Playing with knives....and kids

Gio and the adorable Xiomara

Ibague

So, we finally arrive at our first volunteering opportunity. A children’s centre in a very poor area of the city of Ibague. The centre provides lunch to about a hundred kids and is a day centre, during term time it helps share the load with the local school – kids spend half the day there and half at the centre, and during holidays it provides somewhere for the kids to hang out and do stuff they can’t do at home. The centre also provides some structure for the kids and is strict on manners and respect for adults/each other. So on arrival all kids must come and say hello, ‘chao profe (hola profesor!)’ and kiss you on the cheek – or for the boys and Gio a handshake. Well, the hand ‘shake’ is more of a hand slide, knuckle bashing affair – bit tricky to describe but Gio got there in the end! I am just glad I am a girl – kisses are much nicer.

Anyway, our role is to help Nury in the kitchen preparing lunch, help serve lunch, then in the afternoon play with the kids. Gio and Lesa helping in a kitchen – with a lot of knives...mmmmm!

So, week one with knives: three minor cuts but all digits still intact. One minor accident where I went to stand up, hit my head, fell backwards and burnt myself on the giant soup pot – painful but mostly pretty funny. And now I have a very interesting triangular shape pattern on my back to show for it and have learnt a couple of new words from trying to explain to the kids why I was walking around with an ice pack on my hip - ‘quemarse’ to burn yourself and ‘que asco’ how disgusting!

The first day in the kitchen I spent very worried. When we were in Cartagena we met a South African who had eaten turtle in a restaurant there. So day one in the kitchen we are chopping lots of veggies and telling Nury that we eat everything not to worry about feeding us and then she gets out a tortoise and puts it in a bowl of water. Oh no. Is this going to be the next thing I have to chop up? I spend the morning figuring out how to say ‘please spare him’! Turns out having finally figured out how to say ‘is that for lunch’ – it was/is the centre’s pet. There was much hilarity at my expense.

All in all we are really enjoying our time, never in our lives have we chopped so many vegetables, fruit etc – especially challenging with such blunt knives (although that is probably why we still have ten fingers each). The kids are lovely and very entertaining, cute, grubby, some clearly very poor – with trousers done up with string.

Lunches at the centre are delicious, interesting and very filling. The menu is different every day and involves a soup, main course and dessert – each weekly menu and it’s ingredients are written up on a board which is great for our Spanish learning. However we might need to learn some portion control as by the end of serving lunch to 100 kids we are knackered and hoover giant portions! At this rate we are going to be gorda by the end of two weeks!!

Our first day involved everyone asking us questions – good Spanish practise. What is our favourite colour, sport, food, fruit, football team, song. Most embarrassing moment, and why aren’t we married. Gio was instructed he only has these two weeks to sort it out else one of the kids would step in and do the honourable thing! And then they all chanted ‘beso, beso, beso’ until we kissed at which point they all screamed!!

We will no doubt be ready to leave for a rest and some creature comforts (have had to adapt to bunk beds and cold showers) but being here feels good. Ibague is a lovely city, with amazing Christmas lights...

...the family who run the centre are great and keen to help us with our Spanish – as are the kids at the centre who are keen to chat. They are almost all missing father figures and love hanging off of Gio and asking him questions. All are very curious about just how hairy his legs are (and where the hair on mine has gone), and love hugs and kisses and any attention you can give. We have had some interesting afternoons – the teacher giving the kids glitter to make Christmas cards – and their delight at covering Gio and I head to toe in it – Gio still looks like he belongs in a carnival sporting rather a lot of green glitter. I can just say I am being festive! Wednesday was dance lessons, and the teacher taught everyone a zombie dance, at the end of the dance they all had to put a little bit of an alka seltzer in their mouths and create a vast amount of foam spit!!

Outside of the centre we’ve spent a day at the local swimming park which had a couple of huge water slides, we were impressed by the 70 something lady ahead of us in the queue! Unfortunately I managed to lose my bikini top on the way down – slightly embarrassing...but apparently not the first person.

There is a local Carrefour supermarket! Really it’s all you could ever need – they even had six motorbikes for sale in the shop!

Monday was ‘la noche de las velitas‘ ‘night of the candles’ or ‘la noche de la virgen ’night of the virgin’ (the candles represent a virgin for each house) which involved everyone lighting rows of candles outside their houses – and was beautiful.

Also involved lighting all the Christmas lights and crazy Christmas creations made from plastic cups. It was a fun night – a little bit random with fireworks and cows wondering up the road

This weekend we are resting, and trying to study so we have more to say to the kids next week!

Bogota

It was impossible to avoid and would have been wrong not to visit the capital of Colombia but we did so with some aprehension as the city has had a reputation for being very dangerous. But things have changed and Bogota was nothing like we expected. We loved it, and even started to wonder if we could live there! We stayed in the north of the city which is relatively affluent with lots of shopping malls, restaurants, bars, little ‘villages’ within the city, in a really lovely B&B.

