Week 11 photos!

Day 71: Arepas are my favorite Colombian food. I love them more than anything else I've tasted and there's one guy in Rodadero that makes a killing making them. His are not too greasy, not too dry. Just perfect.





Day 72: I did some plumbing in the apartment! I replaced the handle and turne off and on the water! I'm pretty cool.



Day 73: Moto taxi! This is the scariest thing in the world. You get on it, and his job is to get you where you're going as fast as possible. He doesn't necessarily care if you're healthy at the end of it. SCARY.



Day 74: A picturesque street in Santa Marta. I had to wait like 5 minutes for people to get out of the way.



Day 75: I really, really love TCI. The program does a good job of making kids do the work to understand the material.



Day 76: San Andrecito is a little black market where you can buy a lot of different American foods as well as a lot of different hard liquors and different toys, games and other odds and ends. It's an interesting place to browse because of the sheer number of random things you find while visiting.



Day 77: The view from our balcony.

Week 10 photos!

Day 64: Plantains are so central to my diet. I eat them everywhere.



Day 65: Vendors sell cerveza everywhere - on the beach, in restaurants, on the street. This is where they buy their cerveza. Apparently they can also sell it back to their supplier.



Day 66: I will never get tired of this sunset.



Day 67:

The new bar! Rafa (the bartender) made us a couple of coctails that were his own creations. Delicious!



Day 68: Staff meetings. The bane of my existence.



Day 69: Vendors like this one sell fresh fruit (in this case, mangos) on the street everywhere. You buy it and he'll cut it up right in front of you. I haven't had the courage to buy from any of them because I worry about getting food poisoning.



Day 70: This is the school's dog named Negrita. A lot of construction companies or businesses "hire" dogs to watch their properties at night. They feed the dogs and then leave them off the leash and the dogs defend the property from people who would come in and steal things.

La Negrita

So "La Negrita" is a character for Carnivale. I have a hard time explaining the racism inherent in having a black character with exaggerated red lips and skin completely black. Here are some pictures.

Week 9 Photos!

Day 57: Carnival is huge on the coast here. The whole school did a dance extraveganza so my kids were all in costumes. Oh, yes, someone did okay costumes where 11 year old girls were wearing skirts that short.





Day 58: Lauren and I visited Tayrona the same day that we had the Carnivale parade. We stayed overnight and hiked back the next day.



Day 59: Carnivale style decorations at Buenavista Mall. Oh, yes, the one on the left is a woman in blackface.



Day 60: Jairo sells us bootlegged DVDs for 3,000 pesos a piece. He has everything. He is also doing this right outside the grocery store. That means that no one cares that someone is selling bootlegged DVDs to people who are buying their eggs and bread.

I like buying from him because he's always there, so if I have a problem with a DVD, then I just ask him for a new copy and he gives it to me.



Day 61: Teaching! I am making my OWN PLANS. It is SO CRAZY.



Day 62: The Bureche school bus. Completely different from the states!



Day 63: Our collection of bootleg DVDs.

Tayrona Pictures

These are pictures from Tayrona. It's over two different visits: once when we went in November and it was sunny, then once recently when we went and it was overcast.



























This is a parrot that was hanging out near the lady's showers and it sqwawked EXACTLY like a woman laughing hysterically.



And the chicken on the roof of the showers.

Week 8 photos!

Day 50: One night we came home, and I put a glass in the sink only to see something wiggling and crawling all in our sink! I realized it was a gecko and if we let it stay in the apartment, it would likely die. So, I danced all over our counter and floor, eventually catching it by the tail. I let it loose on our balcony and it immediately ran straight down the side of our building!



Day 51: "Minuto" stands exist because it is very expensive to call from one phone service to another. So what you do is you go to a minuto stand and borrow the phone of that service (Tigo to Tigo, Comcel to Comcel, Movistar to Movistar) then when the call is over, they tell you how much it costs. It's a lot less than calling Tigo from your Comcel phone and so on. You can see the phones are chained to the desk/table so that no one can walk off with one.

Similarly, the vendors are bored and gossiping. You must hear a lot of personal info on these phones.



Day 52: The aftermath of a dinner party. Lauren made FABULOUS eggplant parmesean. However, it made me miss ricotta cheese a lot.

One thing we have in the states is constant access to rare and interesting cheeses and foods.



Day 53: Even here, we still need a lot of bathroom space!



Day 54: Fruity martinis! At a bar that was called the Jamaican, but everyone here pronounces "HAmakan". I still have problems not saying the "j" or "g" sounds.



Day 55: This was a class assignment I did with the kids, where they analyzed artifacts, then wrote what they thought each one was on the board.




Day 56: Carnivale is kind of a big deal here and it means that everyone - even straight laced people are dressing up in wigs, bright colors and sliced up t-shirts.