I To Go To The Good Airs!

I'm going to Buenos Aires tomorrow!

So, this is a slight (last minute) change of plans.  As I noted in my last entry, my dear faithful traveling companion, Jennifer, left me a few days ago for a farm in Samaipata, a city further north in Bolivia. I stayed here in Tarija, intrigued by locals' propensity towards the three hour daily nap, the rich wine-producing valley, and the similarities its culture shares with that of Argentina, as it is the largest city before the border.  My heart melted upon arrival here with the immediate linguistic inundations of ''¿vos cómo andas?'' and ¿qué se SHO?'' Ahh, they have the accents of Argentines but their woman don't have eating disorders! An eating culture! Yes! Yes! Jenn, you go on ahead, I'll be so fine here alone. True, I don't start work at the next farm for a week, but still...I can handle this alone time! I can catch up on my journal and maybe finally finish my Gárcia Márquez book! I can spend my birthday and New Years in solitude--yes, One Hundred Years of it, maybe! Now I'm getting into character!

So, my first night alone was spent reading in bed, completely naked, listening to my music. Ya know, the things you can't really do when you're sharing a room with someone (or some two, three, or ten, as the case had been in the past, as we typically opted for dormitory-style lodging when we were traveling through the continent). I even had my own room--such hedonistic luxury! I rocked out to my mp3 player, I danced a little, I felt the freedom of the open road ahead of me--no real plans for a week!

The next day I went to the market, bought some fruits and veggies, went for a walk, and made plans to meet up with a friend who I had met on a bus, who seemed interesting and worth a potential short term friendship. Maybe he could be my ''in'' to a social scene here. I'd have friends in no time! And if not, it would be fine, cause I could handle being alone!

He suggested I take a taxi to get to him, but oh no, not Ali, the ever locally-comporting traveling queen--I hopped on a local bus and forty minutes later, I was in what appeared to be a very, very residential neighborhood. Just houses and ladies with baby carriages. I climbed the steps of the main square, stood next to the giant granite head of some old European conquistador (or some Latin liberator, same diff, who knows) and looked around, right leg resting one step higher, shading my eyes with the palm of my left hand, perched like a conquistadora in my own right. Where was my friend? Nowhere to be seen. Which was strange, since he had told me he was already there, waiting.  The voice of my father, High Security Greg, popped into my head, ''Ali, it´s a trap. He brought you here to rob you, in fact, he's not even going to show up. Any minute now a band of twenty-something punks is going to accost you and rob you of all the pesos you have with you.''  My inner voice responded with, ''Ah, but yes, this is why I brought no more than a few coins with me. I am my father's daughter.'' Before H.S.G. could respond, a text message appeared on my phone. Well, really, my sister's old Bolivian phone that she gave me before she flew back home.

The text read:
''Se me presentó un problema, me vas a disculpar, ok, besos.''
Translation:
''A problem was just presented to me. You're going to forgive me, ok? Kisses!''

Uh, no. I'm not going to forgive you. Could you have even just waited for like, um, five minutes until I arrived to tell me this? And you're doing it via TEXT message? I'm sorry, no--this is unforgiveable. Get some social skills. I'm done. I called him to say what the hell, he mumbled something about his mother needing him, and that was that. Welp. I crossed the street, fuming, and got on what was probably the very same bus I took there, and headed back into town. Loooove wasting my time (and I had just so many things to do that afternoon!). Good thing I didn't pay for a friggin' taxi.

This unfortunate event did, however, yield one rather positive result. Upon returning back to the city center, I took a different route to walk home, since the bus left me on a different street than the one I had taken to hail it. Just one block ahead, a little happy oasis, a big flourescent sign with a picture of an ice cream cone. Heladería! Yes! I'm treating myself to an ice cream. Don't even care if it's the typical, soap-flavored, ice-chunk variety that is the standard in every other country down here except Argentina. I'm going for it--this is my reward for taking the bus and not a taxi.

I ordered the biggest one my seven pesos would buy me. Unfortunately, seven doesn't buy you much when you're two blocks from the center of town. Essentially, what I received was a bowl for Barbies. ''This little bottlecap of ice cream needs a little garnish of sorts,'' I thought. Thinking myself cuter and flirtier than I probably am, I batted my eyelashes and asked the girl at the counter if she could put a little bit of whipped cream on the top, just for me. She smiled and said of course.''Score!'' I thought, ''free whipped cream!''

Uh, wrong. Al, you're not that cute. The bill came--the whipped cream was two pesos extra. TWO pesos! For like, a fart of whipped cream. A mere suggestion of whipped cream! I should have asked if it was free, but I was half just hoping it would be free, since I had just one peso of leeway. Sometimes I think magically like that--that if I hope for something, it will just happen. Good, responsible method of decision-making for a 23 (almost 24) year old traveling alone through foreign lands, don't you think?

A cold sweat immediately rushed over me. This has never happened to me before! I had to sheepishly tell the poor girl that this white girl in a dress standing in front of her, who undoubtedly comes from a nation far more prosperous than hers, could not afford the ice cream she had already HOOVERED--alá Lay off me, I'm Starving style (rest in peace, Mister Farley. We miss ya, big guy). It was actually really good ice cream, at least, super surprisingly.

I apologized profusely, promising her on my firstborn child's life that I would return to cancel my debt. She just kind of smiled and said, ''está bien.'' No, it's not bien with me, I have travel karma to take care of.

I returned today to the ice cream parlor, which was jam-packed with clients, as it was a hot afternoon, and I think I caused the server more of an annoyance than anything else, as she was zipping around grabbing empty ice cream bowls off one table and running back to the kitchen to grab full trays of colorful soft rainbow mountains of frozen creamy treats. She clearly had no time to talk, and she proceeded to avoid my attempts to grab her attention.

I chased her around the parlor, pushing through the line of would-be patrons as they waited outside the door for a table to open up. The pressure was on, and I only had about 3.5 seconds to explain myself. She appeared to not even recognize me. I nipped at her heels and she finally paused, tray in right hand, three empty bowls in left, and it was my time to shine, to explain. I choked.

(Rough translation):
Good day! I to please cancel the debt that I to carried from the yesterday! I buy a ice cream that I not pay for all together! Not enough money yesterday! I to still owe the ONE peso! You to have it! You to have it! Take!

I pushed the coin into her hand, turned, and ran out the door, horrified at how my years of latin american travel and work experience and spanish language classes have culminated into one very awkward, nervous, high pressure exchange. Señora Nocera would not have been proud. If only the server had asked me to recite the vowel song! I can do that! Las vocales en español, las vocales en español, A E I O U!

So, anyway, my karmic energy is in balance. Hopefully, my bus will not fall off a mountain tomorrow.

My bus to Buenos Aires! So, to bring it back to where this entry started, I had a revelation on day two of solitude, after spending the day meandering around a sleepy city, being stood up by a flakey Bolivian man, and then laying in my bed writing what must be about 50 pages of introspective journal pages and then laying in the dark, wide awake, listening to my weirdest music. What was I trying to prove, waiting around this city without a social circle or any firm plans for the rest of the week, especially when it included my birthday and new years? And to whom? Is it just a societally-ascribed notion that we want to spend special events with those who we love? Or is it a desire we all share as naturally social human beings, regardless of culture? And who really cares where the desire comes from, anyway--did I need to be a stone-cold emotionless monk during this week, drinking a solitary glass of wine in my tiny room as I entered my twenty fourth year?

No. Don't need to prove anything. I had my alone time. Now, I want to be with people. I don't want to rot away in my little room. I don't need to wander the streets, looking for the next café, hoping to bump into someone who would invite me to a New Years party. I don't want to get groped by some desperate single in a bar on the night of the 31st. I am going to stay with Rosana and Enrique, my old host family from when I studied in Buenos Aires in 2005. They're thrilled I'm coming, and I'm psyched and also relieved to be with them.

