Christmas, New Years and new country

Christmas lights, Medellin

Christmas is rapidly feeling like a million years ago, and we have already managed to cram a lot in to 2010.

From the coffee finca in the middle of Colombia we moved back up the country to a city called Medellin. We had been told that the people of Medellin enthusiastically celebrate Christmas and there were an abundance of apartments to let, and so we hired ourselves a very, very lovely apartment for 11 days over Christmas and new years.

First stop, after a complicated cab ride was the supermarket. The supermarkets in Medellin were vast and fun to wonder round. They start with food courts and mix your own salads where people love to mix fruit, yoghurt, cereal, cheese...yes cheese altogether in giant containers for their lunches. We also happened across the clothing section and a lovely pair of pants with added bum padding for those who favour a more curvaceous look – not something Gio or I needed to invest in!

Christmas ended up being a quiet affair, but filled with great food – especially as mum had amazingly organised about 5 or 6 deliveries for Christmas eve including chocolate, wine, cheese, bread, cakes and flowers! Christmas eve Gianni and I hit the local shopping centre and gave each other a small budget and an hour to buy gifts for each other. The gifts had to fit the criteria of light weight or consumable, that plus the budget made it somewhat challenging, but it was great fun running around with everyone else doing their last minute shopping. So our Christmas was spent chatting to family, eating, napping and watching the wonderful movie ‘Cinema Paradiso’. Lovely.

Between Christmas and new year we explored more of Medellin including their amazing Christmas lights – yes just when we thought that we had seen the best, there was Medellin.

Their lights are centred along the river and everyone goes down for the evening and there is live music, food stalls and entertainers.

I enjoyed trying the local sweet – still not sure what it was called but I was sold by the guy making it’s claim ‘mi amore it took 3 hours to make and only cost 50c’, and it was delicious!

Gio, having let his hair grow for a record number of weeks finally chose a hairdressers in Medellin, I was promptly sat between two hair dressers (and their giant hairdryers) whilst waiting and the whole experience for both of us was very hot! But, as always, very entertaining.

Despite expectations for Medellin as a party town, New Year also turned out to be a quiet time as Colombian’s spend it with their family. So we found a nice little restaurant called ‘Barcelona’ and counted in the new year over pasta and cocktails.

We also organised a few days of Spanish lessons with the lovely Dora, whom I considered to be extra lovely as she bought chocolate prizes for the winner of her Spanish quiz (me). And so the challenge continued with our struggling Spanish.

With the arrival of new years day we started thinking about what next and realised we had somehow spent 7 weeks in Colombia and could easily spend 7 more but then we wouldn’t ever make it to Argentina! And so we packed up and headed 10 hours south to Cali. Another great city, we stayed in a gorgeous district and ate under the stars – but much to the owner of the hostel’s distress at our missing Cali we moved on the next day and headed to Popayan. A significant step closer to the border.

Popayan was a gorgeous town,

unfortunately with another hard Colombian bed so not the most restful time but we found Juan Valdez (Colombia’s excellent answer to Starbucks) and spent our day filling up on various coffee concoctions and catching up. Obviously not on the blog!

The food was also great in Popayan and we found some great steak restaurants, the first waiter questioned that I, as a girl, would manage the steak I had ordered, of course I surprised him with my eating abilities!

Popayan art:

As we moved to our final destination in Colombia, a border town called Ipiales, we also encountered local celebrations of the festival de blanco y negro – a day where historically owners of slaves allowed them to paint their faces white for a day and then the next day the owners painted their faces black. Now this means a lot of people with cans of white spray foam or black spray paint! So our bus was witness to lots of street side spray ‘attacks’ which was hilarious (from the protection of glass windows!).

Ipiales is not a very beautiful city to end your time in Colombia, it was hectic due to the festival and lively – and had a very beautiful monastery just out of town.

But also had the worst hotel we have stayed in to date (a bank breaking US $8) and we were glad to step out in to the sunshine and a taxi for the border.

The border crossing to Ecuador was very uneventful, and easy – and straight away we realised how cheap Ecuador was going to be for transport, about US$1 per hour of travel! Next stop Quito.

Medellin, the birth place of Botero