Some Observations On Colombia

I love traveling and experiencing new cultures. For sure, traveling for the purpose of adoption is a totally different experience than traveling for pleasure and exploration (your focus is completely different), but you still get to experience new and very odd moments of being a fish out of water. Anyway, I wanted to jot down some observation about Colombia. Actually, I’m not really sure these observations can apply to Colombia at large as my experience is limited to Bogota and Neiva. Take them for what it’s worth.

The People

Colombians are beautiful. Like, all of them. The women are always dressed up (we jean wearing American’s look sloppy) and the men all wear collared shirts. They also really like uniforms. It appears that every job in every field requires a uniform ranging from pastel tacky to slick yet modest. There appears to be two rules to aging: 1) Men get to wear sandals and 2) Women cut their hair short.

As a whole, we’ve found everyone to be exceptionally nice with a conservative curiosity towards us.  People like to strike up a conversation with you once they get a sense of how well you can communicate. Then a flood of Spanish comes flying out of their mouths and I try my best to keep up!

The Cities

I still think Bogota and Neiva are remarkably clean for Latin American cities. It’s not that there isn’t a fair amount of trash (there is), rather, they do a good job of cleaning everything up. Neiva is basically a city of tightly packed homes, occasional high rises, and the scattering of parks and large avenues. In short, it follows the plan of many Latin American countries (there are constant similarities to where I lived in Brazil). Every few homes there’s a little shop – usually a tiny restaurant that specializes in simple lunches of chicken and rice, empenadas and pastels, and beer or juice.

We walk everywhere and traffic is a steady and sometimes precarious stream of buses (hello diesel), taxis, and motorcycles. Colombians LOVE their motorcycles and scooters. Families pack on the; mother’s in high heels, children holding lunch boxes, and weave in and out of traffic. They all wear helmets.

The Food

In general, Ren and I find Colombian food to taste good, if not bland. Typical dishes include lentil soups, chicken in many forms, lots and lots of baked and fried bananas. For that matter, everything is fried. The supermarket has an entire aisle devoted to oil. They’ve two kinds of avocados, the popular one being this huge green fruit 4 times the size of the Haas Avocados we’re used to eating in the states. They’re awesome and I’ve put them on everything I’ve cooked in the apartment.

There are glorious amounts of fruits, many of which I haven’t learned the names of yet. They’re either eaten peeled or turned into juice, typically with a generous helping of sugar.

I’d say we’re fairly adventurous eaters, trying things out in highly questionable (at least from a sanitary standpoint) eating establishments. You can’t be too worried about such things when you live in the country for nearly a month.

The “That Makes Absolutely No Sense”

Traffic lights. In Neiva (and Bogota too), they put the traffic lights before the intersection. Make that a good 30 feet before the intersection. This results in pedestrians having no clue as to what the lights are when trying to cross the street – and crossing streets in Colombia is already a slightly dangerous proposition. This has to be the poorest urban planning design I’ve seen and the only possible reason I can think of for having it is to keep pedestrians on their toes. Not to mention the fact that it is often ok for drivers to disregard the traffic lights altogether and drive whenever they feel they can safely merge into traffic.

Other Fun Observations

When you pay by credit card for anything, you’re asked “how many times”. Stores can basically break up the charge in 12 separate payments charged over the course of the year (with additional interest, of course). Best I can tell, most people do this.

Payphones no longer exist, Instead, street vendors post signs that say “llamados” and chain small, nokia styled cell phones to their stands. You then pay a few pesos to make a call.

The wide array and selection of motorcycles and scooters really is very cool. There seem to be thousands of variations.

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