I leave early tomorrow morning, and thirty hours later (yeowch, yeah) I will arrive via bus in one of my very favorite cities in the entire world. The city of men with mullets and skinny girls in, well, skinny jeans. The city that gives you little cookies on a plate when you order a coffee or tea. The city of real dulce de leche, of desserts that often look better than they taste (the eternal south american dessert letdown) but where artists and rockers and revolutionaries and bohemian bead-makers and old men who play chess all walk the streets in one colorful, raucous wave at all hours of the night!

¡Voy a Buenos Aires!

Please sir, is there room at the inn?

It´s holiday season, and I´m wearing a sweaty sundress. Not very typical of my ghosts of Christmases Past, but the air is buzzing with holiday cheer all the same, and I´m feeling slightly Navidad-y. Only here, instead of quiet, snow-covered streets and bundled families hurrying and sliding down icy walkways from car to house, here it´s reggaeton music blasting from moped stereos (I didn´t even know mopeds had stereos), large groups of friends and families lounging at tables outside shaded cafes that surround the main plaza of the city of Tarija, and sprawling open-air markets selling cheap Made in China toys, pirated CD´s, and anything from lampshades to bottle openers to televisions to Monopoly board games to boxer briefs to llama fetuses and other common household items.

I´m enjoying that down here, the 26th of December doesn´t come accompanied with the Christmas hangover of up north yonder. Christmas is celebrated until New Years Day, and so the parties, the street markets, the music, the rush of people in the streets, all of it is holding strong for at least a few more days.

Apparently here in Tarija, the custom is to set off fireworks on midnight of Christmas Eve. Jenn and I experienced this as we sat in our room that night, about to fall asleep. After the first explosion, I jumped and dove under my bed, fearing that we were under attack by the anti-gringa brigade. Soon after I realized that it was simply the way of celebrating baby Jesus. Interestingly enough,  now that we´re 36 hours past the customary firecracker hour, you can´t go more than five minutes without hearing a crackle BOOM somewhere nearby. I guess people must have a secret stash of dynamite stored away. Maybe everyone wants to make sure their firecrackers are the only ones people hear, each with its own explosion, instead of joining the cacophony of surrounding ones--more of an individualist response to a shared holiday tradition.  Either that, or the eastcoast-westcoast rapper warfare has trickled its way down through the borders of many latin countries. I better take off that TuPac bandana I´ve been wearing around my head.

Christmas Eve found Jenn and me wandering the streets of San Lorenzo, a little sleepy town outside the (relatively speaking) bustling town of Tarija. Now, Tarija is a place where everyone takes three hour naps in the afternoon, so please understand the nature of San Lorenzo´s tranquility. We assumed we could just show up, find a little hostel, and hang there for Christmas. Didn´t take into account there would potentially be only one hotel in the entire town. There was. It was booked. We walked around the square like little turtles, lives strapped to our backs, searching for anyone who might know of someone who was renting out a room. No one had any space. Exhausted, deflated, and quite hungry, we decided we´d return back to Tarija after all, but not before we found some grub. It was siesta time, of course, which meant that no one was open. It was like a bad Mary and Joseph reenactment. We swaggered and swayed with the weight of our belongings, enquiring at every little shop we saw if they had anything other than candy and soda. Nope. Nothing. Evenutally, we found a nice old lady who had some leftover cold empanadas, and we ate them in silence, contemplating the way that history will inevitably happen again and again.

Back in Tarija, and Jenn and I are saying goodbye for a little while. She´s heading up to Samaipata to check out this farm that really interests her, and I´m going to hang out here and work on a vineyard in the valley about thirty minutes from here, starting in a few days. I took a wine tour a few days ago and tasted the products from the boutique vineyards in that area, including that from the one where I´ll be working, and to be honest, it´s not the best. Most people are still making their wines extra sweet, almost port-like, and the practice of aging them in oak barrels before bottling has not really caught on, at least at the smaller places. Most of what I tasted was more akin to grape kool-aid and vodka than anything resembling wine, but I´m hoping to at least learn the general practices of cultivating the grapes and creating the juice that eventually ferments and becomes one of my favorite beverages. And if worse comes to worse, I´ll take a bus to the Argentina border (1 hour away) and hole away in one of the vineyards down there.

In Bolivia, por fin!

Well, folks, I've made it to Bolivia. Nine days after leaving Manizales, after 60 hours spent on seven different buses and two airplanes which crossed through four different countries, I am finally in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the city in which my little sister has been studying for the past three months. It is a most welcome pleasure to be able to just spend time in one place for a little while after so many days in motion. It's also great to see Emily, since it's been more than four months!

This entry would be about nine hundred pages long if I were to recount all of what happened in these past days, which is interesting, since most of the bus days have the same format:

- Arrive at bus station fifteen minutes before scheduled departure, as per the recommendation of the friendly bus company employees. You are, of course, the first to arrive, including the bus driver and/or the bus, save maybe one or two other whities with giant backpacks and Velcro sandals.
-All other passengers arrive one to two minutes before scheduled departure time, as does the bus you'll be taking. Bus leaves about 15 minutes late.
-Board bus. If it's a fancy one with TV's, it will inevitably be a D-list, straight-to-DVD feature, which will be either exceptionally violent or crude, or both.
-Stop in dusty town. Pick up more passengers.
-Fall asleep for about 45 minutes. Wake up, paranoid, check bra for the cash you've stuffed there, underwear for the rest of the wallet, reach into shirt to check for passport, pat the inner pocket of your jeans to make sure your ipod is still there. It would be rather unnerving for more than one reason if the ipod were not still there, not so much because you've lost your ipod, but rather since the music is still coming through the headphones you have crammed into your ears.
-Stop in another dusty town. Pick up some more passengers.
-Fidgit. Change position from the traditional upright, feet planted on floor position, to knee-to-chest, right leg out window. Accidentally kick Jenn in the temple in an attempt to stretch out. Hip cramp. Back spasm. Readjust. Invent new sitting positions for an hour or so, finally landing back in the traditional one.
-Sleep a little more. Head slams into window when bus hits a rough spot. Wake up, dry mouth, starting to feel desperate to get off bus. Whimper.
-Begin to obsessively check the time. Wait five minutes. Check again. In fact, forty five seconds have gone by. Good.
-Finally arrive to the bus terminal. Be accosted by taxi drivers. Pretend you know where your hostel is and use that bluff it to talk down the original price of the ride. ("No way, it's only like ten minutes from here. That price is exorbitant!") You've probably still been ripped off, but you're feeling triumphant about arguing the price down to half the original amount.
-Wander around city aimlessly, sleep in hostel, start the same thing over again the next day.

So, now that you know the general format of my last ten days, here's where I've been. I've stopped in Popayan, Colombia; Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador; Tumbes, Lima, and Cusco, Peru; La Paz, Bolivia, and finally Cochabamba. So many border crossings. I thought we were going to get robbed by the police in Tumbes (on the Ecuador border) for sure. Jenn and I hopped into this charming little moto-taxi, which is essentially a motorcycle-drawn buggy, and headed towards the airport (we flew from Tumbes to Lima to break up the trip). The sun was setting over the desert terrain, wind was whipping through our hair, and we were grinning with the feeling of freedom of no more buses for a few days when suddenly we were pulled over by the national police. A John Travolta-like specimen with a harsher face jumped out of the police pickup truck and shuffled his way over to us. He demanded my passport, and I asked him to please show me his ID first, since I had heard about police robbing travelers by the border. He looked incredulous, and not in the mood to play. ''But you see my uniform, my police truck, my GUN. I am a police officer. Now hand me your passport."
''I see all of those things, officer, but I would feel more comfortable if I saw your ID, just to be sure."
"In your country, do you demand to see the police officer's information?"
"Absolutely. It's expected."
"But I have a gun. Do you not see my gun?"
This went on for a few minutes, and the more he refused, the more I was sure that he wasn't really a cop, and at any given moment he would turn his precious weapon on me and take everything I owned. Somehow, though, the seemingly pointless conversation yielded favorable results, and he walked back to his truck, emerged with the ID, and shoved it in my face. He had also put on his police beret while he was back there, which I found charming. He was a police officer, after all. I gave him my passport, and after the customary five to ten minute waiting period in which he radioed into his base to check to see if I was a fugitive, he let us go.

