El Poblado and the rest of Medellin
I’ve only begun to glimpse the difference between El Poblado and the rest of Medellin. The casa where I’m staying is fairly far uphill in Poblado, actually, almost as far uphill as development currently goes, and I’ve been walking everywhere, which means that the relatively easy 15 minute walk downhill to the language school becomes a relatively difficult 20 minute hike uphill when I’m returning home. So until I learn how to use various forms of transportation (taxis, buses, and the metro), I’m reluctant to venture too far from home.
And so I’ve been staying in the nicest part of a upscale neighborhood (charming little restaurants, modern grocery stores, health spas, design businesses, gated apartment complexes, joggers, etc., all cleverly built into the side of a mountain), and commuting by hiking to the funky part of that same neighborhood (youth hostels, a park surrounded by open-air restaurants, motorcycle shops, and lots of little street-food joints). In other words, Medellin has so far seemed a lot like San Francisco, only with more security guards and razor wire, and, of course, a completely different kind of scenery.
This afternoon I made my first tentative expedition outside El Poblado, or at least, outside the worlds of gentility and tourista-magnet funkiness. After class, I walked downhill from the language school, instead of uphill, and made my way down to the bottom of the valley, where the Medellin Metro runs alongside a big busy highway. (There’s also a river there somewhere, as you would expect at the bottom of a mountain valley, but I didn’t see it today.)
On Calle 10, after you cross Avenida Poblado, you enter a different world. All trendiness vanishes, the shops become tiny and utilitarian without a nod to good taste, las policias are randomly stopping young men and asking for their ID, and the air becomes thick with gasoline and diesel exhaust. Suddenly the tourista (that would be me) feels like he’s in a polluted, lively, bustling Latin American city, where it would probably be really dumb idea to take out a camera and start taking pictures. Of course, I couldn’t resist this shot.