Lost Blog Heads for Lost City

Well, folks, my apologies for waiting SEVEN months to write anything at all.

There. I've said it, I'm not going to dwell on my negligence, or feel bad about it for too long. But golly, it's been ages. Noelle and I have left Korea. It was difficult, and bittersweet; Our dear friend Yun Seon-gyeong accompanied us to the airport for a tearful goodbye, a free bump up to first class, and a surprise sighting of a famous Sumo wrestler. For the last month and a half, we were in the United States, visiting family and friends. It was fun, memorable, expensive, and exhausting. So now, we've come to Colombia, and are leaving tomorrow on a six-day trek to the lost city of the Tayronas, Teyuna. It also promises to be fun, memorable, expensive, and exhausting. So much so that I'm still stressing about whether or not it's a good idea to go. ¡But damn! I can't remember the last time I saw a lost city, so I'm pretty sure this is a rare opportunity.

We've been in Colombia for a week now, and we're still finding our feet. A lot of our rusty Spanish has come back, we're learning new words, but the quality that we lack is the endurance to speak (or try to speak) for minutes, much less hours at a stretch. As weird as it sounds, I miss Korean. I think that both of us, after two solid years of meaningful cultural exchange, grow a bit tired when faced with confusing or overly enthusiastic greetings coming from a culture we don't understand yet. There's also the difficulty of knowing exactly what is or isn't safe. In Korea, we'd hear all the time that what we were planning to do (or more often, what we did last weekend) was unsafe. We didn't have contacts in the area, we were going to sleep outside; had our supervisors known we camped illegally through our week in Japan, they probably would have had coronaries. And we laughed off their warnings because we felt that we could rely on some fundamental observations we made about Asian culture: not a lot of touting, very little theft, polite strangers. But here, we have the touts, rumors of theft, a lot of barred windows, a lot of folks who clearly have little more that what they're wearing; but for the most part, nobody bothers us. It feels a lot like India, except we get more warnings from proprietors, folks (and guidebooks) not to do this, go there, etc etc. In any case it hasn't been especially eye-opening so far, but extremely fun, if a bit too hot.

My favorite experience so far is a bus ride that Noelle and I took with one of the proprietors at Casa Viena, out hotel in Cartagena. We wanted to get our yellow fever vaccination, but were told at the administrative office that the mobile vaccinating unit was in a barrio called Boston, quite a ways outside of the city. Upon asking our proprietor how to catch a bus to Boston, she interrogated the the cleaning lady (who apparently knows the suburbs well) in very rapid Spanish about Boston's safety, and decided to accompany us. Within ten minutes we were on a bumpy, loud, vallentano-music filled bus moving approximately the same speed as pedestrians, with sellers jumping on and off, offering us cokes, fruit, candy; we drove through the central market, which was absolute chaos. Unfortunately, once we reached the medical center, we were sent elsewhere, and once we reached elsewhere we were instructed to go much farther out into the countryside, and we gave up. But we got a authentic Colombian experience, and coupled with a beautiful plaza called Samtisima Trinidad, made for a memorable Cartagena.

But I have to go. A South Korean guy just showed up! I hope I can still talk!