Cali, Curry, and (the perils of living in) Colombia*

*The title of this blog post is a nod to Kristin over at Coffee, Calculations, and Colombia, who recommended only the best of Cali and who we definitely appreciated!

This weekend, Warren and I headed to Cali along with our friends Marcela and Lindsey. After a quick bus ride down into the valley where Cali is located (quick being just over 3 hours) on Saturday morning, we were in Cali--the third largest city in Colombia. Cali is famous for salsa dancing and hot weather... and although I didn't get to experience the salsa dancing, the hot weather I can definitely vouch for!

With a lot of help from Kristin, we had a great list of things to do, and as soon as we dropped our bags (at Pelican Larry Hostel--friendly staff, loud partying backpacker crowd) we headed out for lunch.

Let me just say--Cali was worth it for the food. For lunch we had sushi, vegetable tempura, and summer rolls at Fusion Wok in the Granada neighborhood. Excellent! We enjoyed our food so much, we forgot to take pictures of it--but the restaurant itself was gorgeous and we had a great meal.

After lunch we met up with Kristin, who happily showed us around the historic parts of town. After touring a beautiful old church, we began walking towards an artisan's market... and here's where the story gets a bit upsetting.

After discovering the stairs to nowhere (above), a motorcycle pulled up next to our friend and tried to steal her cell phone. When our friend resisted, the man said to give him the cell phone because his partner had a gun. Our friend looked up and saw a gun pointed at her. Then the first man fell off his motorcycle, dropping the cell phone he had taken. Our friend grabbed the cell phone, and the man sped off. We did not notice what was happening until they had gone, but our friend was very upset. A man who lived across the street had seen the end of the exchange and offered to let us come inside while he called a taxi. While we waited for the taxi, the guys on motorcycles came back, but left when they couldn't find us. We soon hopped into a taxi and headed towards the artisan's market, shaken.

We're all fine. We were in a normally safe neighborhood. It was simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it still tainted our weekend considerably.

At the Artisan's Market, we all tried to gain our composure, calm down, and find cheap jewelry. We almost succeeded in the first two, and we definitely found some cute headbands.

Marcela at the Artisan's Market

After the upsetting afternoon, we headed to Chipichape Shopping Center, which has a Zara, and as we all know, Zara makes everything a little bit better.

After shopping, we ran to Exito for some cheap wine and snacks, which we happily took back to our hostel and enjoyed completely. We then headed to Platillos Voladores (Flying Saucers, because the food is "out of this world", according to the menu), which is a Thai themed restaurant that Kristin had recommended. It was excellent. I had a delicious plate of Thai Green Curry with Tofu, and it was by far the best meal I've ever had in Colombia. It was a good way for all of us to calm down and begin to enjoy our weekend again.

After dinner, we went to Parque del Perros and happily drank beer in the park, which is what the Colombians were doing, too! It was great and we had a lot of fun, especially at the expense of poor Lindsey, who a bird unfortunately pooped on!

The next day, we headed to Cali's zoo, which is absolutely gorgeous. We spent a very lazy morning walking around and goofing off. It was very relaxing and definitely a highlight of our trip. After a quick lunch, we headed to the terminal and caught a bus home. All things considered, it was a great weekend... but.

I have never dealt with any kind of violence or crime in Colombia in all the time I've traveled and lived here. Perhaps it was inevitable that something would happen at some point, but I like to think of Colombia as being generally safe as long as I'm careful. I also like to tout the glories of Colombia to all my readers in the hopes that you'll make it here eventually, so I almost didn't post anything about the "incident". In the end though, I think it is important to know that crime does still exist in Colombia, and while it's generally very, very safe, it's always best to be smart and to stay with a group.

Also, I just want to emphasize one last point: please don't think Cali is a bad place--we had a great weekend, ate great food, and had a lot of fun. I highly recommend it if you ever visit Colombia. It's important to let bad experiences remain bad and to remember the good--especially when you've just been to a zoo full of Titi monkeys.

Our Cleaning Lady

Our suitcases are packed, our bills are paid, and our tickets are printed. If everything goes as planned, we'll be in Florida at this time tomorrow.

More importantly, our apartment is cleaner than it's been since we moved in.

Yesterday, for the first time since moving to Colombia, we hired someone to clean our apartment for us. Previously I had been against it for ethical and financial reasons, but after living here for so long, I've come to some conclusions. First of all, having someone clean your apartment on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis is not the same thing as having a maid, especially a maid that lives with you. My mother had a cleaning lady for many years because she was working and going to school and raising three kids alone. Most of our fellow teachers have someone who comes and cleans at least twice a month. We were apparently the only hold-outs. Ethically, I am against "maids" because it separates and defines the social classes if you have a maid that you order around while you sit on your butt. Even so, since we're both working 50+ hours a week and then doing more work at home, maybe it is okay to have someone clean for us. I don't know.

This past week I was sick, tired, busy, and not in the mood to do the kind of deep cleaning required before leaving on a long vacation. Warren agreed that paying someone else to clean might be worth it, and so we found Maria, a young cleaning lady that was recommended to us by the Spanish teacher at LPV.

