Colombia in 7 hours

Waiting on the bus in Bogota for San Gil, I have in my charge what seems to be a recalcitrant teenage boy, whose mother has asked me to make sure that he arrives safely to San Gil because he doesn´t know the terminal. I didn´t have a chance to mention that I also don´t know the San Gil terminal. She thanks me graciously, and makes signs of the cross on him. She jumps back on three or four times to tell him one more thing before the bus actually makes it out of the terminal.

The ayudante (helper) tries to play a dubbed DVD of Taken on the bus TV, but it doesn´t work, so he puts a corny Nicholas Cage action movie, complete with full frontals and decapitated limbs, and none of the prudishness associated with possibly damaging the virgin eyes of children.

We stop in small towns to pick up people waiting on the road. People get on the bus selling almojabanas and other cheesebread variety snacks for the ride. One girl gets on, and requesting
our attention, gives a 15 minute spiel on an all natural skin cream that solves all manner of superficial and internal ailments. She hands out a small old-school filmroll sized container to each passenger after a small demonstration of how to apply it. You can give her back either the bottle or $3000 pesos (about $1.50 USD).

Two hours in, the bus stops at a military checkpoint, where an officer boards. He asks for papers, and everyone shifts to reach for their cedulas (ID cards) before they realize he was only asking one guy at the back of the bus. The guy and the officer exchange words while the guy gives him his papers.

The movie stops. What follows is 5 hours of every Vallenato song recorded in Colombian history, and I think that I might be allright if I didn´t hear another Vallenato song for weeks.

If you´re not used to Colombian driving, the strategy is just to not look. The bus rides in the left lane, passing slower freight trucks. If the driver sees something on the horizon before he can pass, he brakes and merges, the trucks in the right lane obliging. A rosary dangles from the rearview mirror. Every few minutes he reaches up and wraps his hand around it. I join in his prayer.

Maninthesky obliging, we arrive well to San Gil terminal. I pass my recalcitrant teenager on to his sister, and flag a cab to the hostel.

the most dangerous place?

A few years ago, a prize-winning Chicago photojournalist visited my campus. He´d been around the world, and when someone asked him what was the most dangerous place he´d ever been, he answered, ¨Bogota, Colombia.¨

You might not have known it if you didn´t ask with a glance at these streets in the downtown historic district of La Calendaria. Ten years ago, a taxi driver told me, this area was full of thieves. While most of Bogota continues fighting its battles, the central and northern districts continue to clean up, gentrify, however it may be. In the meantime, La Candelaria is packed every day with people in business suits, street vendors selling food and trinkets, couples, tons of University students, and a tourist to be spotted on any given street.

A few pics for you (Mom):

An Andes mountain looms just east of the hostel.

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And to the west, the concrete jungle.

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Sunday Ciclovia

ni arte ni cultura

you might wonder...




... why these police are shielding a hamburger joint.

And it´s to protect your right to scarf down a quarter pounder in the event that these bullfight protesters decide to get crazy on the carnivores.














This band of about 30 students marched down Carrera 7 on Sunday´s Ciclovia (an event where major roads in Bogota are closed to traffic so that people can ride bikes) to demonstrate against Colombia´s popular ¨sport¨ of bullfighting. It seems they decided to include some vegan idealism into their campaign.

Now I am grateful for my chicken legs and meatballs, but I have wondered myself what people get out of watching a guy needlessly slaughter a bull that he intentionally pisses off. March on.

llegada

The fates have smiled on my in-transit stages of travel. The plane ride was long, but smooth, fulfilling the blessings invoked by the women who made the sign of the cross as we took off. I didn´t pass the day in a particularly social mood, after the last 48 hours of double checking bags and saying goodbye to parents, pets, and airport escorts (Thanks E!). The flight was a welcome opportunity to orient myself and build up the hype I had been missing since I have spent nearly all of the past few weeks wrapped up in holiday and grad school business. When the plane hit the ground, everyone cheered.

Winding between cars and dodging occasional motorbikes at 60 mph in the taxi to Platypus Hotel, I reassure myself with reminders of my history of surviving South American car rides, and that my 60 year old cab driver must know what he´s doing if he´s made it this far. Bogota is not particularly striking as very seedy or beautiful at this time of night, at least not in this northern area. Twenty-somethings out on a Friday night line many of the streets on the way. I´m happy to see that it seems not to be an unwelcoming place.

My hostel is a classic backpackers´ spot with dorm rooms, hammocks, and shared kitchens. I am rooming up with two Australian girls doing a 2-month hit-and-run tour of a few South American countries. I say I ought not to be surprised to find more non-Americans than Americans around here, though I keep my ears open (more than say, my eyes, cuz you can´t always be sure who´s what just by looking at them). Despite sharing the common experience of being an outsider with everyone, it´s always interesting to compare notes with one of your own. I think it´s extra fun considering that we don´t have the fostered backpacker culture of the Australians and Europeans.

It´s about 60 degrees in Bogota. At 2600 meters (about 1.5 miles), I feel the altitude headache beginning to creep in slowly, and 11:30 means it´s almost naptime. Tomorrow´s missions include geographical orientation, and seeing if I can get a cellphone.

on something-elseness

Colombia -

The last time that I visited you, in February 2009, I came to you as a tourist, a stranger. I know that you see me this way before anything else. I visited your most beautiful places, like the beaches of Parque Tayrona and the streets of Cartagena. I hardly got to know you, seeing you as a flash of paradise.

Before that, in 2006, I hid myself from you, behind my cousins so that they would speak for me, so that you would not see my American posture, or hear my accent so that I could "blend in." It was the last of those last days that I realized that I had to face you, and that it wasn't worth the trouble to keep hiding myself from you, especially if I ever wanted to know you, and that, in any case, you saw me anyway. And to face you, I had to accept myself, the stranger that I am to you, and that you are to me. This alienation, and our efforts to negotiate it, in spite of it, is part of both of our stories.

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It is easy to look and talk American, and thus identify culturally as pretty much solely American, even when you are half-something else, until you speak that something-else language, and people wonder where you got your accent. Then you are a hybrid where your something-else lays dormant until you find one of its compatriots. Then you are not entirely the something-else, as you are entirely American in your native turf, but your something-elseness seems to occupy a liminal space, from which it speaks and acts and dances through you, but you can never entirely be it so long as your desire to be it marks the gap between yourself and that space.

Three years since I had begun to develop the idea that it might be possible to be 100% something and (up to (depending on how you quantify these unquantifiable things)) 50% something-else, I now have a chance to explore my something-else, Colombia, on my own terms. My own terms being, as ones that I am comfortable with, particularly the freedom of the traveler, i.e. not restricted by family obligations, although I will be visiting family. My goal is not, as it was in 2006, to cultivate the fundamental practices of my Colombian identity, though of course I will be building on my Spanish. This time, I actually want to see Colombia as an outsider, with the access of a semi-insider (I intend to write more on the complications of this). I want to document things as much as time and sanity will allow. Those things include my family, the tourist scene, and Colombia´s ¨culture,¨ particularly how its diverse societal sectors relate to the world stage as I (so far) understand it, and how they relate to each other. And of course, how I relate to them.