Hooligans in Medellin

(Writer's Note: the events of this post ocurred over a month ago, finishing up our travels through the Eje Cafetero. I am just getting to this now, apologies.)

Being the intelligent college graduates we are, Steve, Nate and I knew that because it was the rainy season the chances of rain during the soccer game were higher than normal. And the extra few thousand pesos to get seats under the roofed part of the stadium paid off when the first half got a sprinkling.

                  But if you’ve ever seen any soccer game that wasn’t the World Cup you probably know that your average game doesn’t sell out. The halfhearted cheering from our section reflected the crowd’s scarcity, despite the fact that the home team of Medellin was winning. I often caught myself glancing longingly at the super fan section behind the home team’s goal whose band never stopped playing and whose fans never ceased their yelling and singing. So when the halftime whistle blew, I was determined to find my way to the hooligans.

Super fan section, Atletico Medellin v. Huila.

                  We left our seats and found the entrance to superfandom, only to be met by a closed door guarded by a man in a blaze orange jacket and headset. Could we pretty please sit with the cool kids? Not possible, said the blazed headset. We were not above bribing. But he pointed to a camera facing the door, explaining how his job wasn’t terrible and he wanted to keep it. We needed to find his boss, he said, another blaze orange headset man somewhere downstairs. Assuming we were sent on a wild goose chase, I wasn’t too hopeful as we descended into the food vendor area. That is, until we spotted said goose, headset, orange vest and all. He was being similarly persuaded by a group of young ladies, and we were met with the same sad answer to our own proposition. The ladies left, but we hadn’t given up yet. I fed him some admittedly entitled bogus about how we gringos wanted the “full Colombian experience”, and though I’m sure that wasn’t the trick, after he confirmed that the ladies had indeed left, turned back to us and said, “Follow me.”

                  Two stairs at a time we climbed the flight to our first crony guarding the black iron door. Head honcho tells us to wait by the stairs while he goes and talks to the hired hand. After some whisperings, headsets conspicuously turned upwards away from their faces, they shook hands and we were waved over. “Disfruten, muchachos” he grinned at us as we could barely contain our Agustus-Gloop-in-a Chocolate-factory excitement when we officially became superfans.    

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                  Having grown up in the woods around St. John’s playing Pooh sticks down at the creek and doing absolutely nothing in the not-so-secret forts we built when we were supposed to be helping Dad haul wood for the stove, the idea of living in a city is so far down my bucket list that they’re those words you try to cram onto the page before surrendering to the flip side. However, despite my apprehension and subtle agoraphobic sensitivity the last seventeen months in Bogota have been more than I could have ever hoped for, an observation that I’m sure has been clear in prior posts and will be further articulated in subsequent ones. But as far as cities go, it still has its problems. Trash is everywhere, public transportation has only ceased to be a nightmare because of how fond I’ve become of packing my sardine self onto the Transmilenio busses, and although crime isn’t what it is in the states you still might have to cross the street to avoid the soccer gangs or whistling prostitutes. Well, depending on your intentions you might cross the street looking for the latter. The point is Bogota suffers some of the same problems as any city whose population is expanding faster than its infrastructure and local economy can properly manage. On the other side of that spectrum is Medellin, the city where we spent the second half of our trip in October.            

                  Medellin, once famous for being the most dangerous city in the world in large part to the drug smuggling and police killing activity of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, has recently made some serious strides towards being seen as the best city in Colombia. For starters, it’s cleaner. When we gratefully stumbled off the bus outside the terminal, we were struck by how little there was to be struck by in terms of wrappers and bottles rolling by. The garbage collectors in the heart of the city seemed to be of the same ilk as those in the terminal, since garbage was hardly noticeable throughout the city.

Plaza de las luces.

                  But while I mention garbage collectors, it could be that paisas – the term for people from Medellin and the surrounding coffee region cities like Armenia, Manizales, and Pereira – simply give more than two shits about the state of their cities. That attitude of stewardship appears institutionalized, given that Medellin was named the Most Innovative City of the World in 2012, beating out Telaviv and New York. This is in no small part due to their revamped public transit system, an elevated metro track with a cable car system providing access to the poorer neighborhoods in the hilly outskirts. Other ways they’ve cleaned up the city’s image have been making the city safer, adding more parks and other public spaces, and, well, physically cleaning the place up, to the point where Medellin is seeing an explosion of tourist activity from gringos who previously deemed it too sketchy to visit.
as if they’re just better at it than those of the capitol city, it should also be mentioned that there’s a decent chance that

                  Which brings us back to we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, Steve Nate and I. We arrived as a personal escort for one of the seniors from our school who, like us, was bussing from the coffee region to Medellin. Except she was visiting her mother who lived there and owned a host of phenomenal restaurants in the city called El Llanerito, which are basically nicer Famous Dave’s with incredible food specializing in the regions main food resource: meat. Huge shout out and thanks go to Laura, her mom, and her grandmother, who fed us that first evening at one of the restaurants. It should be mentioned that her mother, on top of being a successful business owner, was also a looker, an observation I feel comfortable making considering her Lorelai Gilmore youthful motherhood and the fact that when it was her turn to order she asked for a boyfriend because she was single.  Nate and I tried to set her and Steve up, but we’ll have to check in on that development at a later date.    

