Vermont Chile Round Trip: (Still) waiting for our ship to come in

Sunday futball by the city wall

City Wall - detail

Every few days we leave the walled city and cross the Roman* bridge to Manga to visit Nasly at SC Lines, and each time she smiles and gives us the news in slow spanish – the good news and then the bad news. First the good news: the good ship Agata loaded with our roving home and motorcycle, is expected to arrive in Cartagena today, Tuesday, September 16^th at 9:00 AM in the morning. Bad news: the port is apparently first come first serve, so Agatha will queue up to be unloaded behind other boats, most likely not before 6:00 AM on Thursday. Tomorrow we will visit Nasly again, and if the schedule hasn’t changed, we will buy the day-at-a-time life insurance policy, effective Thursday and Friday, that will allow Luc to enter the port area to accompany the inspectors and eventually drive the vehicles, one at a time, out of the port. If we are extremely lucky, this will be a 2-day process. Being more cheap than optimistic, we will buy only two days of insurance and most likely be visiting Nasly again next week.

* named after a guy named Roman who was not from Rome

Some doors of Cartagena

In addition to the daily life insurance, Luc will be required to have long pants and leather shoes (I would need all these too if I were to go into the port). Since we certainly didn’t expect to be needing jeans or steel-toed boots here, this meant a shopping trip into the old city yesterday. Warned by many blogs to expect conflicting requirements during the port process, we decided to buy the jeans and to find a spot where leather shoes could be purchased, but to hold off buying them until the leather-shoe requirement is confirmed by port officials. Neither one of us is a lover of shopping, so we steeled ourselves for a challenging episode. First, we put off the trip until 1:00 PM, then we walked around during the hottest part of the day changing the priorities of our shopping for as long as we could (we also need maps - infuriatingly hard to find in this country). At last Luc saw a promising store (I have no idea how he selected it) and we dove in. We were greeted by a young man of about Luc’s size. We have been practicing our numbers, so we successfully communicated size trenta y dos. After checking rows of women and children’s sizes, the young man held up a thirty. Luc managed to ask him, “Could you fit into those?” The guy shook his head and burst out laughing which was completely infectious. He eventually found a 32 which Luc tried on over his shorts, and they fit better than any other pair of jeans he owns. Cost: 20,000 COP or $12. First store.

Street Vendors

This whole process had made me wonder if anyone has already written an article about the life of a single bolt of denim. After being fashioned into hundreds of jeans in a factory of exploited workers, it is imported into the US where it arrives in a container ship. In various containers, it spreads out across America on the back of trucks and arrives in the boutiques and department stores of the indistinguishable malls of America. While hanging on racks for a season, a few are purchased. The remainder are then packed into containers and moved about so they can spend the next season in an outlet store one level down the hierarchy. Those still on the racks are then loaded back into containers and shipped here to South America where they arrive in the port, spread out on the back of big trucks and then are piled into little trucks and handcarts to various shops, tiendas and street stalls where they are sold for a fraction of the overinflated US price. (Perhaps I’ve spent entirely too much time on our balcony watching other ships come and go from the port of Cartagena.)

Thinking our ship was coming in a bit sooner, we had our last week at the Nueva Lengua Spanish school last week. In every way the experience exceeded our expectations. I wrote a little testimonial for the school’s Facebook page that I won’t repeat here. We made lasting friends amongst both teachers and other students, took advantage of many of the free afternoon activities, and learned enough Spanish to make shop clerks laugh with us instead of at us. Now we just have to keep practicing.

Making Empandas with Sra Janice

the Daniels

Ramona, me, Legia, Luc and Midori

Legia with my family slideshow, Luc's new handbag in the foreground

The final week of school coincided with the Colombian week of Amor e Amistad - Love and Friendship - which is a bit like a week-long version of Saint Valentines day but for friends as well as lovers. We did a secret friend activity with small gifts each day, and then the whole school (some 20 - 30 people, I would guess) gathered and shared the customs of our respective countries, our thoughts on love and friendship and small gifts as our secret friend was revealed.

Sirle as MC - thoughts on love and friendship

Daniel is Luc's secret friend


Daniel had a keychain made for Luc's moto

From Jose - A new van decoration to add to the collection Quinn started

Cartagena is known for its nightlife, of which I can report we have seen exactly zero (this will be no surprise to our friends at home). We have, however, had a few small gatherings of friends here at this lovely apartment where we have shared friendship, stories, meals, travel tips, blog addresses, plenty of wine and the great view from our balcony. We look forward to crossing paths again and following each others' adventures throughout South America.