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Hello again!!
I thought it was about time I updated cyberspace on what I have doing with myself for the past blog-free weeks!
This week's 'activity category' (I'm not sure whether this even comes up next to my blog but I have to chose one to keep writing) is 'Cultural Encounters' because I have had a few eye-opening to say the least cultural encounters over the past few weeks!
The first I should mention happened a few weeks ago here in Bogota after arranging to meet up for a drink with a friend. As I walked up the street I had been told to go to, looking for the right bar, I could hear the faint sound of what quite frankly sounding like gun shots, and I had the impression that I had been led to the wrong side of town. Keen to get to the bar, as I found it around the next corner, I rushed in only to realise that the gun shot like sound I was hearing was in fact not only fifty times louder now (not that I'm really that familiar with the sound of artilary fire but more like a canon blasting by this stage) but also coming from inside this very bar. The combination of the lack of worry on my friends faces and the groups of colombians huddled in lanes behind individuals hurling metal disks at clay boards in between swigs of beer made me realised that this was no ordinary bar, this was a 'club de tejos'. This 'tejos' I mention is a truly colombian sport, in which, as was pointed out to me, the beer is as important as the score. Now some might find that slightly worrying when they discover that the way to assumulate said score is by lobbing heavy metal discs down a lane at a clay board littered with pouches of gunpowder. Yes, thats right, gunpowder. And to cut a long story short, the objective is to hit as many of these gunpowder pouches as possible so that they all explode. Unfortunately for me however, despite following the Colombian advice, no matter how much beer I drank, I still couldnt manage to hit the gunpowder!
After that, I decided it was time to get out of Bogta and headed on an overnight bus back to Medellin. Whilst there I spent my time moving between the city and little towns near by. Now I say near by, but the closest was four hours away and the furthest involved a whole days worth of travelling. They were all in the same department though of which Medellin is the capital. There are people working there, giving workshops on Mine Risk Education which I sat in on. For a number of reasons, most of these towns were very much off the tourist trail, and in such a diverse country, it was certainly eye opening too see some of the places you dont hear so much about. From these little towns, I visited some veredas (basically anything from a little village to score of house spread over double as many fields with a school in the middle), inhabited by farmers libing off the land. Now, Id heard about these 'isolated locations' around the country and now I can see what they mean. The farmers dont have any cars or transport other than foot (there own or a horses) and the only public transport comes only once every couple of weeks. This may have something to do with the difficulty in getting there, the 'roads' to get there are much better described as narrow, extremely rocky paths. Not letting this stop us for one vereda we visited, we got a rickshaw to drive us the hour and a half journey. I'm not sure this did the rickshaw a lot of good but its driver was certainly very happy giving us a guided tour of his home ground!
Whist in Medellin, I stayed in a place that translates as the 'Peace Home' where landmine victims from the numerous veredas stay whilst in Medellin recieving treatment. Most of the people I met were up in the city to get new prosthetic limbs as they had lost a leg in the accident and these need to be regularly replaced. I met a variety of landmine survivors there, ranging from a 19 year old girl to a seventy year old women. Some of them had come up to Medellin by themselves, whilst others had somebody with them to help.
Being a tourist in my spare time, along with visiting a beautiful near by holiday town on the edge of a lake, I also visited the Medellin art museum in the home city of Botero, where I for the firt time in my life was able to look at paintings and smugly remember having read about them before! The reading was compulsory but that is not the point.
So, after Medellin, I headed south into coffee country and to the little town of Salento for a few days. This town is famous and popular with tourists (the only vageuly full hostel I've come across so far) mostly because it is so close to the Cocora valley which is home to COlombia's national tree 'the wax palm' which basically look like enormous palm trees and the countryside is beautiful. I think its also the only place in the country where tehse trees grow, which makes me wonder why its there national tree but oh well. Anyway, I actually met some people who I did a fair amount of hiking with around there so finally got to put my walking boots that I've been lugging around with me to good use! I visited a coffee plantation near Salento as well but shamefully discovered in the home of colombian coffee, that my favourite kind of cuppa is the entirely unauthentic coffee with baileys combo!
I'm pretty sure the rainy season began the day I arrived in Salento, four months with a drop and then four days of torrential downpour. And unfortunately it seems to have been the same in Bogota as well! to stay out of the rain this morning, I embarked on another 'cultural encounter' but this time of the scottish kind. I went to help these really nice scottish girls (I met last week who teach english in unversities here) teach colombian students how to scottish dance. The mental imge I returned with after seeing one colombian wearing authentic ginger wig and tartan hat manically trying to remember the next step whilst dancing the dashing white seargent and moaning how its not as easy as salsa is priceless!
Thanks for reading, I hope everything is tickitiboo with you!
I'm off to the Amazon in a week so watch this space! xxx
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