Sunday Night Songs

Sunday night I was invited to a friend’s family party. A nephew and his girlfriend were going to Chile for a conference and the family was seeing them off, helping them get there. I tried to give them 10,000 COP (about $5 USD) as a way to show my gratitude, but my money was firmly handed back to me.

I arrived late, under-dressed, empty-handed. It was misting here (it always is), and I was coming from work (I always am).

They took my coat, sat me down, handed me a glass of hot sangria with a sugar rim. There was a rifa, where I won a hand towel with a green frog, and a small porcelain angel that I unceremoniously dropped and broke an hour or two later.They fed me ajiaco, my new favorite soup.

But the singing, oh the singing! That is what I came here to share. Once the eating and gift-giving was over, the two guitars came out and everyone, everyone sang. Even the shy 10-year-old who held the guitar with the strings facing up towards the ceiling, and murmured Hey Soul Sister. There were songs about aguardiente and being Colombian, being unable to find the right man to marry, unrequited love, gypsies, doing something versus saying you’ll do it.

Of course, with everyone else singing, I was cajoled into singing something in Russian. My repertoire consists of children’s songs or mid-90s rap. I chose Миленький ты мой, a short song, very repetitive. Luckily only the very last sentence of my a cappella rendition was captured on video.

Video evidence presented for posterity

The universality of it all is what I love most. That people in every country I have lived in, have sang together, played guitar. The songs tell the same stories – the beloved country, the hope and despair of love, the fleeting nature of youth. Whether it’s on a friend’s couch in Vermont, around a campfire in Russian summer camp, in dark Massachusetts basements, on Chilean buses -  the words, language, setting may be different, but the guitar sounds the same and the heartstrings respond the same.

A Taste of Home: Ice Cream!

I was feeling a little angst-y due to being at a desk all day, so I did what any angst-y young person does: I went to the mall. Centro Comercial San Martin has a gym inside (Spinning Center – membership is $90/month), a grocery store (Exito! the successful supermarket), and a bunch of overpriced, empty shoe stores. And a Crepes and Waffles!

I was responsible & went grocery shopping (successfully!) instead of eating dessert for dinner. But after dinner, I indulged in this delicious chocolate ice cream with maraschino cherries inside:

My grandmother’s favorite way to eat ice cream: with chips.

Add some blackberry jam, and salty potato chips, and there’s no need to leave the house for dessert. Ice cream with potato chips. I know, it’s an acquired taste. It’s the sibling of chocolate covered pretzels.

What strange snack reminds you of home?

Shoulda, Coulda, Didn’t Pack: Gifts

This morning, I complimented one of my coworkers on her earrings, and got a new set of earrings. I tried to not accept them when, to my horror, she took them off and placed them in my hand. (Horror might be too strong, but it felt like I was in the midst of something messy and there was no going back.) It’s not that I wanted her earrings, I just wanted her to know how nice they looked, on her.

Um, where can I learn about the ethics of gift-receiving?

Last week at lunch, I mentioned how much I love sweets. The coworker I was dining with walked down the street and brought back two chocolates for us to share over tea. Another coworker brought me a Colombian dessert  (guayaba con manjar blanco) the next day.

Friday night when my supervisor called. Her cousin has a room I could rent. A doctor takes me to her house after work, introduces me to her whole family, invites me to live with her. After work last Saturday, one of the psychologists drove me to her house, where I met her mom and son. We had arepas and hot chocolate for dinner, talked about life, watched the soccer game.

Over lunch my coworkers noticed I have been at work too much, that I haven’t seen the city outside the couple blocks I live and work in. I now have invitations to the Museo de Oro, another coworker’s house, a personal guide for the bus system (Transmilenio). I’ve been invited to attend dance classes, dinners, festivals. One coworker is setting me up on a date. Another is taking me out dancing.

How can I not want to be at work every day? I’m learning how to navigate this extraordinarily giving culture. How can I be polite and share what I like – without receiving anything? The doctor I’m sharing an office with told me not to worry, that it means people are accepting me, that they like me.

I wish I had packed things with me to share – things I could be giving away. It’s poor form really, to arrive somewhere without a gift. Maybe if I convince some friends to visit, they could bring some gifts down.

What US  or Russian item(s) would make a good gift?

You May Ask Yourself: What Is She Doing in Bogota Anyway?

You may find yourself in another part of the world…doing research.

I am doing things besides buying bubble gum TP, looking at vaginas and going to parades. I swear. I did say that I’m sitting around the office all weekend doing something.