Maria arrived yesterday morning at 8:00 a.m., almost 2 hours after we had left for school. When we came home around 2, she was still here, scrubbing our floors. We had left a list of instructions, but she far surpassed any and all expectations we had. She did our laundry, cleaned our bathrooms, organized our closets, folded our clothes, mopped our floors, washed our curtains and windows, and finished a few dishes we had left. Then she cleaned out our refrigerator, and the woman even DEFROSTED our freezer. (It had about 5 inches of ice all the way around, and the entire week we kept saying "We really need to defrost that before we leave".) She cleaned and organized all of my kitchen cabinets, and she ironed. She also cut up a watermelon for us as an afternoon snack. It was awesome.

To get over my ethical dilemma, I also had to get over my financial one. Normally, Maria charges 25,000 pesos a day, and she's allowed to eat whatever we have in the apartment. That means she makes $12.50 and, in our apartment, some pretty lame food. (We haven't been grocery shopping because we didn't want food left in the fridge.) We paid her quite a bit more than 25,000 pesos, because I felt guilty. Also, she DEFROSTED OUR FREEZER. I felt better about having her clean up my messes, and I have to admit--we employed her for a day, and that's got to be better than not being employed, right?

Our apartment looks amazing, and everything is clean. She got every spot off the floor, she cleaned out cobwebs... I'm still in shock.

Anyway, we still can't really afford to have her come very often, but we'll definitely be calling Maria again. She rocks.

Perks of Living in Colombia

Last summer I had already accepted a position at a school in Seoul when we arrived in Colombia for a 6 week volunteering experience at LPV. I was very nervous about the position in Korea and frequently worried that I had made the wrong decision. At the time, our supervisor at LPV continuously hinted that perhaps we should consider getting jobs in Colombia instead. At some point, Warren and I both began listening to her and started considering it an actual possibility.

It didn't take us long to decide that we would rather spend a year in Colombia than a year in South Korea. Although I'm sure Seoul is a fabulous place and I think I would have enjoyed it, it was comforting to accept a job at a school where I already knew my boss. I had seen the school and lived in the city where I would be moving. As much as was possible, I knew what to expect. We agreed to return to the school in January as full time teachers. It meant moving back to the States for 1/2 a year, during which time I taught and worked at my old job.

Now that I've been here for exactly 5 months, I'm positive we made the right decision. Things can be tough here, but there are many perks to living in this country and working at LPV. While I know I would make more money if I could find a full-time job in the USA, I make a lot of money by Colombian standards and live very well here. We have a lovely apartment with nice furniture, and our building is fantastic. I have full-coverage health insurance, so when the doctor made a house call at 2 a.m. Saturday night, I didn't pay a cent. I get random holidays (like today) off while my fellow Americans are hard at work. (Next week is a 3 day weekend, too. HA!) Also, I get to experience another country and culture, which is priceless.

Even so, it's easy to forget those things when you work 47+ hours a week and then spend your evenings grading and writing finals, and I'll forget how lucky I am until I talk to a friend on Skype and they mention how pretty our flowers are.

They are pretty. The flowers at the top of the page are from La 14, and they cost $2.50. That's definitely a perk. Another perk is that I get regular pedicures here and never pay more than $6, including a good tip. We can go swimming almost any week of the year here, and we actually have a pool so that's possible. I've been growing fresh basil since February, when most Americans were shivering, not gardening. We live in possibly the best climate zone in the world--always in the 65 to 92 degree F range and no humidity because of the mountains. It's hard to beat this weather. The country is also beautiful--mountains, hillsides of coffee, tropical flowers, and palm trees are all just part of the view from our apartment or from my classroom. OH--and I suppose that working in a place like LPV has plenty of perks, too. For example, on Saturday someone had a wedding at the school. While we were there for our teachers' meeting people were running around and setting up chairs and things. Please think about your grade school. Would you have planned a wedding there? I certainly wouldn't at mine. LPV is a gorgeous place to work, and because I'm basically outside in the forest all day, I know I'm getting plenty of fresh air.


Another great perk that I often forget about is the year-long abundance of fresh produce. I made this pasta for lunch today. I threw it together quickly, with leftover bruschetta topping from Saturday night, random veggies, beans I had pre-cooked for minestrone, and a few handfuls of pasta. It was super healthy, super quick, and super easy. As I was eating it, I realized that the only "packaged" foods in the entire thing were pasta and olive oil. I made the tomato sauce from scratch using a mountain of tomatoes. The spinach was organic spinach I forgot to put in the minestrone. The basil was grown on my porch. The whole dish probably cost less than $5 to make, and as you can see there is a lot left. In the United States, this would be an expensive dish. I would probably have used canned diced tomatoes, packaged basil, and canned beans. It would have been full of preservatives and unnecessary sodium. More importantly, it wouldn't have been as healthy or as tasty.

There are a lot of perks to living in Colombia, but perhaps the best one is that it's good for my health. I get lots of fresh air, sunshine, and tons of healthy fruits and veggies.

I'm just going to guess that wouldn't be the case if I lived in downtown Seoul, although I have heard kimchi is extremely healthy. Oh well!