Well, the last few days have been very interesting, and busy, and have taken me to places where there is no internet connectivity, so I have a lot of catching up to do.
Incidentally, between the last sentence and this one, two giant palm fronds fell out of the sky and landed on the table about two meters away from me, the one where I was originally going to sit. I’m in the Restaurante Botero, in the Museo Antioquena, facing the Plaza Botero, where there are about 15 giant bronze statues by Fernando Botero, the Medellin-born artist, whose signature is painting or sculpting fat people, fat animals, fat birds, etc. In the tourista map, the sulptures are called “Las Gordas.” Botera insists they aren’t fat, but rather “volumnious.” Anyway, this is a very nice little restaurant, with internet inalambrica (wireless internet), and it’s a nice retreat from the frenzied South American bustle of El Centro, which I can watch through the huge french doors.
Anyway, I’ve been busy with new experiences, which I guess is the point of this trip, so I’ll try to list them:
Jueves (Thursday)–went with two of my classmates to do some volunteer work teaching English in an after-school program in Santa Elena, a town in the mountains just above Medellin. It was fun, exciting, exhausting, and frustrating. The kids were very sweet and very wild. They were really just interested in playing games, and the game of “learning English” kept their attention for about twenty minutes (los niños) to forty minutes (las niñas), and after that we became playground monitors. I think this after-school program is the perfect voluntario for my classmate Raphael, a very extroverted American entrepreneur (for real–I think), who in fact was the one who had been going there for a couple of weeks, and recruited Lauren and myself to help him. Then Raphael and his partners decided he had to go to Buenas Aires, Argentina (I need to specify the country because to get to Santa Elena from Medellin, you go through a barrio named Buenas Aires) to do due diligence on the Argentinian division of they company they are buying, which apparently has shady accounting practices, and anyway, Raphael was trying to talk Lauren, a young woman from Australia who has been traveling through South American for six months before returning home for graduate school, and myself into taking over his volunteer project. Raphael is a great salesman, but I don’t this opportunity is the right fit for me.
Viernes (Friday)–went on a 4 hour historical walking tour of El Centro (downtown Medellin). Our tour guide, Pablo, is a young engineer from Medellin, trained in Bucharest and Paris, who returned to home and discovered his true gift–telling foreigners the history of Medellin while leading through the places where that history was made. His take on the history is personal and passionate; his interaction with all the street people along he way is a model of paisa charm; and his delivery had an amazing level of energy. I knew most of the facts from my previous research, but Pablo filled in many gaps and made the story into a coherent whole. By the way, his loathing for “the criminal who shared my name” was never in doubt.
Sabado (Saturday) I began the day by riding the regular Metro Cable up then mountain, and then taking the tourista Metro Cable to Parque Arvi, an eco-park in the Mountains. Exhilarating. Then, in the afternoon (by this time, Raphael had already left for Buenas Aires), Lauren and I returned to Santa Elena to teach a group of adults. Between us, we had a total of about 2 hours previous experience as English teachers (that is, not counting the time spent playing duck-duck-goose with the kids), but we had a book, and our genuine educated accents, and we had just spent 4 hours a day for a week with a great teacher (Sara at Medellin Language Academy), so we winged it. The adults were very intense and focused–these people were the leaders of their little isolated community, and they wanted to learn. It was great. I will definitely return next week for a follow-up lesson. I hope more more people who want to volunteer show up at the school, so these programs can continue.
And that’s not even mentioning the cabs and the buses and the metro, which are adventures in themselves.