Locombia

Well, it´s been a while. Colombia is confusing, so I´ve taken an Aristotelian approach to it all: let each event be a pair of spectacles, for which I have only one head, at any one time. That is to say, let the pacific brews, and not the threats of violence, blur our festivities.

Well, all in all, to begin to get to grips with Colombian living I need more specs than there were in my entire vintage collection, including all the pairs I left in the P section of the central library. So I´m just going to make a fairly poorly constructed list of bits and pieces from my bit over two months here as they come to me.

There are an abundance of horrid Miami style malls all over the place in various states of construction. They, along with apparently all the gyms, clean money lie new. A friend thinks their architectural style is one of the most dreadful outcomes of the drug trade.

In southern Colombia they sell the most excellent bagged, protein rich snack, the chontaduro. Resembling the tree tomato, and with a taste and texture that colours the grey area between pumpkin and bean, they are boiled, peeled and sold in mil peso bags in the street with salt and honey (which I´m guiltily eating here because the tropical flowers are so flavoursome).

Oooooooh QUE RICO!

Underneath the pit´s shell, should you be able to crack it off discretely and not get too much stuck in your teeth, is a sweet crunchy coconutty inner. utterly marvelous! And more than a little addictive. Strangely, though they´re from the Pacific coast, and have a reputation for sustaining the local population (there are gorgeous marimba numbers about living on chontaduros and marijuana alone) I was unable to scout any out while I was there. I´ve found the odd bag in Bogotá, but they´re double the price and, like last year´s apples, refrigerated, and a bit floury.

I spent a week on the Pacific coast, the area that following Peru´s earthquake (and during the Antonio Alvarez music festival when many of the costeñas were in Cali) was due for a tidal wave. The inhabitants of Juanchaco took the contents of their wooden beach side homes to marginally higher ground, about 30m above sea level to wait for the wave that, thankfully, never came. Lines of wave worn sandbags remain a constant reminder of such past threats.

From Buenaventura, a major port and consequently an area highly contested by all the influential sectors this country has to offer, it´s a forty minute boat ride to Juanchaco, where you can take a short walk or tractor pulled cart to neighbouring Ladrilleros, or, at low tide, a much longer walk to La Barra. Less than a month before I arrived at the coast, a man and young girl were killed in an explosion aboard one of those carts. The media linked it to guerrilla activity, but according to the costeñas that touched upon the subject, the man had a lot of bad debts in the area, and the death of the little girl was a tragic aside to a long period of loan scandals. I´m sounding less and less affected aren´t I?

The pacific beaches are long, wide, tree trimmed, mosquito possessed, and more than a little polluted by junk from boats and toiletry bottles. It rains buckets nightly in great rumbling storms that purple the sky. I found myself the butt of many jokes based on my fire building ability. Pretty much everything there is cooked on open fire bbqs lit with plastic, which is more plentiful and effective than paper. My poor paper based fire starting and a few toxic gas factoids was all the protest I could muster without sounding like a missionary. It´s a lot easier to convince people to not throw shit out of the bus window AFTER they´ve eaten the contents.

How glad I am that my Spanish is sufficient to ham together the local stories, advisories and television game shows. The superlative example, that seems to tie all the strange crimes and prejudices together ´Nada Más Que La Verdad´ (nothing more than the truth) is a distant relative of the´Who Wants To Be A Millionaire´format of answering questions to reach increasing booty brackets while sustained synth stabs colour in the silences. The twist, however, is that contestants are seated in front of three family members and close friends, and hooked up to a lie detector, forced to reveal the answers to a fairly representative spread of their most personal secrets. At least one contestant seems to have participated purely to shame those in the front row. Juice-y.

The last episode I watched featured a woman who admitted to having an affair, and child with her uncle, and working as a prepago for a drug cartel (a woman who is done some sort of favour by the mafia, perhaps in the form of a loan or television break, which is paid back through on call sexual service), but lost after denying she was uncertain about her sexuality. As such, she walked away with NOTHING but a lot of explaining to do . I hope you´re wincing right now. A couple of weeks back they pushed a food vendor to admit he dressed stinky old meat up as today´s and thinks his sister is fea (ugly) while the first 100 million peso winner admitted to investing his wife´s savings in an apartment for his gay lover. She left him seconds later, hopefully with half his winnings.

