempting to write on the bus. |
So what better way to
celebrate our good fortune than to toast to our guardian angel in the first bus
terminal bar we could find? It just so happened that Steve and I weren’t the only
ones with this genius idea, as we had front row seats to an all-dude birthday
party held at the back of this cantina. The party was for a guy whose friends
apparently thought it was going to be his last, judging by how much aguardiente
they were downing. At one point, on my way to the bathroom, one of the guys
warned me that their friend had thrown up everywhere. Needless to say, our wait
for the bus wasn’t short on excitement.
We roll into Villavicencio
at around 11:30pm and walk the two blocks to our hostel only to find our
friends were out at a local bar a few blocks farther down. Naively thinking
that the evening would end quietly, we decided to go to the aforementioned
club, Capachos, to pretend to dance for a few more hours. Coincidentally, I ran
into two guys I had met the night before at a bar in Bogota, who were alums of
the school I teach at. One of them, Hernán, had told
me they would be going to Capachos and said we should meet up. Well fish, fish, Hernán. The next few hours were spent in the most PG-13 of
fashion.
 |
| The crew. Jordan, Satchel, Larry (looking at phone), me, Cox, Nick, Steve, and Laura. |
In an attempt to have a
quieter night, we made it back to our hostel in Villavicencio and opted not to
go back to Capachos. While back at headquarters changing out of our sweat stuck
clothing, I decided to accompany Steve out the front door for a curb beer to
chat about the finer things in life like education, happiness, death religion;
topics I’m not quite fully capable of expressing myself in in Spanish. And just
like one dude once multiplied bread and fish, our one beer became two and our
ten minutes became over an hour. If only time and beer could be multiplied so
easily. The rest of the squad came trickling down to join us, and the stoop
kids then took off down the street. We found a twenty-four hour car wash that
also doubled as an open air bar and posted up for a couple of hours, playing
21, our game of choice (where you begin counting to 21 around in a circle, and
when you get to 21 you make a rule, which ideally should make it more difficult
to make it to 21 e.g. instead of saying 4 you say or do something else totally unrelated). We soon found that the car wash/bar also specialized in
other services. One of our group members, in an effort to satisfy a curiosity I
feel only foreigners would have after seeing a scantily clad woman go to the
second floor of a carwash/bar at 3am, climbed the stairs when the owner wasn’t
looking, returning shortly thereafter claiming that we were also enjoying a few
beers underneath a brothel. Obviously we can’t be absolutely certain. But it
would explain why a random car wash is the only place open at 4am on a Sunday
night. Plus, carwash/bar/brothel just has a nice ring to it.
We made our way further down
the street to an incredibly drab basketball court with accompanying sad jungle
gym, with dim, flickering lighting that would make you feel as if dementors
were about to emerge from the shadows. In the spirit of the ongoing Olympics,
we had a makeshift long jump competition that was determined by your distance
flown after jumping off a swing. After Satchel won – his form was a work of art
– we were overcome by more curiosity when we heard music coming from the other
side of the apartments the park faced. Heading into even worse lighting, we
rounded the corner and stumbled into a birthday party for – well, we never
actually figured out who the birthday girl or boy was since most everyone was…
well, it was past four in the morning, you get the idea. We felt bad about intruding, but since
the tent they had outside their house was right around the bend we had just
turned, it probably would have been more awkward if a bunch of white guys about
faced upon seeing a large gathering of Afrocolombianos. So while curiosity
doesn’t help cats, it fed us dinner (er, breakfast?) since we were received
with a mostly warm welcome from the whole group. Good thing, too, due to the
fact that the cloud’s floodgates had just opened up on us. But I say mostly warm
welcome because there were a few incidents that resulted in us hightailing out
of there after almost an hour.
First, one guy wouldn’t stop
trying to sell me acid. Upon his first sales pitch, I politely said no, that’s
not why I’m here, but rather to hang out with people. But after a few more
insistences I began to worry that he was getting impatient. Then, Steve claims
to have seen a different guy make a gun sign with his hand pointed at me when I
wasn’t looking. This wouldn’t really have given me enough to worry. That is,
until we were pulling the chairs and tables into the house to avoid being swept
away by the flooding streets and yet another guy was telling us how it wasn’t
safe around these parts at this time of night. At this point, the signs were a
little too numerous to ignore, and we gathered the squad, said a quick goodbye
to avoid protests or reactions, and sprinted off back around the corner with
water up to our ankles and rising. Potential crisis averted, we decided to
celebrate with one last beer at our favorite carwash/bar/brothel.
 |
| My only photo from the trip: riding in the front seat of the bus back to Bogota. Note incredible landscape. |
Song in my head lately: My
cousin, Ben Kewman, introduced me to Needtobreathe a while back. And their songs
recently popped up randomly on my computer. Their song, Haley, is one that’s
been played maybe a few too many times in my room, though Ben would probably
contest that "too many times" don’t exist for them.
Spanish word of the day:
We’re getting to the point where I’m honestly forgetting if I’ve used such and such Spanish term or such and such song yet in this part of the blog. So if I repeat, it just
means it’s a significant word or song. This word, however, is only significant
in who I use it with. Early this year, the computer science teacher, Daniel
Rodriguez, became famous within the teaching corps for the expression, “beh” which doesn’t actually mean anything other than how my and other grandpas say
“well…” when trying to end a conversation, frustrated, or as a way of saying
“well, that’s that.” Many other teachers have since adopted the phrase and the
meanings and how it’s spoken are varied. One meaning is as a sort of dare.
Having many young male teachers around means having young male testosterone
around, which can lead to push up or arm wrestling competitions in the
teacher’s office area. A common conversation might go “Let’s do pushups, ba!”
It can also be used to confirm or accept a dare or other proposition. “Want to
go to the gym?” Baa! Or “Let’s go
grab drinks!” Baa! Again, this
Spanish lesson means nothing since it doesn’t actually mean anything outside of
the teacher’s lounge. My apologies for continuing to waste your time.
Poem from Tango and Poetry
night. For my English readers, sorry it’s in Spanish. For my Spanish readers,
sorry that it sucks. I wrote it in five minutes.
A veces me pregunto
Caminando por el calle
Tu mano en la mía
Perdiéndome en el valle
De tu risa de alegría
O como me mata tu mirada
Esos ojos de café en fuego
Enamorada o enojada
No puedo decir hasta luego
Pierdo el aliento
O como hoy, todo el asunto
Como decir que es lo que me siento
A veces me pregunto
Other photos of my recent comings and goings
 |
| Watching the Colombia - Venezuela game. Alex and I won the pool, saying that Colombia would win 2-0. We split the 26,000 pesos, which paid for the beer. Andres, Luisa, Santiago, Andrea, Jorge, me, Alex, Wilmer's friend, Felipe, Nathan, Wilmer, Sofi, Steven. |
 |
| Our indoor soccer team. Alex couldn't play since he was the organizer. Anderson, Carlos, Juber, Adrian, Sergio, Cesar, me. |
 |
| A rare night out with the boys. Throwing up double West sides for my man Shaul. Exhausted, having just returned from 6th grade field trip. Felipe, Alex, me, Santiago, Sergio, Nathan, Steven. |