Hanging out with Botero's statues.

                  Anyways, housed in our recommended International House Hostel, awaiting our mysterious fourth roommate that never showed, we were given breakfast (a perk we weren’t even aware of when making our reservations) and a show, since public basketball courts lined the block in front of our hostel. I would have seriously considered joining if I weren’t still nursing a severely sprained and swollen left thumb from a previous game of a tournament we’re in back at school. Our days then continued by taking a taxi to a part of the city where we could hop on the metro. And travelling with two dudes about two meters tall meant I sat up front with the cab drivers while they scrunch-sprawled out in back, which gave me a good chance to ask questions, get travel recommendations, and, in some cases, oblige a requested English mini tutorial.   

                  Upon other suggestions from friends who had travelled to Medellin and from Father Nicolas who calls the city home, we were able to fill our handful of days fairly easily. We visited the Botanical Garden, which was a distant second to Parque Explora, a dream combination of science museum, zoo, and planetarium. We geeked out for a few hours and could have definitely spent more time there with all the kids’ games they had, which made me think about returning to the Science Museum of Minnesota to see how far I could shoot those ping pong balls out of those compressed air cannon.

                 

Guatape Benedictine monastery.

One of the many attractions of the surrounding Medellin area is going to the nearby town of Guatape and climbing the Piedra de Penol. Supposedly it is the largest freestanding rock in the world, in that it is in no way attached to the bedrock, simply a nice, large boulder. Like most natural wonders it used to be a sacred site for the indigenous populations. And also like most natural wonders it was climbed and claimed for the white man. The two nearest towns, Guatape and El Penol, disagreed over which could claim the rock as their own, to the point where Guatape rascals were caught painting their town’s name in gargantuan letters on the face of the rock. After painting just two letters, their conspicuous vandalism was stopped. But to this day you can still see part of two giant letters “GU” on the rock's side.

                  The attraction apart from this rocky rock is what you can see from the rock. The surrounding town had to relocate many citizens as the government decided to flood the valley and install a hydroelectric dam in the 70s. Now, tourists come from all over the world to climb over 700 steps to view this Colombian Boundary Waters-esque area. Then, most try their hand at water skiing, paragliding, or a boating tour, since the water flooding the hilly pastures shifted the towns’ local economy from farming to eco-tourism relatively quickly. We took part in the latter, having met three other gringos – Matt, Max, and Alex, travelling South America in their gap year between undergraduate and graduate school – with whom we were able to split the cost of the boat trip that took us past older parts of the flooded town and one of Escobar’s hundreds of houses. Check this video out for a drone video of the whole place.   

                 

Community surrounding Guatape resorvoir.

Another day found us in the cable car up out of the city and into Parque Arvi, which we affectionately and oh so Americanly named Arby’s Park, since the letters “v” and “b” in Spanish sound nearly identical. This park is also surprisingly well managed, with ample camping areas, community gathering spaces, bike trails, and swimming holes all within the 40,000 acre wood. It also had pretty decent signage, but we’ll get back to that.

Brimming with confidence, right before getting lost.

                  The last cable ride lasted over twenty minutes and took us three miles high up out of the city and across the hilltops, over the river and through the woods, if you will. We got plunked down in the middle of artisan shops and guide information. Many choose to hire someone to guide them through the parks fifty-odd kilometers of paths, so naturally we wandered off into the woods ignoring the catcalls of guides offering their services. You’d think, what with Nate’s hiking guide experience, my sublime directional intuition, and Steve’s height, that we wouldn’t have gotten lost. But fate has a funny way of working, which is another way of saying that signs have a funny way of not working. We came to a fork in the road, with a park sign leading up to it giving no indication as to which tine of the fork to tread upon. Stymied by our Robert Frost-like predicament, we decided to veer to the left and up the hill so as to get a better vantage point and make a better educated, or rather, minimally educated decision. Our choice ended up leading us through a mini neighborhood tucked away in the woods, and up to a four-way cross. More choices. Just what someone like me, who sucks at making decisions, wants. Luckily some lady walking a Daniel Radcliff amount of dogs happened upon us. She must have seen our confused faces and map flipping, put dumb and dumb together, and offered to walk us back down the hill we had just climbed to properly orient us. We emerged from the woods a short while later and promptly caught the cable car back down in time to catch our soccer game.

Spanish word(s) of the day: Often, as a customer in Latin America, entering a shop, store, or walking by a street stand will be met with lots of client calling, courting, or ways to get your attention to come over and purchase something. I'm assuming this has to do with hourly wages not being great for customer service positions, leaving vendors to rely on their salesmanship. For tourists, it can be even more incessant since you're a walking wallet. In Guatemala, you could be met with a no tenga pena or siga adelante. In Colombia, the popular one is a la orden. In Medellin and the rest of the Eje Cafetero, an additional greeting along with siga and a la orden is bien pueda.  

Song in my head lately: Many thought Bon Iver's latest album was a huge stylistic shift for Justin Vernon's group, but it seemed more like a natural progression from where he was going with songs from previous albums like Woods, Minnesota WI, Calgary, Hinnom TX, Roslyn, Perth, etc. So lots of songs off 22, A Million didn't strike me as wholly different from a lot of his other work, including Over Soon.