Tumbes was weird. In the airport, we met a man from Lima who spoke beautiful English. He chatted with us about how he had studied in the U.S. in the 70's, went to some great concerts in Boston including Pink Floyd and the Styx. Then, while waiting in the departure lounge, we heard a POP! POP! BANG! which sounded like two shots from a cap gun and then a heavy object thrown into a glass wall. Our Lima friend burst through the doors leading out of the security checkpoint, followed by two or three security guards yelling, "Senor! Senor!" I was reminded of the chicken coop at Cecilia's farm, because this scene caused an eruption of whispering speculations among the seated passengers, and the sound was not unlike the noise the chickens would make whenever a large animal passed by the coop and tried to break in. "awwww que pasaaaaaaaa con ese hombreeeeee awwwwww visteeeeeeee? Awwww..." Anyway, the security guards grabbed him and pulled him into a secret room, where I assumed he would have to stay for hours answering questions, but oh no, as I sat down in my airplane seat, there he was, about ten rows up. I waved.

Since I've already been to Peru, I am okay with not really spending time there, at least on the way to Bolivia. I was just so anxious to get here, and I'm so glad I finally made it. Next week, Emily goes home and I head to Tarija, which is on the Argentine border, and is the winemaking region of the country. I will spend two weeks at an eco-resort on a lake, and then I hope to spend a couple of weeks on a vineyard. I'm itching to get my fingers back into the dirt.

In Quito and over it.

Ok, clearly not really OVER it; it's a gorgeous, cosmopolitan city. But it has definitely been a shock to the Colombia-adapted system. This. City. Is. Expensive. Did you know that Ecuador's national currency is the dollar? I found that out the night before I left Colombia. It was a surreal moment for me when, after crossing the Colombia-Ecuador border on foot with all of our belongings fastened to our backs like pack mules, we were accosted by cherubial Ecuadorian men with official ''money changer'' badges around their necks, fanning thick stacks of U.S. dollar bills. I hadn't seen George or Abraham in a while.

So yeah, this place is expensive. It's kind of funny--upon arrival in Colombia, Jenn and I spent the first week or so using mental math to calculate the pesos we were spending into dollars, to have an idea. Now that we're in Ecuador, we've been calculating our dollars into pesos because they seem more familiar. And clutching our chests everytime we arrive at the total, because every coffee, every little snack, every internet café, everything except breathing in the fresh mountain air, costs exhorbitantly more than it did in any of the cities in Colombia, Cartagena included.

It's also a strange feeling to be within the majority, at least phenotypically speaking. Tall white people run amock, they travel in packs, they fumble with their fanny packs. I have to remind myself, however, I'm much more of a Helga than a Julieta, at least on the outside.

Quito is beautiful, though--don't get me wrong. It's another one of those dreamy mountain cities that rests in a small valley surrounded by fog-covered rolling hills. Classic colonial architecture abound, and the Ecuadorian people are truly beautiful. I think I'm just feeling fatigued after yesterday's 15 hour bus ride. I'm sure if I had more time (and a little more money) I'd be singing Quito's praises.


You know you've been traveling in Latin America for a while when, after being served a coffee with two good quality napkins, you squeal in delight and say ''YES! Toilet paper!'' (and then you stuff it into your already existing plastic bag filled with a collection of similar napkins you've swiped from other restaurants). It should be noted that you are now familiar enough with napkin quality to make a discerning decision. Similarly, yet another indicator is the salvaging of plastic bags (''This would be a GREAT raincoat!'').

More busing tomorrow, hooray.

¡Ay Papito! ¡Ay Mamita!

Greg and Janet Smizer came to Colombia last week. Yes, it´s true! My parents joined the orioles and flew south for a few days (four, no more) to come visit me. The decision was made hastily--in fact, I didn´t even know (and neither did they) that they would be coming until about a week and a half before they arrived. It was delightful having them here, and also pretty hilarious. Those of you who know them will undoubtedly understand the limitless potential for good laughs and awkward moments.

For example. Consider the average sized Colombian and then consider me. Take into account that which I´ve previously written along the lines of size disparity, especially on the farm. Now consider Greg Smizer. Six foot two, solidly built. Petite and delicate? Hardly. Watching him cram his long spindly legs into the back seat of the car upon picking him and Janet up from the airport elicited from me a feeling of empathy and also giggly childish delight. Knees pushed nearly to his adam´s apple, chest heaving slightly to try to make room for limbs that would not rest in their preferred anatomical location, and the strained smile that attempts to convey the idea that everything està bien--we´re in Colombia!

Since their time here was so short, we didn't really do many touristy things. I wanted them to see my day-to-day, and my farming budget doesn't really allow for day trips into the mountains or high-end dinners. They came to the farm, we hung out in the city, we rode the brand new aerial cable, we went to my favorite cafe, and we cooked a delicous meal for all of our friends the last night they were here. I think they enjoyed themselves. I think it's so cool that they wanted to come to Colombia.

Anyway, much has gone on in the life and times of yours truly since I last wrote. After my parents' spontaneous trip to visit me, I took a spontaneous trip of my own. I officially left Cecilia's farm and decided to take a few vacation days before heading out in search of another farm further south. On the morning my parents left, Jenn and I took a road trip up to Cartagena, a city up on the Carribbean coast. Apparently, Gabriel Marquez' ''Love in the time of cholera'' was filmed there, so it seemed more than appropriate to travel to that region, especially since I currently find myself deeply entrenched in that very book. In Spanish, of course. I am reading it at the white-knuckle clip of about 1 page every five minutes.

We drove up there with our friend Maria, who is the owner of the boarding house where we would stay on weekends in the city of Manizales. Twenty three hours in the car. One way. Weirdly, it didn't feel nearly as long as it was, at least on the way up. I must have taken about 500 pictures out the window as we rounded curvy mountain passes, climbed up steep green hills, and joined the traffic caravans of large banana trucks and tractor trailers. The variety in the landscape was astounding. The temperature would climb and drop within an hour, to a point where you could be sweating like you've never sweat before at 1pm, experiencing zero wind and an unrelenting sun, and then by 1:30 you've climbed to the top of a hill where the breeze finally reaches you and the air has dried out, and you find solace in the shadows. By 1:45 you reach into your bag for your sweatshirt, it's actually not warm at all anymore, and you're high up above the valleys, and by 2pm, you're climbing down the mountain and quickly peeling off your layers of clothing once again. The towns through which we passed changed with the climate, too. The hot weather yielded vallenato music, which is that accordion and guitar tropical beat, and the people sat outside their homes in rocking chairs or hammocks. In the cooler weather, we found men in jeans and cowboy hats, cows grazing for miles and miles, and coffee drinkers on patios. I saw so many different shades of green, blue, and yellow, and I also discovered something especially delicious about traveling by land in Colombia: road food.

