Another week in Paradise

“On Sunday, August 30th, 2014, the vessel Agatahad to deviate her course to Kingston, Jamaica due to a severe case ofAppendicitis reported in a crew member.”  As a result we are in Cartagena for an additional week, which means more Spanish classes, more activities with our friends from school, more sports on Colombian TV (Attention Colooombiaaaa!), and more ship gazing from our beautiful patio.

We have very much enjoyed our Spanish classes so far, though by the end of the morning (our classes are from 8 to noon) we can barely form a complete sentence in any language. 

Several times we have recounted various daily routines (our classmates and our own, here and at home).  All in the present tense but with increasing sophistication, I’m sure. Here is ours:  We wake up around 6, with the sun already heating up the port.  After a breakfast of avena (oatmeal) and Kumis (some sort of liquid yogurt) with papayas, mangos, bananas and other mystery fruit, we set out on our walk to school at about 7:20. 

It has surprised me how my impressions of the same route have changed over the two weeks we have been walking to school.  In front of a nearby supermarket, we pass a series of parking places that are tended by a guy with a crutch who makes his living parking cars in the small lot.   He is there every morning.  Limping, smiling, gesturing, shouting, working.   Soon after we arrive at a street corner with an enormous tree. 

Under the tree is a vendor with 4 or 5 thermoses from which he serves tiny plastic cups of coffee, another with candy and gum and phone recharges, and many people drinking coffee or waiting for a bus, taxi collectivo or a taxi moto or just standing around.  We don’t have to walk much father before a big electronic billboard confirms what we have already guessed.  That is it 7:28 in the morning, and that the temperature is 88 (29c+15)*2) and that the humidity is at 88%.  The billboard also tells the time and temperature in NYC and Madrid and Miami and the positive news of the day (noticia positiva) before reminding us to use our hats, gafas and sunscreen to avoid the perils of UV light.

Then the ice vendor with his three wheeled cart as we turn the corner to the boat dock with its barrage of hawkers selling rides on various slow (2 hours) or fast (1 hour) boats to the Playa Blanca and the Isla de Rosario. Though we haven’t been there yet, both boat rides apparently get you completely soaked and provide the chance to sleep in a hammock overnight on the beach.  Also available is also a complete line of bottled waters (agua agua), hat and sunglasses.  At first I felt like walking by these guys was like running a gauntlet, but now we tell them hello, say we are going to school and greet those we’ve spoken to before.

We pass the longest balcony in South America (paced by a European who was called slave of slaves, haven’t quite figured that one out yet), the old city walls, the convention center, and numerous people walking in uniforms to school or work, or sleeping in the shade and of course many honking taxi-collectivos letting us know there is still room for us to squeeze in.

 

In the afternoons, our school offers free organized activities. Tuesday is always Dancing and Cooking.  This week we learned to make empanadas in cooking class, then practiced the steps of the Champeta and Salsa Bomba (what we do can not yet be called dancing).  Colombian start to dance before they start to walk.  This was explained to us by our wonderful teacher, Jesus, who demonstrated how a Colombian father will hold his little baby in the air with his thumbs under the baby’s armpits.  With his ring fingers and pinkies, he pumps the baby’s hips forward – instant baby Champeta!

Other activities include the gold museum, the naval museum, the botanical gardens and yesterday a kayaking expedition.  After about 30 minutes of kayaking, we turned around a point and surfed the kayak over a line of rope and onto a beach.  I am so sorry we didn’t have a camera with us!  For about 15 minutes, we watched two groups of men hauling in what I first thought were 2 separate lines. They slowly approached each other, as did a whirlwind of diving pelicans from the sea.  As the net finally became visible, other men appeared from the beach and completed the haul.  Two guys waded into the net with some sheets of plastic and somehow emerged with a hopping catch of tiny silvery sardine-sized fish.  The bigger fish were hauled into the boat. 

About 45 minutes later, we hauled our own boats back onto our original beach and were approached by a guy with a joint-compound sized bucket covered with a wad of burlap.  Inside the bucket were oysters and the tiny green limones that go with everything here.   It seemed much more reasonable to believe that he had just pried them off the nearby rocks.

Here are some photos from the Botanical garden and museums:

 

One of our nicest evenings so far was a small dinner we had with some friends from school.  Fiona, from London, has just spent 3 months in Detroit working as a social worker.  She will soon embark on a solo bike-ride through South America.  We hope to see her in various campgrounds as we all proceed south.  Our friend Ze’ev (who took these pictures) lives in San Diego and Israel. Many years he stops in NYC on his way between Israel and California to see the US open.  This year, he watched a few minutes of it here with us.  John, from Austin, is working in Tunis for the African development bank.  As you can imagine, it was a fascinating evening.

Just a quick note about another one of my favorite activities, which is to sit on our balcony (or on the couch with Luc’s binoculars) and survey the bay.  When I was a kid I would spend a few weeks each summer with my grandparents in Sayville, Long Island where I would get spectacularly sunburned on the Fire Island beach, and then play endless games of battleship with my patient grandfather in the living room.  After so many games staring at ships on the blue-lined graph paper, every ship in this naval yard appears to me to be either a battleship, an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, a cruiser or a submarine. Here I have managed to avoid the sunburn, but I’ve been tracking the movements of the Colombian Armada, which this week had many visiting dignitaries whose white sailor suits with blue piping that I spied from our balcony.  Still scanning the seas for the second submarine that left its dock on Thursday!