Basketball at Midnight

The Journey So Far

Most of the time since my initial post has been spent traveling.  Selby and I left her apartment at 3:45am on Thursday to catch the metro to the airport for our 6:00 flight, arrived at the Medellin International Airport around 3:00pm, and reached a guesthouse (hospedeja) around 6:00pm, after spending an hour getting our cell phone unlocked.  We borrowed an older AT&T phone from a friend, knowing that the protocol that AT&T and T-Mobile use are also used by most of the rest of the world.  For US$2, we can get a chip that allows us to use the phone natively in Colombia; however, we first have to get the phone unlocked from the AT&T network – an ordeal that cost almost as much as the cheapest new phone available.  Regardless, we did it, and we have it.

Medellin is a beautiful, massive city in a valley surrounded by tall mountains, and we had to snake down from the airport 30km away into the center of the city.  The inital vistas were fabulous, and the first portions of the city we entered were upscale and full of shopping centers, bars, and eclectic restaurants (the Asian resturant along the highway is a notable example).  At this point, except for the clay-ceramic shingled roofs and the Spanish signs, it wasn’t that far off from what you might have expected in the USA.  The city was clean, the other vehicles were in good repair (and included such models as Chevy, Hyundai, and Toyota), and our bus was climate controlled and seemed to be a recent model.  It wasn´t until we got closer to the center of the city did we go through more heterogenous neighborhoods that appeared to be poorer than you would expect from back home. 

From our hospedeja, we took the metro to another area of the city with more shopping and restaurants and walked around until we found a restaurant that met our liking.  The cook was extremely genial and seemed thrilled to offer us course after course: soup, the main course, a sweet, coffee, and tea- all included in the plate of the day.

Today, after checking out of our hotel, we again took the metro to the bus station, took a large, fancy bus south to Pereira,  about 6 hours away.  Cousin Ruben (Gloria’s brother) met us at the station and put us on a minibus to Apia, the family home.  Lucy had arranged for him be at the terminal for the transfer, and Selby and I were amused that they didn´t think we could find the ticket booth and the subsequent bus to get to Apia by ourselves.

We finally arrived in Apia around 6:30pm, and Cousin Lucy (Gloria’s sister) met us, fed us, and has taken us in for a few days.  We are staying in the family house, just off the square in the center of the village.  Although we arrived after dark, we can see that the village is built on the top of a mountain, and the roads have a much steeper slope than, probably, any town I have been in in the USA, including San Francisco.  I will write more about the views in the future.

Initial Impressions of Colombia

There are several things that strike me initially about Colombia.  The people are extremely warm and friendly, are willing to put up with me piecing together Spanish words and pronouncing them incomprehensibly over and over again, and are more than willing to help.  To this point, I haven´t noticed any significant attempt to jack up prices for the foreigners, and prices seem similiarly mostly fixed, as they were in nearby Nicaragua .  It has also been a surprisingly clean country, and the roads in Medellin and major highways between state capitals are reasonably wide and kept in very good repair (expect the road construction in which they were repaving them). which is a significant divergence from Nicaragua.  It occurred to me that this is an especially impressive feat, as only a small portion of the trip was on anything resembling flat land, and the roads were often carved into the mountainsides.  Although we saw a set of buses that were lower quality than the ones we had taken, they would have ranked highly in Nicaragua and much of Asia.  In fact, Colombia most closely mirrors Malaysia in infrastructure, cleanliness, and ¨standard of budget traveling.¨

So in short, after two days spent almost entirely traveling, things are fantastic.