This is not your Roy Rogers or Sbarro experience. No senor. Think little roadside restaurants which serve heaping portions of freshly made cheese, hot chocolate, coffee, arepas (thick corn patties), avocadoes, savory soups, grilled meats, homemade sweets, and agua panela, which is kind of like really unrefined sugar, maybe a cross between molasses and brown sugar, mixed in with cold water and lemon. Delicious. And you need not travel through thirty miles of nothingness in desperate search of those big blue signs with the fork and knife logo, sponsored by McDonalds, as in my country. The rest stops on the highways of Colombia can be found pretty much every 5 km or so, which means that you never go hungry on the road. And highways are mostly one-lane roads with double yellow lines that everyone ignores, especially when you find yourself stuck behind a donkey truck.

Cartagena was immensely touristy, but also breathtakingly gorgeous. Situated on the ocean, the old part of the city boasts colonial European architecture with balconies overlooking narrow streets illuminated at nightfall by antique lanterns which emit a warming yellow hue. Bright pink and purple bougainvilleas wind whimsically around doorframes, balconies, and banisters, and musicians roam the streets with their classical guitars and it's all enough to make even the most callous of human beings fall in love. Jenny and I were lamenting the fact that not only were we broke in Cartagena, but single as well.

Maria's brother lives in Cartagena, and he let us stay in the vacant apartment over his store. Un. Believable. Also located in the old sector, the most sought-after real estate in the city, with high ceilings and french doors that led out to our very own balcony. We have been shown such generosity in this country.

One of my favorite things about Cartagena was ever-available coffee vendors in the streets. They walk around with thermoses and little cups, and there seemed to be one on every corner. Coffee when and where you want it. Heck, you don't even have to leave your house. The apartment where Maria's brother lives had a little basket with a string attatched to the handle. If you're feeling super lazy, or just too hot to peel yourself off the rocking chair, you can lower the basket over the balcony down to street level with your money, and the coffee vendor will place the coffee into your basket, at which point you just have to pull it back up (ever so carefully so as not to spill it!) and there you are! So much fun. It was like fishing for coffee.

Since realistically Jenn and I couldn't really afford to do this trip, we simply pretended we could, dealt with the expenses we couldn't control (transport, etc) and kept it simple with things we could control (food). We ate a lot of yogurt, bananas, and granola. Good bang for the buck. Punch for the peso. But don't you worry, we still left room for plenty of quality food, probably the best food we could have found, which happened to be some of the cheapest:

Example: Arepa de huevo. Egg arepa. Arepas in Manizales and other landlocked cities are more like thick corn tortillas, cooked over the fire. Arepas in Cartagena are fried, then slit open, at which point a raw egg is cracked and dropped inside, along with a little bit of cooked ground meet, then the arepa is thrown back into hot oil. The egg fries inside the arepa and when it is scooped back out with a slotted spoon, it's ready to eat. They must be eaten straight from the oil, because once they cool they get soggy and flopsy. You squirt some hot sauce or tartar sauce (or both) on it and eat. Delectable. Because what can be better than fried food? Food that is fried TWICE! But the arepa itself is only half the charm of the experience. These arepas cannot be found in standard restaurants in the luxe confines of Cartagena center, oh no. We had to venture out of the tourist area into the neighborhoods, where the arepas de huevo are sold on street corners. A few chairs are set up next to the arepa stand, where a television is almost always mounted on top of an egg crate so that patrons may watch their favorite soccer team while they eat. Good food, good soccer game, good time.

Also, if you go to Cartagena, don't leave without eating arroz de coco. Coconut rice. Sticky, dark brown from being cooked with panela, that molasses/brown sugar stuff I wrote about earlier, and of course, coconut milk. It's more of a dessert than a side dish, which I heartily appreciated. We took some with us on the road trip back to Manizales, but after digging our spoons into it at a rest stop, I accidentally left the box on the roof of the car. We saw a white little box-shaped bird flutter away and bounce down the road, spewing brown stuff, in the rear view mirror as we picked up speed upon driving away, and I had to try really hard not to show how incredibly devistated I was. Tranquila.

Maria's brother, Carlos, was one of the funniest people I've ever met. We spent the day on the beach of the island, Isla Tierra Bomba, and we got silly on beers and rum and gave them an English class. Carlos was convinced that the word for scissors was "chicken," and kept doing the scissors cutting motion with his index and middle fingers and saying "chee-kan, chee-kan!" We taught them the word "scissors," (SEE-zahrs!) of course, as well as "knife," (NYE-eef!) and "I don't understand" (Eye doh nonderstahn), among others. Sometimes, when Carlos spoke too fast and we asked him to repeat, he just repeated the same words at the same pace, just in his version of gringo Spanish. So funny. As if that would help us understand. And so for the rest of our time we all spoke Spanish with this weird harsh "r" sound (eg. "Varrmos ar lar playarr" instead of vamos a la playa), and it never got old. I like accents.

Tomorrow Jenn and I begin what will be the longest series of bus rides of either of our lives. We will travel from here to Bolivia in about one week. Not excited to sit still for a long time, but I am excited for street meat!

Sedentary Sally

This was the week of sitting, and strangely enough, I feel the most sore I've been since my arrival at the farm. Que interesante.

My week began with a violent bout of vomiting. Yep, my first weird stomach thing since this trip has begun. I think I ate some bad ice cream or something in the city the weekend before, who knows. Or maybe it was the rapid influx of raw milk into my diet. All I know is that I awoke on Monday morning with projectile vomit and dry heaves once my stomach finally emptied itself. Felt like someone was wringing out my intestines. Cramps do not begin to describe. Awesome. Jenn was a dear--she made me some herbal tea and intermittently entered my self-imposed quarantine zone to soak the cloth on my head in more cold water. I spent the better part of the day in an intimate snuggle with a medium-sized plastic bucket. Romantic.

Luckily, I found some antibiotics that I had taken with me, just in case, but since I am such a proud traveler who ''never gets sick,'' I had in effect completely forgotten that I had those little magic pills with me, since I never in a million years thought that I would have a sick stomach. They proved effective, though, and in a couple days I was almost one hundred percent better.

This week marked the arrival of two additional WWOOFers on the farm--a sixty year old Colombian woman named Julieta, and a twenty four year old French woman named Judith. Prounounced Hoo--DEET. I was calling her Hoo-LEET for the first few days, and she finally got comfortable enough to correct me.

Originally, the plan was for Judith to come with Julieta´s daughter, who is her close friend from university, but at the last minute, Julieta's daughter found a job and could not come to the farm. So, she sent her mom in her place, which sounds questionable in terms of the workability of a sixty year old, until you meet Julieta. First of all, she looks closer to forty. Second, she is incredibly fit. She has her own little farm outside Bogotà, mostly flowers, and she is a walking botanical encyclopedia. She arrived to the farm and was shocked to find that most of Cecilia's flowers were in rough shape. Clearly, because Cecilia's priority and expertise is food, not flowers. So Julieta spent the entire week repotting, replanting, and redistributing flowers of varying types and stages. By the end of the week, the farm was a different place. Julieta breathed life into the floral landscape, and I hope she's able to come back in the spring once the flowers bloom.

I loved having Julieta and Judith at the farm. They are true lovers of gastronomy, and we ate (and drank) better than we had in weeks. They enriched our kitchen with wine and chocolate, and Julieta baked this heavy, satisfyingly sweet and savory wheat bread, which was a huge hit. She put on a bread-making workshop for a few of the neighbors so that they could learn how to make a tasty yet healthy bread, and she also made homemade marmelade from the oranges from our own trees. So. good. I made more cheese, but to me it tasted even more like the smell of a cow than the previous ones, so I added a ton of garlic and herbs to it to mask the moo, but it was a futile effort. Tasted kind of like shrimp and cow manure. Julieta loved it though, even licked the knife when it was gone. Must be an acquired taste. Philistine as it may be, I guess I just have to come to terms with the fact that I'm more of a pasteurized milk gal myself. The romantic notions I have of sipping a frothy glass of cream straight from the teet may never be realized, and I suppose that's fine.

