Nice Surprises

I felt a little bad being negative about my host-country nationals in the last post (okay - I did have pretty good grounds, though), so in a change of mood, Tim and I came up with the following:

Nice surprises

There are a few things, pleasant surprises that I’ve noticed that Colombia does better than the US. This is not a comprehensive list; it is simply what I’ve noticed recently and I hope to add to this list as the months unfold.

·         Fruit juice. They have awesome fruit juice here. It’s fresh; it comes in all sorts of flavors that we don’t have and they make these deliciously creative mixes – like pear, green apple, mint and something tropical that I can’t remember the name of. But trust me – it’s amazing. And that’s just one example; the number of mixtures they come up with is exponential to the number of fruits and herbs that exist.

·         Aromatica. While we’re talking about delicious concoctions, I’d like to suggest “aromatica,” a brew of dried or fresh fruits and herbs that does NOT only taste like rose hips (like so much herbal tea does). Every batch is different depending on the creator; it’s refreshing and warm and sweet… Mmm hmmm. Why don’t we have this at home? And you can eat the fruit with a spoon afterwards!

·         Desserts. There are bakeries and ice cream and gelato shops everywhere. And flan, and things with “arequipa,” this caramel-like substance that makes everything better. Now, I know that Europe is renowned for their bakeries , so you French, Italian and Austrians out there don’t go getting all upset at this. This isn’t a world competition here – just nice things I notice in Colombia and their bakeries are one of them!

·         Taxi companies that recognize your address automatically when you call from your home phone and dispatch a taxi to your exact location and then tell you how many minutes it will take to arrive. All without talking to a soul. That’s pretty cool.

·         Parking lot security. Besides bomb-sniffing dogs that check every vehicle entering the shopping center parking lots, today we also saw what could best be described as parking lot lifeguards. There were guards in towers overlooking the outdoor parking lot, armed with whistles and binoculars. One was excitedly blowing his whistle and pointing at some offender, but I couldn’t tell what the crime was. Could it have been door-dinging another car? Leaving the cart to block an empty space? Forgetting your purse on the car roof? Either way, he was certainly On The Job and it was nice to see.  

I’ve given you five nice surprises of things that Colombia does really well. Protocol* dictates that I may now list one thing that Colombia is really lousy at, and I apologize in advance to any host-country nationals reading this, but you gotta’ admit that this is true: It makes NO sense to have the folks who re-stock the grocery shelves work during the busiest shopping times!  We have enough trouble working our way around each other and past the over-solicitous sample marketers in front of their skillets and pitchers of juice and little tooth-picked sausage pieces - we truly do not also need to contend with pallets and crates and boxes of groceries blocking the way and dozens of staff clogging the aisles that we now have to reach around, over, and under as they ignore us to chat with their coworkers. Really, these tasks are best left to the overnight hours.

Okay, that's it for now.

*Mine

Things that go #@$%^& in the night

On Thursday night, just moments before slipping into bed, the racket started. I turned on the small fan that I keep beside my bed to dull outside noises, but the noise was still there. I tried to distract myself with my book, but it crept in over the storyline until all I could think of was, “What the #@#$%^ is that NOISE? And why is it so loud, so close by and so late on a weeknight?”  I tried to ignore it and put my hand and my pillow over my ears, but it was not going to be bested so easily. Finally, after midnight with the noise continuing unabated, I opened the bedroom door, walked down to the hallway door, and upon opening it, was faced with the undeniable source: the neighbors directly underneath our apartment were hosting a LIVE MARIACHI BAND. Short of living under a tap dance studio or a rehearsal hall for experimental jazz, in the poker game of apartment annoyances - I do believe this was a royal flush. 

To make matters worse, our apartment building has an airshaft up the middle, with windows to three rooms (our kitchen and bathroom included) opening into it. The airshaft is completely brick, giving it the noise-dampening qualities of a megaphone. Every note from each horn (and there were more than one, trust me!) ricocheted its way from the original source, up the airshaft to be delivered directly to the unsoliciting ears of each resident above and below our reveling neighbors.  

12:30 am found me in my robe, ringing the offenders’ doorbell. I don’t know how they actually heard it, but a man answered and when I mouthed “WAY TOO LOUD!” to him, his facial expressions said, “Really? Loud? I’m sorry, what can I do? Really – you can hear this? Gosh, my apologies!” So close to the music, we couldn’t actually hear each other speak – so this was all pantomime. But he understood why I was there.  

Satisfied, I went back upstairs and waited for the change in volume, which – of course – didn’t come. Our only saving grace was that Mariachi bands are hired by the hour, and so some time after 1:30, they packed up their horns and left the party in their matching costumes, leaving me with nearly four hours to sleep. 

Friday night, as Tim and I were settling onto the couch to pick a movie to watch - it started again. The volume was such that it was all I could do to not turn around and look for the band that was certainly IN our living room. Even the cats were freaked out by the racket.  This time the band only played until about midnight, after which the party continued with Mariachi on the stereo, naturally.  