Christmas tree in the center of the old town

The first night we went to a local restaurant to try some typical Medellin cuisine – ajiaco de pollo and a patacone both were delicioius. Gio’s was a chicken soup that comes with a plate of capers and sour cream to add to taste. My patacone was a plate size taco with half an avocado, shredded pork, salad etc. The meal was enhanced by some phenomenal singing by two traditionally dressed musicians, unfortunately their voices were so powerful we couldn’t actually hear each other talk, but hey ho!

The traffic in Bogota is constant and crazy, at each intersection jugglers and various entertainers walk in to the road and entertain everyone while you wait for a green light! Luckily there is a great bus system called the TransMilenio with it’s own lane and ‘stations’ that make it easy to get anywhere. Well I say easy, it took Gio and I about twenty minutes of staring at the map and walking up and down the platform jostled around by commuters before we figured it out – but turns out that wasn’t due to the complexity of the system so much....

Our first day in the city we took the TransMilenio down town and did the mini walking tour in the Lonely Planet.

One of many beautiful churches

One of the first stops of course was food orientated – a traditional Santafereno which is hot chocolate served with cheese and bread that you dunk in it! Denise is the only person I know who I thought might actually like that (something about chocolate digestives and cheese)!

Chocolate Santafereno

Next stop was the Botero museum – the artist who makes everything fat! Which we really liked.

Generously proportioned Mona Lisa

There was a slightly embarrassing moment when I got a bit too close with my enthusiasm and set the alarms off.

How Gio and I are starting to look:

At the exhibition we bumped in to the Ozzy girls that were on the catamaran with us from panama which was a bit of a coincidence – doing the same walking tour as us! Next stop was the gold museum which was also really interesting but vast and so we were ready for more cheese and chocolate afterwards!

Crazy gold tribal figures

Day two in the city was going to be sightseeing but we ended up in an amazing shopping mall, the food court was phenomenal – every food you could imagine and amazing quality. Then we headed in to ‘Zona T’ for the evening and ate lovely food and ended up in a little Salsa bar with a live band, not quite brave enough to join in but we both loved watching and wondering.... “why can everyone in Colombia dance so well? Why do we have two left feet?!”

Taganga to Bucaramanga and beyond

Taganga

After Cartagena we decided to continue along the Carribean coast to a tiny fishing town called Taganga for Gio to finally get under the water and do some diving. We found a great little hotel, surprising in such a small town, that had a pool.

Although we quickly discovered that even though they had a pool they still managed to run out of water for everything else daily, and the electricity was only intermittent!

Studying...

We stayed in Taganga long enough to enjoy some amazing fresh fish and great juices and for Gio to do a couple of dives. However a combination of no electricity (and therefore no fans at night) and lots of very noisy dogs motivated us to make a move to our next stop, Villa Leyva.

Bucaramanga

In order to get to Villa Leyva we needed to break up the journey, so, after 11 hours on the road we stopped in a city called Bucaramanga – yes try saying that after a couple of drinks. We dumped our bags and wandered round the corner for some fast food. I gave up attempting to decipher the menu and ordered something random. It turned out to be a giant pile of potato sticks (these retro crisps)!

With chicken and cheese and some other unidentified vegetables on top!! Still after such a long day it tasted pretty good.

Villa Leyva

We headed to Villa Leyva as we had read it was a beautiful old town with year round spring like weather and plenty of peace and quiet for us to study Spanish. As usual, despite the best of intentions our planned 6 hours study a day didn’t quite work out.

Lesa 'studying' at the hostel

It may also have been linked to the discovery of a French bakery in town! We seemed to find a reason to walk the 15 minutes in to town every day and inevitably end up with cakes in our hands.

'Besos di mi novia' speciality local cakes

So far we have been under the illusion that despite the fact we still struggle stringing a sentence together we understand a lot of spanish. However after helping a little old lady in to town – and listening to her chat enthusiastically to us for about half an hour, we discover this is not the case. Between us we understood about 4 sentences! Mind you – she really didn’t seem to mind that we clearly didn’t have a clue what she was saying!! We understood “tan lindos” – how kind we were! And between us received a lot of kisses.

As usual time passed on without us really knowing what we had been doing with it! We spent six days in Villa Leyva, hired a bike and visited an Ostrich farm..

....ate great food in a bbq restaurant....

.....inadvertently joined a music lesson on traditional Colombian music...

Music lesson - with a very earnest musician

....oh and enjoyed the beautiful climate.

Market day in Villa Leyva

Impressive hat improvisation

Gio's first Arepa - typical Colombian snack!

