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I have been here for two weeks now. Not enough to even try to understand everything that is going on in this city but enough to have seen the various parts of it and to be able to make a very quick much unfounded judgement. Here it comes:
I live in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Cali at the moment. What exactly I am doing here I will leave for another post because I have been doing it for 2 weeks but still don't know much about it. Let's just stick with the facts: I am living here. More than once, when I told people where I live I got a reply like "Why do you live THERE?" This reply comes from two reasons: one, obviously, in Colombia like in something like 70% of the world's surface people believe that if you are from Europe/white-skinned you must be rich. Which, clearly I am not, but they find it hard to understand. And secondly, they think it is dangerous here and I, as a foreigner, should stay away from here. Which is what I will be writing about in this post. The picture I added is from my neighbourhood.
I wrote before that there is quite a good cycling infrastructure here in Cali. Not that it is being used much, but this is not due to a lack of cyclists. It's just that they bike wherever they want, not necessarily using the cycling paths. And amazingly cars are very observant and drive very carefully so as not to hit pedestrians or cyclists. The only dangerous thing here are the motor cycles, really, and there are a lot of them. There are also whole streets which consist of nothing but motor cycle repair shops.
There are four main means of transport in this city and I think all of them are used to about the same amount: cars, buses, motorbikes and bicycles. Oh, well and people also walk, of course. Obviously cars are only for the richer parts of the population, and bicycles are certainly for the poorest. The buses here are not cheap compared to other places I have been to, so even I try to avoid using them. I am told you can by a decent bicycle for less than 20 Euro, which would be about 20 bus rides. Considering that I assume motor cycles are still cheaper than buses on the long run. So somehow public transport here is for the not-so-poor part of the population, which is interesting. On the other hand, public transport between cities is extremely cheap - luckily. Oh, I should add: I have not seen people using horses or donkeys to ride on them. They are only being used to pull carts with goods on them (or mostly bads, really, as they mainly transport trash or recycling stuff or whatever). But there are very few and they are really only used by the poorest of the poor.
Actually here I should comment on one more thing, which quite surprised me: the city is very navigable for wheelchairs. Not like a European city, of course, but much more so than any Latin American place I have seen. Whether these installations were originally made for bicycles or for wheelchairs, in any case, both can use them and it helps a lot. Sidewalks are lowered wherever there is a crossing, bridges that cross streets always have ramps instead of stairs and all the buses of the city's bus systems are accessible for wheelchairs.
Since I hadn't made up my mind if I was going to stay in Cali or not, I didn't buy a bicycle, which meant that I was doing a LOT of walking. Which has the advantage that you get to see a lot. And since I had time, there was nothing wrong with that. I usually didn't carry my camera and only limited amounts of money, although I must honestly say, there are some European cities in which I felt less safe than walking around here. Anyway even if I had had a camera, I wouldn't have known what to take pictures of. So, guess what: it is a city, it is full of buildings, roads and - maybe a little surprising - parks. Well, it is a city. Depending on the part of the city you go to, the buildings look very poor and are planted almost into each other with very little space in between and very little green anywhere, or they are big villas where each of them has a yard and a swimming pool, the streets are lined with trees and so on, and there are even European-style apartment buildings which look like any random apartment complex in Europe. Now, I was going to comment on the dangerousness part. Well, as it happens, I really love the place where I live. By now the people in the neighbourhood know me be sight or even by name, they have asked me where I was from and some random questions about life in Europe. The streets are always alive with people, no matter what time of the day or which day of the week. And no matter what time of the day there are also always women and children on the streets, playing, chatting, eating, whatever. There are street vendors everywhere and it is literally so that, should you, for some reason, not have money on you at any moment but want to buy something, they'd just tell you to come back later and bring the money. I don't know how anybody could feel unsafe in this environment, or why people would think it's unsafe.
On the other hand, as soon as you get to the richer parts of the city the villas and apartment complexes are surrounded by high walls, barbed wire or electrical wires mostly. Honestly, so where would you think it is more dangerous? Where people just walk on the street, leave their doors open while they pop over to the shop, leave their children playing on the street without supervision, or where people think it necessary to put themselves in a jail in order to feel safe? I am exaggerating here. The walls and electrical wire thing is true, but there are still people walking on the street and I am relatively sure that the security people at the entrances of these complexes do not pay all that much attention (deliberately so, because it is just not part of their culture). So I don't think that the rich neighbourhoods are dangerous either, but there is certainly no reason to think that the poor neighbourhoods are dangerous. Especially considering that most of the danger in Colombia comes from drug cartels, and throughout the whole continent the important people in drug cartels are among the richest of their respective countries. They are the ones to live in those villas with electrical wires. And there is not much to get for them in a place as poor as the neighbourhood where I live in right now. Point.
An other interesting observation is this: my neighbourhood is also really cheap. And this goes for literally everything. When you buy the very same product in other parts of the city it costs up to twice as much as it costs here. And this goes both for home-made foods, as also for things like yoghurt, which is packed and clearly bought in large amounts to be resold in a store, and it is the very same yoghurt but still it costs more, the farther you get away from here. However this works, I don't know. It will just remain one of the mysteries of the world, like why people think it is better to live in a developed country. Well, one does not have to know everything.
Now, as for the other things about this city: the one thing that I couldn't help noticing as soon as I got here is the HUGE number of sports facilities. They have indoor sport halls too, but you can barely walk two blocks without passing an asphalt football/basketball field. There are grass/dirt football fields everywhere, fitness machines are installed in every part of the city and weights just lie around there. Use of all of these is free. Next to that you also have at least five complexes of artificial turf fields for football 5 vs 5 that you have to pay for. Oh I should maybe mention: the city has around 2.6 million inhabitants, which certainly makes enough users for all of these, but it is a very compact city so so far I had little problems getting everywhere that I needed to get to walking. In any case, the many sports facilities there are are also used a lot. And still you see children playing football just outside their houses on the streets. Which means that the game always has to be interrupted when a car comes, but that doesn't seem to be a problem. Football, of course, is the biggest thing in the life of people here. When you walk through the streets about one in every three people you see wears a football shirt. Half of these are of the Colombian national team (which seem to exist in almost every colour), and the other half are split more or less equally between the two big local teams (America and Deportivo), FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, and other Colombian or foreign teams. It seems to count as reasonable formal clothing here, which I highly appreciate. And wherever you go, if there is a TV somewhere (restaurants, shopping malls, etc.) most of the time there seems to be football on. As a matter of fact I know that they also produce TV shows in Colombia but sometimes I wonder what for. I will write about women's football in one of my next posts because I am still trying to figure it out. Take it step by step ;) One thing I can say for sure at this moment is: women seem to wear football jerseys almost as much as man but I have never seen little girls play football on the streets with little boys. There are a lot of women's teams though, so it's not like women don't play, they just don't seem to play with men. When men accept to play with me, I can never be sure if they do not only accept me because I have blue eyes which seems to be the one thing that gets me everything I want when it comes to Latino men.
One last comment for today: there are a lot of birds in the city and they are not very shy. I have not managed to get a bird guide yet so some I can identify and some not but I am still struggling. The other night an owl flew over the field during football training but I was the only one who seemed to notice. I don't know if the others just didn't see it or if this is such a common occurrence that nobody cared. But the other day a few parrots (big ones) sat on a pedestrian bridge crossing over a highway and several people stopped to look at them. I can't wait to see the birds in the forests.
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