The truth is, I’ve been avoiding writing about work because I don’t know how to write about work. What do I say?

I am doing Research, the kind that involves being around people and asking them questions to try to make something easier, better. Right now a lot of the work involves sitting at a desk all day, everyday. Sending emails, editing draft after draft of protocols and scopes of work and schedules. Working slowly, with much complaining, on a seemingly endless literature review.

This is the uninteresting part, the part that makes people dislike research. I understand. I don’t like opening documents filled with more comments than text, editing the same paper 23 times, fiddling with citations. I get it. But, maybe, it’s worth it? All the persnickety, nit-picky, flip-flopping that goes into making a decision about which questions to ask, how to ask them, when, to whom, by whom.

I’m in the midst of the paper part. What’s there to say?

Colombian Curiosities: cell phones on a chain, gum-scented TP, garden tables

First let’s look at a theft-prevention device connected to a communication device. It’s a phone-on-a-chain! Where 1 minute of cell-to-cell calling costs 150 – 300 pesos (7 – 21 cents). A vendor (a store or person on the street) has 3-4 cell phones on them (one per phone company) and rents you the phone by the minute. To ensure that the phone won’t be stolen, its attached to a chain. Brilliant!

Note my excitement at using the phone-on-a-chain

At The Nunnery, I share a bathroom with one other resident. We’re required to provide our own toilet paper. (I guess Jesus could make wine and fish multiply, but not toilet paper.) I associate bringing your own toilet paper with ritualized homelessness masquerading as vacationing. The landlord saw my confusion and walked me down the street to buy toilet paper at the only store open late – the packie. I brought my roll home, and took it out of the plastic packaging to find out…it smelled like bubble gum. The smell infiltrated everything, making clothes and bags and beds smell pink, sticky. Back home we have unnecessarily scented menstrual products; here it’s toilet paper.

Invasive TP species momentarily contained by plastic packaging

Lastly, here’s a photo of Colombia’s president, Santos, dining with some distracted-looking businessmen this week. I’d be distracted too, if I had a garden in the middle of the table. Or in a conference room at all. What is this, a greenhouse? A wedding reception?

Bilateral negotiations among psychedelic flowers

Surely you, dear reader, have also seen some strange things while traveling or living abroad. Maybe you even have photo evidence. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen outside the US?

Bogota Apartment Search: Officially Over

Before I tell you where I am living, here are some places I’m not living:

A glorified closet with a window (huge step up from NYC!), rooming with a vegan anarchist polisci student  who works in a feminist collective, sleeps like a log and has an extra bike. Nearby there’s a Crepes & Waffles ($3 ice cream sundae? hot cocoa with marshmallows? YES please!) and a gym (with $15/month membership including classes). The storage room doubles as a laundry room, and clothes take 2 days to air dry – which seems weirdly inconvenient in an let-me-tell-you-a-story way. The shower was a suicide shower, with its its own shower area (rather than just being a pipe jutting out of a wall between a toilet and a sink). And rent was $150/month including wifi and utilities.

(I’ve decided to move in to apartments for much less. One time, there was a lilac tree outside the front door. Another time the street was named after a city I used to live in.)

This room, the $150 one, was about 40 minutes walking to work. Given that I’m in at 7 am most days, the thought of waking up at 5:30 was somewhere between unsettling and painful.

Other apartments I looked at had 22 people in one house (cupos universitarios), with cardboard dressers,  rooms subdivided into smaller rooms, and an interrogation-style lightbulb dangling from the celing. Food was included in the price, and consists of a plate placed into a locked wooden cubby at mealtimes, with each resident heating up the slop in the microwave when they get home.

Another apartment had a computer, and when I asked if there was wifi, the landlord called her 8 year old grandson over, who explained with much enthusiasm that the computer could go to facebook and google search.

Here’s the view from my current place:

My work is the house in the left of the photo, and the mountains are to the East of the city. If I squint a lot, it could look like the (distant cousin of the) view from my Santiago, Chile apartment:

I’m living half a block from work, in a nunnery*. It’s $206 a month, furnished, wifi and once-a-month laundry access included. The women I’ve met so far are students, workers friendly. It’s a month-by-month arrangement, so if I decide to start having a life outside of work, I can move somewhere more interesting in mid-September.

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*OK, so it’s technically just a clean, quiet house full of women, with a curfew. But doesn’t The Nunnery sound better?