My coworkers told me that Colombians love Mariachi and it’s a tradition to celebrate a birthday or an engagement by hiring a band. C’mon, don’t hold it against them – it’s a tradition, part of the culture! Should the festivities continue for a third night, Tim and I will be happy to introduce our new friends to some American culture: early Sunday morning breakfast with the Allman Brothers at full strength.

Getting Out and About

Each weekend, Tim and I try to get out and visit a new part of the city. We’ve started with the traditional touristy-type destinations, and will work our way deeper as the weeks pass. To catch you all up on our recent forays, here are some pictures and descriptions:

Monserrate

At 10,401 feet, perched above the sprawl of Bogota, Monserrate can be seen from nearly any point in the city. The white church and its tower is accessible via a long walk (1500 steps, so my guidebook says), a gravity-defying funicular that crawls up the nearly vertical mountain face, or the teleferico cable-car (like from a ski resort). We went up on a Sunday, which was nearly half-price from the other days for some reason that I could only chalk up to Monserrate hoping to encourage folks to come to mass which seems to run every hour during Sunday mornings into mid-day. We chose the funicular for the way up, and packed into the little car as the only gringos among loads of Colombian families and couples. It was a quick trip with great views of the city interrupted only by the tunnels and drifting clouds.

View from inside the funicular

At the top, we unloaded and explored the mountain-top cathedral and beyond to a lane of trinket shops and further to an alley of, I can’t really call them cafes or restaurants, more like an alley of kitchens with picnic tables offering amazing views to the backside of the mountains and the usual carnivore fest of choices. I truly don't know what vegetarians do in Colombia! I had my usual stand-by ajiaco soup, instead of an entire chicken, a three-foot long chain of sausage links or a side of beef (i.e. what everyone else was eating).

We did mention that this is a BIG city, right?

There were also a few restaurants in beautiful old buildings with views over the city, fancy dining rooms and extensive menus. 

We continued past all the lunch stalls to the end of the alley to a clearing where there was a little beer stand at the very peak of the mountain, under the radio towers and among the stumps of huge eucalyptus trees that we're being cleared for some reason. The view to the east, the opposite direction from the cityscape, was very Man From Snowy River, with incredibly steep faces covered in eucalyptus and evergreens.

Not sure what this is - but it's at the top, too.

Carn-fest with a view



This is where we could have eaten...





...but this is where we DID eat.



Beer shack at the top of the world.

We had hoped to take the teleferico back down the mountain, but the line was over an hour long, and so we returned in the funicular instead.

Yesterday we went down to the Botanical Gardens and walked around through different types of forests, each with neatly labeled trees, and later through a maze of glass greenhouses that varied in climates from dry desert to sweltering Amazonian. It felt great to be above 65 degrees again, until it got to about 100 degrees and I thought I was going to faint in the sudden heat and humidity. There was also a butterfly room where we walked through a collection of tropical plants decorated with tropical butterflies.

One of 30,000 varieties of orchids

After the garden, we walked through parts of the enormous Parque Simon Bolivar, and stopped into a sports complex that was hosting the PanAmeican Championships for Wheelchair Rugby. We watched part of an exciting Colombia vs. Argentina game (the US vs. Canada game was later and meant to be the headline event, but we couldn't wait that long). Instead, we found a taxi just 15 minutes before a gully-washing shower descended on the city, turning our street into a navigable river.

Sidebar: Word came from the customs and shipping guys in the embassy that our truck has finally reached Bogota and is "out there" - somewhere in the city, hopefully behind some form of security fencing. It will be another eight weeks before it can be released by the MFA and licensed, so our weekend trips will remain within walking and taxi distance until then.

Resourcefulness

Subtitle: What to do before your HHE arrives

First, let me define my terms: HHE =  Household Effects, basically your stuff. This is the stuff that gets packed up and sent over land to the edge of the land, and then via boat to your new country. This process takes months. When it arrives in your new country, the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has to allow customs to release it so that nice men in jumpsuits can bring it to your house in cardboard boxes the size and strength of which I'd never seen before. Really, you could live in one of these things. HHE is not to be confused with your UAB - Unaccompanied Air Baggage. Please don't be fooled by the "A" in the title and think that this stuff (weight restricted to 250 lbs for the employee and 200 lbs for the spouse) gets here at the speed of an airplane. Tim has been here four weeks now and apparently the airplane from Seattle with his UAB still hasn't made a blip on the Bogota radar screen. He has been living out of his suitcase since arriving.

So what does one do while waiting for your stuff? You get resourceful. I'd like to give you a few examples that Tim has come up with:

We have highly-polished State Department-provided wood tables and nightstands that we don't want to damage with cup and glass rings; we need coasters. Why look at this styrofoam meat packaging! Bit of soap and water, a pair of scissors and we now have chic black coasters on each table. Got houseplants? Use the entire meat tray and the lip will keep the water from dribbling onto the table. 