The week was sedentary partly because we took more coffee breaks, more sweet breaks, more breaks in general. It reminded me not to be such a damn workhorse. Sedentary also because we harvested about 100 pounds of tumeric, and we needed to soak, scrub, and dry all of it. Many hours bent over buckets of these weird little bulbs that look like the love children of a carrot and a ginger root. Scrubbed 'em with toothbrushes. Dyed our hands bright yellow. I took a lot of pictures. I'll show you sometime.

Julieta really made me laugh. She has a weirdly sarcastic sense of humor that I can relate to, and she never ceased to ingnite the belly laugh within me (even when my stomach was not in an ideal state). For example: when she pulled the loaf of bread out of the oven, there was a sprinkling of white flour on the top. She laid the loaf on the table in front of us, pointed to the flour, and said, deadpan, ''Do you guys know what this is? It's coca.'' We laughed, and she kept a straight face. Another time, she emerged from the bedroom with a plastic sac filled with liquid with a hose attached to it. It was one of those Camelback things, kind of like a source of water that you put in your backpack and when you get thirsty, you can just drink from the hose. Cecilia asked her what it was, and she answered,''it's for my infusions. I have to attach it to my vein here [pointed to her inner arm] and inject myself every night.'' Cecilia wasn't sure what to make of that response, and Julieta just walked away. Fantastic.

We drank some good wine this week as well, which is tough to come by in Colombia. It reminded me of how much I love wine, how much I know about it, and yet how much I have to learn. I am absolutely interested in working on a vineyard for a while during my time here, probably in Argentina, where my love affair with the nectar of the gods began.

The Colombiana and Francesa left this morning, and it was sad to see them go, but it was so incredibly ''rico'' to have them here. Good food, good drinks, good laughs. Important.

Sometimes, you just gotta hit the horse.

So, I´ve written before that I´m not a lover of animals (see:post entitled ''Cat Attack''). They frustrate me in the same way that certain humans do; they cannot be reasoned with. They do not follow logic. They cannot understand that, for example, escaping from the chicken coop and running freely down the hill is quite dangerous, and that certain hungry animals, such as our friendly pet dogs Lara and Negro, will be waiting at the bottom with open jaws. I was heartbroken a couple weeks ago when my baby chick, whom Cecilia named ''Ali,'' because I saved it, was eaten alive by Lara. I frequently try to reason with my animal friends, and I even speak to them in both English and Spanish, but so far, no good. Jumeth, our old lady horse, is one of the smartest animals I've ever encountered. She often finds ways to escape through the bolted fence--I'm convinced that she has fingers hidden under those hooves. She escapes onto the lawn where horses typically are not permitted, and at first, when this happened, Jennie and I would try to coax her back into her side of the fence with banana peels (one of her favorite snacks) and whisper sweet nothings into her hairy, twitchy horse ears. Nothing. Then, one day, when Jumeth had escaped yet again, we observed Trinidad, the Dr. Dolittle of the farm, approach her from behind as Jumeth stood munching on some raspberry bushes. Trini is tender and loving with all animals, and I think she really speaks to them. She loves the chickens so much that she refuses to kill them when we need to eat them, leaving the dirty work up to Cecilia (more on this later on). However, this day, she walked right up to the hefty old horse and gave her a big WHACK on the buttocks. The horse whinnied and took off running, towards the hole in the gate from which she escaped. Easy. Jenn and I looked at each other in disbelief. ''Sometimes, you just gotta hit the horse,'' was my first utterance directly following the incident. We've been using this expression ever since. It has many implications; I'll leave it to you to decipher them.

I guess one usage of our new saying is that sometimes you have to do things that might be outside your character, but are completely relevant and necessary for the given moment. This week, for me, was the week of killing things. On Monday morning, when we were feeding the chickens, Cecilia came up to me with a twinkle of plotting things in her eyes and stood over the chicken coop, and appeared to be counting something. I asked her what she was doing, and she said, ''You don't want to know.'' About an hour later, I found two chickens sequestered in the coffee processing hut, underneath baskets which were weighed down by heavy shovels. Jenn and I decided that they were probably going to be arreglado (literally means cleaned; organized), or killed. Oh boy!

I felt conflicted. I eat meat. I am doing this trip so that i can learn about where my food comes from, and I don't just mean plants. So, on one hand, I was elated. On the other hand, I felt sentimental. I have conversations with these chickens, even if they don't listen to me. One of them was selected because she was a ''mala gallina'', or bad chicken, because she laid bad eggs. A bad chicken? You say it like it's a personality flaw! She can't help it if she can't make babies! I had a flash of fantastic childhood urgency, in which I briefly considered lifting the shovels, running out with a chicken under each arm, and setting them free deep below into the coffee valleys. ''Run free, little friends!'' And then I snapped back to reality and realized that this was an important part of the food chain, and that it was a lot more humane than the methods used to raise and butcher the majority of the chickens I've eaten in my life. So, I let them be. I went back to my task of pruning the tomato plants, and I checked back about an hour later. Cecilia had already killed them, boiled them, and was in the process of plucking out their feathers.

I asked Cecilia if I could help, and she was pleasantly surprised. Apparently, most of the foreigners who come to work at her farm are grossed out about this process, and prefer to remain in the dark. Not I. Jenn and I got to work, pulling out feather after feather until all that remained were two naked, sleeping (ok, dead) chickies. After, I helped Cecilia clean one of them out. She saved every single part, most of it for us, and the rest for the dogs. Amazing. Jenn got a little woozy at one point; I turned around and her lips were purple and her face white, and she had to take a few minutes out. I was totally enthralled, brought me right back to high school Biology when we cut open those little pigs and explored their insides. The part that was most nauseating for me was when we plucked the feathers; sometimes, I focused too hard on the little follicles where the hair came out and I would get creeped out (kind of like the feeling I get when I look at the heart of a bell pepper, anyone else, other than Emily, understand this sensation? No?).

We ate the chicken for lunch that same day. So satisfying. So fresh. There is something really peaceful about eating something you helped kill.

Later that week, I bought cow's milk from a neighboring farm, since we only have a goat at ours. I wanted to make cheese. The man who sold me the milk told me to boil it first, because apparently foreigners often get the runs from raw milk. I heeded his advice and when I added the guajo (the enzyme from a cow's intestines that makes the cheese separate), nothing happened. Apparently, this was my second experience with death that week--I had aided in the killing of something again, and this time, it was the bacteria in the milk. So I guess you can't boil milk you intend to use for cheese. I felt sheepish. We did end up with some clotted cream, though, which spreads rather nicely over bread. The remaining milk is similar to skim, which works well for hot chocolate.

We bought more milk later that week, and round two of cheese-making was much more successful. Did not boil it. Did not get diarrhea. Double success.

Jenn taught Ovidio the term, ''OK!'' and now he yells it, seemingly from out of nowhere, at any given point during the day. I'll be squatting over a row of beets, and all of a sudden I'll hear it: OK! I will turn around and see him plodding across the field with a sack of something over his shoulder, grinning and chuckling silently. He's a hoot.

Death and Dying on the Farm. Scene.

What Is This, A Farm For Ants?

With three weeks of farming under my belt, I feel that I can say with confidence that Cecilia´s finca is built for those with slightly more delicate builds than my Norwegian-esque frame.