Long Weekend Hybernating in the Office

I’ve been living in the office this long weekend. Monday is a holiday here. Just me upstairs and the painters downstairs. Heady paint fumes wafting up the stairs, through the silent corridors and into the room. Sunlit in the afternoon, the light reflecting off the wooden ceiling.

My third rendition of the literature review is due Tuesday morning, and the Director of Services has graciously given me full access to her office and computer this weekend. (My baby computer, BB, has an itty bitty screen.)  I feel important just sitting in her office, using her chair, clicking her mouse.

I love the silence of this place, interrupted by the floor’s gentle creaking when I walk to the kitchen for tea. Always more tea, to fight off the cold, warm up my hands for faster typing. Inexpensive black tea, anything, will do when it is cold. (One of the things I miss most so far is my favorite tea.)

In middle school and high school, I used to stay after school most days. I didn’t play sports and many clubs were at the ungodly hour of 6:30 am. I had no reason to stay so long, but the quiet soothed me. A space so riotous, electric with angst during the day, suddenly calm and tranquil. When I taught in a high school, I still liked to stay late, when the hallway lights were dim and classroom doors were darkened, closed; a building napping.

It’s also that I had nowhere particularly exciting to go. So it is much the same here, with my hostel two blocks away from my practicum site, and my days filled with research and not much else. I spent 49 hours in the office my first week, and 9 hours a day during the holiday weekend. I feel like a writer, a Real Writer, sitting in front of the computer in the dark silent house. Though I’m just making a spreadsheet, and rewriting a literature review. It’s the little things.

Vagina Week Is Better Than Shark Week

I saw more vaginas last week than I have my whole life. They’re amazing. Each one’s different, like noses, toes, kneecaps. One of my favorite ways to pass the time on public transportation is to look at everyone’s noses. Pick a body part in a crowded place and notice how everyone’s is similar but individual, a symphony of genetic variety.

So, vaginas. Between pelvic exams, Pap smears, and procedures I’ve seen about twelve or fifteen this week, women allowing us to see the softest, most vulnerable part of their bodies. It’s an underappreciated body part. It’s where we all came from! Before I go off on a tangent about politics and religion controlling vaginas and the people who have them, vagina books (even coloring books), let me tell you why I’m seeing so many of them lately.

This past week was week 1 of my practicum: 49 hours observing 12 pelvic exams, 6 counseling sessions, 3 procedures, 2 Pap smears. I have a renewed reverence for vaginas. They can accomplish things no other organ can!

I’ve been following every type of provider, observing the reception area, counseling sessions, procedures, follow-up appointments. Everyone has stretched and expanded to let me in, to warmly welcome me. I feel comfortable and grateful for my new home. I am surrounded by doctors, nurses, psychologists, researchers who respect, appreciate and help vaginas. And the women who have them. What an honor, this work, this project, this place.

Bogota, Colombia: First Impressions

It is cold and alternately misting or sunny. The view on my street in the afternoons is intermittent sunshine on the hills, with rain starting and stopping as it pleases. The roads are quiet, abandoned except during rush hour.

The corn sold here is somewhat similar to the type sold by Mexican maiz street vendors. I still remember the corn seller passing by the Mexican house I lived in shouting mai-mai-mai. It is warm, salty, buttered cardboard.

Communication is formal, polite, humble. Everyone is “Señor” or Señora“. It is not diminutive like Chilean Spanish, nor immediately friendly like Dominican Spanish. It is not fast or shrill. I’ve started a list of Colombianismos, and hope to have a full page by the end of the week. It’s slow going; so far everything is cloro. If you’re feeling really fancy/polite, you can say su merced instead of Señora. I am not quite there yet – it still feels overly formal, too punctilious.

Did I mention it’s cold? Seattle weather all around, all around.

Bogota Parade: Desfile Metropolitano de Comparsas

Sunday, my first full day, included seeing two apartments, finding my practicum site, and meeting up with some new friends for a picnic & parade. Of course, I got the obligatory first day suburn, despite the misty weather. The suburn wasn’t as bad as the 2007 Valparaiso one, which resulted in not being able to open my eyes for a couple days. I just have a slight red hue on mah face.

The parade consisted of a school or organization from each neighborhood marching, dancing, singing, or playing music in the parade. Some commented on politics, public transportation, or environmental issues.

After tinkering around with Flipshare & Youtube, I patched together some clips of the parade for y’all:

My favorite part of the video is the little kid next to me meowing at the cat costumes.