How they research the questions, which about 90% of the time require a ¨verdad¨ (true) response, I have no idea, but exploiting the darkest secrets out of the population for a little infamy and no prize money has illustrated some facets of this confusing culture rather colourfully.

The show has since come to rest, despite recruiting a good chunk of the telenovela audience (think ´Days of Our Lives´ with more sex, eyeliner and often strange historically themed locations and wardrobe) following the admission by one 50 million peso winner (about $NZ 30 000) that she had hired an assassin to take care of her husband. If you want a look-sy, all the videos are up on the show website in the VIDEO SALA. You don´t need to worry about the Spanish with all that synth working for you.

All Sundays and public holidays the main routes throughout the city of Bogotá are turned into ´ciclovias´, or cycleways, filled with families of bikes, skates, motorised trolleys, fresh fruit and juice vendors and cycle pit stops.
The truly scary traffic comes back at two sharp, so the last quarter hour can be a bit hairy if you´re on latino time.

You can have the price of any credit card purchase you make divided over as many months as your doctor advises. They call this system cuotas. I´m yet to really test it out.

People are super protective of their personal information here. Friends won´t be involved in supermarket flybuys´ style point schemes in case their membership card falls into the hands of someone, perhaps working at the supermarket, involved in any of the number of organisations that would want to threaten their families and extort money from them. They call this extortion a ´vacuna´, or vaccination, an oft increasing monthly payment that keeps your family, farm, transport business, fruit company union workers, from coming to any harm.

The local Blockbuster Video was recently reminded to keep their balance in the black by a parking lot bomb. Stories of parents disappeared by paramilitary and guerrillas after being unable to keep up the payments are as numbingly commonplace as the farmers and small scale land owners disappeared during CONVIVIR.

There´s a saying here, other than ´todo es posible, nada es seguro´(everything´s possible but nothing is certain, the most popular quote of taxi drivers going ´contraflujo´, or the wrong way down a one way street), that says, at this time in Colombia, it´s hard to know if it´s worse to have a lot or have little, as both present an equal threat to your life equally. Pushed to choose, I´d take more, give a bit, and keep my membership cards to a minimum.

A friend of mine has another approach to keeping capital from the various mafias. As well as being particularly careful with his personal information, he´s involved in a pot growing collective with his mates. Better living everyone.

More so than any other country I´ve visited, Colombia is festival HQ. Thus far I´ve been privy to festivals of theatre, books, music, cinema, kites, dancing, and art in more variations and intricacies than you have the patience to read. There is always, always something to marvel at. And the street art is poderoso, that is to say, really powerful.

This one comes from the Universitario del Valle in Cali, and was taken during the manifestation to mark the birthday of Katherine Soto, a young student who presented a threat to police by crossing a seldom used bridge in the early morning to see the sunrise. She was gunned down at the scene. It reads " All species evolve except rights. The police kill students".

It was the first of two manifestations that I´ve seen so far, which seem to start with the students calling up the police to come to the University, and them subsequently responding with tanks and riot gear at which to throw big bomb-noise rocks and molitovs, while leaping along the rooftops, identities hidden in pillow padding. I personally don´t understand why the police insist on responding to such call-outs, because there really wouldn´t be much to aim at if they stood them up. Maybe it just looks good on the CV? I hear Coca Cola needs more union workers.

Bueno. Not an entirely balanced account of Colombia thus far, but some of the more interesting findings for someone whose Spanish is finally allowing her to get a grip on well disguised local currents. That said, the people here are the warmest, most welcoming and least likely to whistle obscenities at me, the coffee is the best, the rumbas are the loudest, longest and most inclusive, and all the things I was warned about, namely bus travel, is yet to cause the slightest anxious furrow. Plus, Bjork, Soda Stereo and Toto are all playing Bogotá within the month. Wohoo!

This final snap was taken in San Agustín, the birth place of Colombia´s three great rivers and as such, a location of great spiritual importance to many. You best believe I don´t have photoshop access here.