They sell roses for about $5 a dozen here, or $7 for three stems of lillies that will last two weeks and perfume the whole apartment. But what are you going to put them in? Empty wine bottles, of course.

Our bathroom is a well-organized shrine to dinners-past with the nail clippers, scissors and other little bathroom objects neatly corraled in a green plastic tub that our sliced mushrooms came in. The Q-Tips? Always tidy and within reach in a tomato paste jar. The sugar next to the coffee pot got the same treatment.

In the kitchen, we only have what the "welcome kit" provided us. This kit comes in a sturdy Rubbermaid footlocker and has 4 plates, 4 bowls, 4 knives, forks, spoons, a few pots - you get the picture. Therefore although we have a lovely dishwasher, we can't use it for anything more than a drying rack as we simply don't have enough dishes to spare. Having company for dinner can be a challenge, and the other night we hosted two friends and warned them that it was a "BYOPM" affair (Bring Your Own Placemat). When it's just Tim and I, magazines serve us well under our dinnerplates, but for company... well, it would just have been a bit tacky. I'm not sure what we'll do if we ever invite more than two people: BYOPKFS?

By the time our stuff actually does arrive, it'll feel extraneous; we've got just about all we need now!

Okay, except for my tea kettle. I really miss my tea kettle.

Day of Service

Embassy Bogota took President Obama's call for a national day of service in memory of September 11 seriously, and yesterday found dozens of embassy folks at a nearby Colombian Army batallion supporting soldiers who have been permanently injured in the wars Colombia has been fighting against the FARC or guerillas for decades. We came in support also of Corporacion Matamoros which provides training and services to the soldiers and their families. The focus of the day was to get the families, particularly the children, involved in games or art, and to share our understanding of how the soldiers and their families have suffered by reflecting on our own losses via terrorism. It sounds kinda' heavy, but actually it ended up being at first poignant, and then just fun. 

The day started with the playing of both countries national anthems (our Ambassador McKinley sang along with Colombia's ¡Oh Gloria Inmarcesible! which I found impressive), speeches from some of the batallion's comanding officers, the Ambassador (see news clip here, select Noticias then scroll down to the words "Homenaje a las victimias del 11-S en Colombia" I think the picture of Old Glory makes it obvious), a director from Corporacion Matamoros, a wounded Colombian soldier and my embassy colleague, Joe Giblin. Joe recited a story about of watching the September 11 events firsthand. Many of the batallion's soldiers, none looking older than 25, are amputees, have been blinded in explosions, or are tramautic brain-injury sufferers.

After the formalities, we divided into groups with the older kids and adults playing frisbee on a large lawn, and the younger ones coming into a large hall where we spread out art supplies on rows of lunch tables. The kids were pretty little, no older than about 6, so their families and the embassy volunteers helped them quite a bit with painting, drawing, molding clay and sticking glitter to anything/one they wanted. I shared a table with a darling young man, Alexander, his three-year old son Dylan and his mother Lucero. Alexander was very open with me in stating that he'd been ambushed while on patrol and had a grenade go off just to his left side, leaving him deaf on that side, damaging his face (you couldn't tell - they did a great job in surgery) and affecting him with PTSD and traumatic brain injury to the point where he now cannot go outside unaccompanied. His wife left him after saying he was "too crazy" and he functions only with heavy medication. Lucero (I don't know how she spells her name) was a very sweet woman who sprinkled "mi amor" into all her sentences, as in "darlin'" and helps with Alexander as much as she can. He told me he receives psychiatric therapy every day, but will only be able to stay with this batallion for another six months. At only age 24, he doesn't know what he will be capable of for the rest of his life. They showed me a picture on the mother's cell phone of the other brother, the spitting image of Alexander, who is currently serving with the Army, "in the jungle somewhere." Other young soldiers admitted to my colleagues that seeing their friends return to the batallion as amputees has made them very afraid to know they'll be heading out to the countryside soon to continue fighting the anti-government guerillas.

I wish that my Spanish skills were stronger, because I spent a lot of time misunderstanding or having them repeat what they were saying "en otras palabras, por favor" (in other words) so that I could grasp it all. We drew pictures of pets, houses, race cars (Dylan) and managed not to spill the paint all over ourselves. After the Frisbee and art activities, we gathered on the big lawn in the center and had burger lunches catered by the embassy. I sat with my "family" and I think I was invited to Dylan's baptism... but I'm not really sure. (As I said - I really wish my comprehension was stronger!)

It was a wonderful experience and I'm very glad I took part, however small my role was. I see from my friends' blogs that there were embassies all over who joined in the day of service. Here is another example from my OMS friend in Rabat, Morocco.

Next up: More weekend excursions