It's the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 1)

So, I was blind-sided by a ridiculous amount of paperwork and test grading over the last couple of weeks, which reduced my reading time to nil (my Google Reader account has hit 1,000 unread posts since I last checked it) and my writing time to even less. I'm finishing up four years in Colombia with a mixture of excitement, trepidation, anxiety, regret, relief, and pragmatism, but I'll explain all that in a later post.

This weekend, I jetted off to Bogotá and Caracas to see and say goodbye to friends that I've made in both cities, since it'll probably be a while before I'm in the region again. Having booked an award ticket on Avianca, I only had 23 hours to spend in Bogotá before popping over to Venezuela for two nights. I'd say out of 72 hours, I only slept about fifteen; had lots of whoring to catch up on.

Here's the run-down of last Friday:

The perpetual blanket of gray, rainy clouds lifted over the Colombian capital as soon as my plane touched down, as if I had brought the sun with me from the coast. Still, the high-altitude air was chilly to my thinned blood and I had to wrap up as the cab sailed past the new glass mid-rises popping up like mushrooms on the grassy savanna of Bogotá. The place is growing like mad and I was reminded that Colombia is not a poor country, it just has shit-loads of poor people. Still, Bogotá truly does get better each time around...y'all should visit.

I met up with Roberto, my ace boon in Colombia, for some shopping, and being some supastah soap opera actor and model, he was supposed to be hookin' a brother up with some style tips for my big trip. After a two hours, he had purchased three shirts; I, none. Anyway, after lunch at Gaira Cumbia House, a little bit of the Caribbean in Bogotá, owned by the brother of tropi-pop legend Carlos Vives, I met up with my friend Indira (actress/model) and her Venezuelan husband, Noé (not an actor/model), who just had a little teeny-tiny, expressive, very-well-mannered baby named Maximiliano a few months ago. The lil punkin, whom they said never approaches people, crawled over to me, sat on my lap, and started drinking water out of a cup I was holding, bless 'is lil ol hart. I was so proud.Then, after my last granizado de café at Juan Valdez for the foreseeable future, I met up with the whole gang at Gaira again for some kick-ass salsa and some kick-ass sandwiches til 2am.
A couple of restless hours later (the altitude plus the cold air and no heat killed any teensy iota of sleep that I may have liked to have obtained), I was headed back to the airport for my jaunt across the border into Chavezlandia, aka la República Bolivariana de Venezuela.

Gracias Róvel, Indira/Noé/Max/Bruno, PPCCS, Mike, Guillo, Kathy and John, and Super Ratón for helping to wrap up mi Colombian sueño 8500 feet up in the nosebleed section of the Andes.

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