I think I have finally made my way out of the honeymoon period, and now find myself more settled, and seeing my daily tasks as work (which I enjoy) rather than a beautiful natural gift from Pacha Mama. To be sure, I am still in love with the work I´m doing, but I guess I´m starting to see things from a different (slightly taller) angle. I´ve slammed my head into the doorway of chicken coop countless times, partly due to the fact that I wear a baseball cap and it obstructs my view, and partly because I am by no means a miniature human. Cecilia, on the other hand, is, and as she was the one who built the entire farm from the ground up, I think it´s fair that the size of the animal pens and the holes in the fence that we´re meant to climb through from garden plot to garden plot are more Cecilia-sized than Ali-sized. I frequently get my shirts caught on the barbed wire as I try to wiggle my way under tiny crawl spaces, and my feet hang over the edge of my bed while I sleep. Also, in addition to my title as resident gringa, which I share with Jenn, I have also become the human subsitute for a ladder. Cecilia is thrilled to have a friendly giant at her disposal; I am finding that she more and more often calls me to reach high-up tools in the shed and clear fallen leaves off of rooftops (don´t worry, Dad, the rooftops here are lower than over there) and it´s just funny, I guess, to see oneself as a tool.

I have finally become acquainted with the varying classes of hormigas (ants) that make this region their home. The most common ones are little brown ones, which attack your foot and proceed to crawl up your leg with astonishing speed the moment you step upon the little mound of dirt they call home. These guys crawl into your socks and bite you, but the bite doesn´t really hurt, it´s more annoying than anything else, because you have to roll down your sock and pick them off of you, one by one. And then, there are the big red ones, the ones that latch on for dear life. Their bites burn, real bad. They burrow their antennae´d heads in your sneakers, shoelaces, pants, socks, SKIN, and you have to grab them with concentrated dexterity in order to pull them free from your skin. Plus, they hurt, so it´s almost counterintuitive to be grabbing at something with your bare hands that will probably turn around and bite your finger. This week, they seeemed to be everywhere, and it felt like either Jenn or I were doing the ceremonial ant dance (frustrated grunts and groants, stomping feet, skipping around, hands reaching down to feet and picking, picking). I never thought I´d say this, but I miss our friendly black ants that visit us in Boston in the summertime. They just walk around the house in search of a crumb or two, and you just pick them up with your own hands and show them the door, and nothing happens. They don´t form massive mounds of dirt, dirt which is essentially the same color as the dirt on which their mounds rest, so that they´re essentially begging for some poor unsuspecting traveler to set her feet. Apparently, though, the red ant poop is really good fertilizer.

Poop. I find myself talking about it a lot, lately, both within this blog and in common conversation at the farm. Maybe it´s the ant bites, maybe it´s the relative lack of human contact, maybe it´s the fact that there are few people my own age out on the farm, but I think I´m regressing. Jenny and I make countless jokes around fecal matter, and now that we´re becoming more comfortable with our farmer coworkers, we share them with these guys. Ovidio is a sixty-something machete-toting gentleman whose jobs most of the time entail chopping things down and lugging them from one end of the farm to the other. He is short, stout, and strong, with a slight case of scoliosis (my own diagnosis) so that his right hip is slightly higher than the other, which becomes more pronounced when he walks. His skin has been tanned and tightened from working outside all day, especially on his forearms and face, and he has freckles over the laughter crinkles on the corners of his eyes. His bottom row of teeth jut out from under his top row, and his eyes sparkle with humor and at times mischief. He always wears a sombrero typical of the men of the coffee region, and he´s got a fantastic sense of humor, which is why we have started to joke with him. I don´t know, I feel this sense of childhoodhood freedom when I converse with him, and so the other day Jenny and I were helping him clean out the manmade duck pond and we started chanting ´´Playa de Popo! Playa de Popo! (Poopie Beach, Poopie Beach)´´ and laughed hysterically until we were doubled over with muscular contractions. Ridiculous.

Ok, back to serious stuff. This week, I got to harvest coffee beans, which I´ve always wanted to do, since I´m a coffee fanatic. I took my Ipod down into the coffee trees and searched for yellow, red, and black little granitos, which I tossed with a satisfying PLUNK into the plastic container I wore fastened with twine to my body. It was a fantastic morning, I just rocked out in my little world of playlists and parted branches searching amid the majority of green, young beans for their brightly colored ripe brothers and sisters, bending the trunks back as far as they´d permit without snapping in order to reach the highest ones, which were usually the ripest since they had the twofold advantage of both prime sunlight and were also out of reach of the shorter coffee pickers like Jenn and Ovidio. Later, we ran these beans through a processing maching that de-shelled them, and they are currently laying out to dry. Once completely dry (4-7 days time), we will roast them and grind them and package them! I will save a few for us to roast on our own, over a small fire, so that when I sit down to eventually drink this coffee I will be able to say that I made it. And this will have a much different sentiment than the countless times I´ve said I´ve ´´made´´ coffee before.

Tranquilo

There are quite a lot of things to report on this week, and unfortunately, I had written an entire post just moments ago when my internet connection failed, the computer shut off, and I lost everything.

Tranquilo.

This word, translated literally, means ´´tranquil.´´ In Colombia, it is an expression which means ´´relax, no big deal, don´t worry about it, take your time.´´ It is important to me to continue to remind myself to be tranquila because sometimes once you lose something, it´s gone. It´s fine. I can re-type this. My intense, type-A perfectionistic, idealistic personality is really getting a good exercise in patience. Latin America is a good place for me to learn these lessons. If all else fails, you can always abandon your work for the moment and go take a nap, or drink a cup of coffee, or work on something else, and go back to it later.

Many things are unpredictable in life, and even more so in Manizales, largely in part due to the ever-fluctuating weather. I might even go as far to say that they experience more of a range of climate than we do in my beloved New England. They even have the same expression we often hear during the winter in Boston, ´´if you don´t like the weather here, wait a minute.´´ Today was a good example.

As today is Saturday, we woke up later than usual. When I crawled out of bed and stepped outside to stretch, I remarked on the great difference between the warmth of the sun at 8am and its heat at 6:30am, which is when we get up on weekdays. The sky was bright and the air was dry. It felt really delicious. Jenn and I made plans to go into the city, so after our morning chores, we packed our bags and prepared for the four kilometer trek down the dirt road to the bus stop. Not one second after I closed the zipper to my bag, I heard the resounding crack and boom of thunder in the near distance. The sky darkened, and the crescendo of falling water approached us, until we found ourselves under attack by gumball sized drops of rain, which fell from the sky with an intensity I hadn´t experienced.

Determined not to let a little (or a lot) of rain hamper our city plans, we trudged ahead anyway, and marched headfirst into sheets of precipitation. About a minute or two into our soggy stroll, a rickety, rusty truck rattled its way down the road towards us and stopped a few feet ahead. The driver rolled down his window and asked us if we wanted a ride down to the bus stop. I peered inside his vehicle and saw that there was already someone sitting in his passenger seat, and that the backseat was stacked with boxes, farm equipment, and bunches of freshly-picked bananas. ´´But, there´s no room,´´ I said. ´´No, the back!´´ he replied. Of course. How very American of me, thinking inside the box of safety and low-risk. Of course there was room--on the back of truck, especially if you grip onto the racks on top of the roof. Jenn and I exchanged affirmative looks and hopped on.

The rain and wind picked up, and it would appear that we got our ride in the nick of time. The dirt road became a mud river, and the water fell with such concentrated showers that it pelted us in the face in sharp needles. I had to keep my eyes closed out of fear of losing a contact lens (or eyeball). I waved to every neighbor we passed, even if I didn´t know them. We certainly were a sight to behold--I can only imagine what the onlookers must have thought. Gangly white giantess and her equally pale compatriote, dangling off the edge of the truck, bodies swaying with each curve and bump of the road. We both had smiles plastered to our faces for the entirety of the five minute ride. It was not unlike what I imagine an Epcot parade to be. We arrived to the bus stop completely soaked, like, we-just-jumped-in-the-lagoon-with-our-jeans-on-soaked. But elated. This is what traveling is all about.