Sunset from our hostel in Villa Leyva

Crazy for Cartagena

After breakfast on the catamaran, a very sticky, shaky and relieved 13 of us were taken to shore by Luis in the boat’s dinghy. It felt like we were still at sea for about 8 more hours and I found myself holding on to things genuinely believing the ground was moving – Colombians first impression of me might have been a little strange. Our first impressions of Colombia were of a beautiful Cartagena.

The old town of Cartagena is absolutely gorgeous and we spent three days wondering around absorbing it all. Colombians are crazy about fresh fruit and every corner has some one selling lovely fruit- from fresh mandarin juice to mango (with salt on!). We discovered a fantastic little place with amazing juices and amazing pastries – lots of fruit we don’t know, I quite liked the lulo juice but maracuya (passion fruit) was the absolute best. What with the fruit, pastries and men selling coffee from thermos flasks everywhere, we were in heaven.

The local food is interesting – well according to our translation of the menu it included parakeet eggs for breakfast and some sort of ‘gold fish dessert’! This may just be a sign that our Spanish needs some work. We had fun exploring the local supermarket and it's amazing fruit and veg section.

New mystery fruit for identification! Peels like a banana, looks like passion fruit, tastes very sweet.

The biggest avocado we had ever seen.

We visited a beautiful church dedicated to San Pedro Claver a monk who begged from door to door to give money to the slaves until his death in 1654, and whose remains are still on display.

San Pedro Claver

Fernando Botero sculpture of Pedro Claver, Colombian artist whose works are all proportionally exaggerated, or "fat" figures as he once referred to them.

Glorious rear view of Botero's 'La Gorda' in Cartagena.

The majority of our time was spent in Cartagena wondering aimlessly

We loved all of the beautiful buildings, the shops, and the generously proportioned mannequins,

Green around the gills

So, after a recommendation and a lot of research we decided to go with ‘Fritz the Cat’ to Cartagena. A good size catamaran with a slightly bonkers Austrian captain. Things didn’t start of the best as we met a couple of friends who also planned to do the trip and started exchanging horror stories that we had heard about too many people and not enough beds.

After a three hour totally bonkers jeep ride we finally got to the ocean, the jeep ride involved the steepest hills we have ever seen a car go up and driving through a river. We then paid some Kuna people (local tribe) to take us by boat out to the awaiting catamaran and the crazy Fritz. I was feeling decidedly dodgy.

Greeted by Captain Fritz we discovered we were sharing our boat ride with 2 Swiss girls Alex and Gabrielle, YouJin from Korea, 8 Australians with 8 litres of rum, Luis a Colombian ex-tiger trainer, Fritz and his much younger Kurdish girlfriend and her friend. Gio and I are allocated the ‘honey moon’ suite, which we wish we had a photo of – a very small bed with a mirror running the length of it!! It takes quite some acrobatics to climb in to and squeeze in to the gap between the bed and the ceiling!



After some discussion concerning my illness, Fritz diagnosed me with kidney stones after a jab in the kidney but seemed to think I will be fine, we decided to go for the more traditional antibiotic route just in case.



Fritz lived up to his nutso reputation and we were all entertained by his unique trumpet playing approach to playing host, we spent a lovely couple of days around the San Blas islands, snorkelling, laying on deserted beaches and buying lobsters and souvenirs from the local Kunas.

One of the cute Kuna kids enjoying lunch on board.

It was a pleasure getting to know Luis, one of the crew.

Luis is Colombian and only speaks Spanish which was excellent practise for us, we enjoyed learning all new words about tigers and the circus as Luis told us about his job for the last five years working with white tigers and a sunglass wearing chimp – no, we couldn’t quite believe it either!

After leaving the San Blas islands the journey took a bit of a turn for the worse.

The GPS and the auto pilot failed which meant a fair amount of swearing from Fritz and everyone taking it in turns to steer the boat constantly, turns out YouJin is excellent at doing this with his feet! The sea became ‘very confused’ according to Fritz, Gio and I would just call it rough – with big swells and lots of waves! After a rough and very very hot first night at sea we wake to find we have run out of water and the sea is too rough to pump any from the reserve tank. Mmm it was destined to be a long ride. The day at sea was long and boring as it was too rough to do anything but hold on tight. The second night was almost comical. As it was so hot we slept sitting at the back of the boat and both Gio and I, in turns, managed to get caught by giant waves coming over the top of the boat and absolutely drenching us. So we decide the safe option is the sauna that is our room. About an hour later Gio woke up to hear water swishing and gushing in around us. Something was wrong – water was coming in through the light fittings and everywhere else possible. A little panicked we reported in to Fritz who was more concerned about the GPS continuing to fail! He did however manage to solve the issue, almost being swept over board in the process. So the next 8 hours were spent attempting to sleep between people on the floor and in any tiny vaguely dry space, occasionally exchanging worried glances with people as big waves hit.

Finally, finally, finally Luis guided me up to the front of the cat and to the wonderful sight of the sun rising over Cartagena. Phew (and that’s being polite).