Colombia Mía: Amor y Amistad

Tomorrow in Colombia is Love and Friendship Day, a homegrown version of Valentine's Day that includes platonic friends just as much as romantic. It's strange that I've been thinking a lot about Colombia lately, just as this holiday approaches. During the four years I lived there, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with some amazing people, both for short periods of time, as well as for what I hope is a lifetime: co-workers and students, fellow gym rats, neighbors and workers at restaurants I frequented, exes, currents, friends with benefits and without. And even if I'm not in touch with them anymore, there's still no doubt they've made a permanent impact on my life, always for the better, even if it didn't initially appear so.

I won't name names, lest I forget someone in my haste to write this post. I'll just say that the photographs below reflect only a fraction of the memorable folk that have crossed my path (like Angela, Pepe CCS, Tom, Sasha, Ely, Marcie, Giancarlo, Pacho, Carol, Marcela, Chris and Rox, Sandy, Paul...okay, I named names) and that in the course of our interaction, I never got around to taking pictures with some of those very important people (some I deleted along with their numbers out of my cellphone, but that's another story).

The song below is called "Si Tu No Vuelves": If You Don't Return. It's a bit of romance and heartbreak and a tune some may think a little heavy-handed for a post about friendship, but if I had to take away one song from my four years in Colombia, it would be this one. I first heard it on the radio at Indira and Noé's house in Bogotá on a typically chilly Sunday afternoon, underneath that hated/loved whitish-gray blanket of cloudcover that settles the city in a melancholy mood. And whenever I hear it, I'm reminded of all the chilly Sunday afternoons I spent in BOG, searching for physical and emotional warmth. I'm reminded of endless conversations and rumbas. Of what I loved about Colombia and what I hated. Of my amores and my amistades. And always of that cloudy sky.

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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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Colombia Mía: Doggy with Blow Hair, Bogotá

This lil fella belonged to a locksmith in the Soledad neighborhood of Bogotá. While I was waiting for some keys to be cut, he sat down in the doorway to take in the breeze and watch the traffic go by. I'm not that into pets, much less pets with clothes, but I couldn't resist this shot.

Where I've Been: Bogotá

Modern office buildings tower over centuries-old cathedral spires. Yellow, bug-like taxis dart past ragged horse carts. The electric pulse of international house music compliments a full repertoire of folkloric standards from the provinces. Contemporary art galleries and explosions of graffiti. Boutique hotels and backpacker hostels. Theatre festivals and street performers. Five-star restaurants and five-thousand-peso luncheonettes. Highlife on 93rd and whores on 23rd. Ten minutes of equatorial sun and ten hours of ice-cold rain. Vast flatness leading to a jagged horizon of green mountains, Monserrate and the Virgin Mary blessing the whole array. Developed-world comforts and developing-world chaos. Rags and riches. Bogotá is contrast, perched 9,000 feet above sea level. That’s high.

If the only picture you can come up with when you think Bogotá is bands of kidnappers and narco-traffickers ducking and shooting at each other through a veil of chicken feathers and dusty haze in a sweltering, tropical hellhole, you've been bamboozled like most of the world by erroneous Hollywood imagery and selective news reporting. The Colombian capital is at once New York, Denver, Zurich, and Mexico City: a (more than) mile-high city with inroads into finance, fashion, commerce, and design, ringed by colonial architecture and pockmarked by squalid refugee encampments. It is, at heart, an Andean metropolis, most people being reserved and stoic and polite; but the influence of the warmer regions of the country is felt throughout the city as music and food from Cali, Medellín, and both coasts add spice to Bogotá's frigid, rarified air.

For 18 months, I lived in the historic district of La Candelaria, just south of modern downtown at the foot of Guadalupe, Bogotá's answer to Rio's Christ of Corcovado, and a stone's throw away from the site of the current city's founding in 1538 (the original inhabitants, the Muisca, had been there for centuries). Yes, I did see nuns slowly parading past pidgeons and soccer-playing schoolboys in the shadow of colonial church towers and indigenous Andean women lugging pack-laden llamas up and down cobblestone streets. I'd hang out at matchbox-sized salsa spots in Downtown and multi-story electronica clubs filled with drug-addled glamazons up in the Zona T. I'd take tango lessons on the 30th floor of the Residencias Tequendama or Afro-Brazilian dance classes at the Instituto Cultural Brasil-Colombia. Taxi drivers were nuts, buses jerky and old, and the TransMilenio crowded, but there was always somewhere to go: cruising at Gran Estación over in Ciudad Salitre, catching the ever-changing exhibits Downtown at MAMBO, chilling at Juan Valdez in Chapinero or Andino, or seeing an art film at Cine Club El Muro's various participating theatres. There's the world's best burgers at La Hamburguesería in La Macarena and Ciclovía Sundays on the Séptima, where the whole city turns out on foot, bikes, or roller blades to take it all in. There's Rock al Parque and Salsa al Parque and Hip-Hop al Parque, and in this corner of South America, Bogotá's the only place to catch the Black Eyed Peas, Caetano Veloso, Lenny Kravitz (though he "got sick" and cancelled), and Kylie Minogue (eh, not so into her, but...).

I had to move because my job there paid peanuts, but there's much to miss about Bogotá (except the weather...think springtime London), which is why I'm there every chance I get. And it gets better cada vez.

Bogotá Tourism (in English)