Yesterday was another soggy day, and another lesson in tranquilidad. When I went to go visit my chicken friends at mid-morning, to check for eggs and refill their water, I forgot to close the door behind me. As I greeted my gurrrlfriends and we had our typical repoire (´´awwww gurrrrl whatchu doinnnnnn bwahhh bwwahhhhh gurlll whatchu got in that nest gurrrrrrrl´´[see my last post for insight into this relationship]), about fifteen of them streamed out behind me, a reddish-brown sea of poultry. Crap. I ran out after them, and began to grab them two at a time with impressive swiftness, especially given the fact that three weeks ago I had never touched a chicken in my life. I picked one up by the legs even, since I had read somewhere that if you pick them up that way they become peaceful and dream-like. Not true. The little bugger squawcked and flapped like nothing else, and I hurried to dump her back in her home. Just as I was rounding up the last few, I caught The Bully jumping on top of the babies´ cage, pecking at them, causing their trap door on the top to cave in on top of them, which allowed them to escape out as well. They hopped and peeped around in an anarchous mess, and I had to take a deep breath and find my tranquila before deciding on who to chase down first, and how to do it. I finally grabbed the last of them, put them all back where they belonged, and then sat down to have a one-on-one with The Bully.

I had been noticing that The Bully has been picking on the younger ones for a few days now, so I asked Trinidad, the animal guru at Cecilia´s farm, what the deal was with her. She told me that this chicken had been persecuted when she was a baby, and was certainly at the bottom of the totem pole, of the pecking order, literally. So, there I sat with Bully, and tried to reason with her using kindergarten logic. ´´Don´t you remember what it was like when they picked on you? Why are you doing it to them? Be a role model and break the chain!´´ She cocked her head to the side, and I thought I got through to her, until I caught her moments later picking through the compost heap, which is pretty much closed off, except for a little hole. This heap is where we throw the chicken poop and the leftover feed that has been pecked-through and clogged up with poultry saliva. It was then that I realized that a chicken who eats her own excrement, and the excrement of her brothers, sisters, and contemporaries, probably lacks the mental capacity necessary to comprehend empathetic logic. Ingesting poop and ABC feed certainly won´t increase brain mass. Oh well. I now fully understand the term pecking order. I will write about the social breakdown of the chicken community in later posts.

Other noteworthy points from the week, in bullet point, since this post is already obnoxiously long:
-I learned how to make goat cheese.
-I sorted and cleaned about 50 pounds of dried coffee beans, which are now ready to be roasted and processed
-Horses poop about 30 pounds a day!
-You can eat orange peels, if you scoop out all the white parts and soak them in water for a week, then dry them and sweeten them with a little sugar or honey
-I learned how to make peanut butter, by hand
-Manizaleños also dress up for Halloween. There are armies of little nugget children wandering around the city in costumes, and it´s really cute.

It rains here like I´ve never experienced. Right now it sounds like someone is pouring a dump truck-sized bag of quarters on top of the tin roof of this internet café. I get these wild daydreams of our little house on the farm being swept away into the coffee valleys.

Life on the farm can be simplified into two acts: pooping and eating. We eat, we poop, we throw our poop (and the poop of our animals) on the food we will eat in the future, we feed ourselves this food, we feed the animals this food as well, we all poop, and we throw this poop back on the future food. It´s beautiful.

Our goat is named Navidad, or Christmas, and she is the furthest thing from merry you will ever meet.

Thanks for reading! Tranquilo!

The Farm, a Week in.

¡La Finca, Al Fin!

So, I´m finally at the farm. I am beginning to see that it will be sort of difficult to post with regularity simply because we are kind of far from things like computers and stores. Which is charming and was certainly the goal of this trip, but yeah, it might be a while before the next post. Also, I now have a mailing address, so feel free to contact me if you want it! I like presents!

Jenn and I arrived 2 weeks ago after carefully following Cecilia (the owner)´s directions on how to arrive at her rural abode. After boarding the local buseta (read:minivan with a few extra seats squeezed in) and winding slowly out of the city of Manizales, through little hilly towns, and finally along the windy country road that snakes around the edge of the valley of coffee fields down below, we finally arrived at a rickety old sign with the name of the town. ´´A walk of fifteen minutes from where the bus drops you off, and you will arrive at our home´´ was what Cecilia what had said to us. I pictured a casual stroll down a dirt path. What she should have said was, ¨after forty five minutes of straight uphill mountain climbing, you´ll encounter a brief break of flat road, and then another steep hill awaits you. This should take at least an hour.´´ So, needless to say, with all of our belongings strapped to our backs, after a brief ´´you´ve got to be kidding me´´ exchange, we began the ascent in silence, like two little goats. Good thing we both used to be varsity athletes. An hour later, we arrived. Sweaty and buggy, but relieved to have finally found our new home!

The next day we boarded a bus with Cecilia to attend an eco agricultural conference in Pitalito, which is in the south of the country. It was an international venue for farmers, vendors, and people from various non profits to meet and learn about what others have been doing around south america in the name of ecology and agriculture. It was really interesting to me because it was organized by a leg of the Colombian government called SENA (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, or national learning service). Every region of Colombia has an office, and they run a school for children who mostly come from rural families with few resources, and in these schools the children learn all about sustainable agriculture and managing projects, and they each choose a practical focus like business management as well. And, it´s completely free. Really cool stuff. I wish our country had governmental programs that taught kids how to farm! Once the students graduate from the high school, they typically only have to go to university for 2 years instead of four because so many of their credits transfer. This makes university access more affordable as well. Brilliant.

Ok, so like I said, this conference was international. International, yes, but only for nations in Latin America. So, you can imagine that Jenn and I created quite the stir. Everytime I stepped out of the auditorium, someone grabbed my arm to either take a picture of the giant gringa, or they wanted to ask us what we thought of Colombia, or they wanted to practice their English. At one point, we had a giant crowd of about 70 people surrounding us, asking us questions and taking pictures. It was the Jenn and Ali show. I was interviewed for their local television channel, and I was also interviewed by one of their journalist students for their radio station. Famosas. Apparently they don´t get foreigners around there often.

Now, back at the farm, life is more simple. I feed the chickens every morning. The big momma ones make so many glucking and clucking noises when I enter their home to feed them, and it really makes me laugh because it sounds like they´re saying, ´´gurrrrrrrrrl...........whatchu doinnnnnnnn....gurrrrrrrrrrrrrl.....´´ and so I talk to them in the same way. They are large and in charge. Other daily chores involve feeding and milking our goat, whose name is Navidad. She is essentially a dog on crack, with horns. I´m slightly terrified of her, but I pretend not to be because I think animals can tell when they have the upper hand, and then they manipulate you. See last entry on cat attack.

Cecilia also typically has school groups come to visit the farm, and both Jenn and I help out with these as well. I really enjoy working with children, and I think it´s so cool that they get to have these types of experiences at such a young age, coming to a completely sustainable farm and learning about the importance of biodiversity. Cecilia is so charismatic and the children all stare at her, wide eyed, during her presentations. Then we take walks through her trails around the house and learn about the many different plants and animals that make that space their home.

I intend to be at this farm until the beginning of December. I already feel like it´s not enough time.

Cat Attack

So, continuing on our romatic exploration of the old historical district of Bogotá, we stumbled upon a ´´Pastelería Francesa´´ (French pastry shop) and, despite the budget we had set for ourselves, moseyed on in for a look and inevitably a tasty treat.

I should have known the place would be kind of expensive, due to the rather high ratio of gringo to latino. Upon entrance, I spotted a crusty-looking white dude with a blondish-reddish beard, writing in a leatherbound journal. I was willing to overlook the potential sticker shock of the establishment simply because, through a little arched doorway, I could see a sunny little courtyard with a glass roof and many hanging plants and little armchairs and other cozy little nooks. A photographer´s paradise. We sat down and ordered some espresso and a couple of little sweets.

Almost immediately upon taking our seats at a little wooden table, a rather lively and feisty cat bounced in to join us. She began doing the ´´scratch me please´´ dance by rubbing her head and body against our legs. I don´t really love cats, nor animals in general so much, but Jenny really does, so she indulged the creature while I kind of scowled at it and used the opportunity to dig into the chocolate tart while she was occupied.

The cat caught my eye, and I swear I saw a plan brewing behind her little slitted irises. She crept under the table and was soon directly underneath me, which caused my chest to tighten slightly. I took my first sip and placed the cup back down. Cat was doing the pounce face. She lurched back, jumped up on her hind legs, and hooked her paw around the edge of the table, hitting the espresso saucer and catapulting my espresso cup (and its entire scalding contents) onto my lap.

I had to trek back into the main room of the café, tail between my legs, to explain rather sheepishly to the barista that I had been attacked by the cat. I showed her the giant wet stain on my pants. Her eyes widened, and I saw her doing her best to hold back a good cackle, but she was quite the lady and instead handed me some towels and brought me a new cup. Awesome.

I asked her if this had ever happened to anyone else before. Nope. Of course it hadn´t. Friggin cats.

Día de la Marta

¡Hola from Bogotá!

Well, after a slightly ridiculous series of bumps on our South American road, Jenny and I have arrived safely in Bogotá. Our flight was delayed about three hours due to exceptionally strong winds in Newark. So strong, in fact, that the catering company´s little food truck tipped over (at least, according to the Spanish account. The english explanation left that part out. It´s fun to be able to understand the flight announcments in both languages). Anyway, we waited an hour and a half on the runway, buckled in safely, for the catering company and the airline to make a decision about whether or not we´d even get food. When it was decided that we would be fed, it was another hour and a half of waiting for them to manually load the carts onto the plane. It was quite the production.

Silver lining: The extra time spent on the plane allowed us to meet Marta, the woman with whom we shared our row. She was about the age of our mothers, and we struck up a conversation with her. What an amazing woman--so warm, so loving, so funny, and so welcoming! After five minutes, she had given us her phone number and address and told us if we needed anything, to please call her. I think she was kind of worried about us, simply because we are two young women traveling alone in Colombia without any big strong men to fend off the rif raff. She would not leave the baggage claim until we both had our stuff, and then she waited outside the airport to make sure we went to the ´´official´´ taxi stand. She didn´t get into her husband´s car until we were safely inside the taxi. Nice lady. But this was not our first lovely Marta, oh no.

In the airport, back in Newark, a woman asked Jenny if she´d take her picture. Jenny took the photo and as we were waiting in line to board, we started chit chatting. I kid you not, after no more than 32 seconds, she let us know that if we needed anything, anything at all in Bogotá, that we could call her. She gave us her number and trust, and off she went. Her name? Also Marta. I really love Colombians. I feel so good about this trip.

Our hostel is warm and plant-filled, and it perpetually smells like a wood burning stove and spices. There are sunsplashed patios and multi-colored hammocks hanging from the pillars that surround the little courtyards, and there always seems to be a hot kettle of tea or coffee sitting around somewhere. I´ve met the most lovely poeple and eaten some delicious food (today´s lunch included chocolate completo, which is hot chocolate served with bread and cheese for dipping). We are in the old part of Bogotá, called La Candelaria, up on a hill, and when you start to walk down the hill towards the main plaza and turn around, the view uphill is breathtaking. In the foreground you see this palette of pastel-colored buildings with balconies and spanish tile roofs, and then in the background it´s the rolling green hills that surround the city. Romantic doesn´t begin to describe it.

This has been a fantastic start.

Less than a month!

This picture pretty much sums up my family's relationship with food. Seen here are my sister and me, circa 1993, desperately wrapping our tongues around the prongs of the cake batter-smothered electric beaters. Not a drop to be wasted!

But first, before we go there, let's go here: With my South America departure date rapidly approaching, I feel like I should take a little time to sit down and write a brief overview of the story of my journey to this point in my life before I depart on my next big trip down south.

I guess it all started, in a town outside of Boston, with the utterance of my first word (or really, my first piece of a word). Pepe (pronounced PEH-pay). No, this wasn't my cute word for "papa," or "please," or something seemingly obvious. This was my word for "pancake," and it was my first. My family has always had a tradition of good food, and especially long, leisurely meals prepared at home, and on Saturday mornings, my dad would make pancakes. My parents tell stories of tiny toddling me, who would waddle into the kitchen, bleary-eyed from having just woken up from a night's sleep, chanting, "pepe? Pepe? Pepe? Pepe?" I would proceed to climb up into my high chair, buckle myself in, and slide the tray back towards my belly and click it into place, ready for my weekly ration of those beautiful, round, flat cakes of love. At first, my dad thought it was maybe my cute little word for him, but alas, sustenance slang won out over paternal petnames. It probably didn't take my parents long to realize my little toes were curling as I shoved fistful upon fistful of pancake into my sparsely-toothed mouth.

Years later, maybe twenty or so, and I found myself in Burlington, Vermont, where organic, local food can be found year-round, despite the fact that snow, too, is almost a year-round phenomenon (ok, not really, but its climate and soil make it a far cry from a farmer's paradise). Surrounded by barefoot vegans and organic crusaders, I started to question my own food choices. I was a self-proclaimed foodie and wine lover, but had never really challenged myself to find out where my food came from. I never thought about the long journey my apples took to get to my supermarket, and certainly never thought there was anything weird about the fact that, depending on the season, my apple might have a "producto de Chile" sticker on it. On the contrary, I would sigh romantically, head tilted slightly, eyes closed, as I thought back on my college semester abroad in Argentina, which of course is next door to Chile. "How nice," I'd think, "to be eating an apple grown in my favorite continent! And it's amazing how pretty it looks!" And then, slowly, amid the modern-day hippies with whom I thought I shared so little, I started to re-think our food system, and how my own food decisions affected the rest of the world. Why do our fruits and vegetables come from other countries, even in the summer time, when we could just grow our own? Why are processed foods actually cheaper than the ingredients from which they claim to be derived? What is the point of eating organic--that is, food grown without chemicals or pesticides? Is it really better for you? Is it better for the environment?

I started thinking about disparities. I started thinking about health, and how poor people are either starving (in most other countries) or excessively overweight (like in our country) and how both are often signifiers of poor nutrition and the lack of access to real, healthy food like fruits and vegetables. I thought about how our current food system might be affecting this. I had an epiphany. The community where I grew up had instilled a sense of social justice within me, and my formal education fostered and built upon that desire to pursue it in some way. I was a dedicated lover of food who was interested in systems change, and I realized that I could put both passions together through exploring the current food system and how it affects us all. Who benefits? Who suffers?

After Vermont, I moved back to Boston to work at a community health center, where I worked with children and families in a nutrition program. I saw firsthand how the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in a community (and the lack of money to buy it, even if it were available) will negatively affect the health of a population. I also saw that education and policy initiatives can help change the systems that make us sick. I managed a farmers market, learned about community gardening, and coordinated a community supported agriculture program, and through these projects I observed the true beginnings of a movement to change the way we relate to food.

And now, to further my food system education, I want to study successful, sustainable small farms. I'll be traveling down to South America through the WWOOF program, which stands for Worldwide Opportunities in Organic Farming. Through this program, I can work as a volunteer on a farm affiliated with their organization, and in exchange, the farm provides me with room and board. I hope to learn more about organic farming, to see the process from planting to harvest, and to talk to as many people as I can. I hope to absorb as much information as possible and to take it back with me to implement it into practice in the U.S.

And that, my friends, is my story. I promise the posts to follow will not be nearly as wordy as this one. Hope you enjoy!