Bad Days and Good Days

Wednesday was one of those days where nothing bad really happens, yet you just seem to have trouble enjoying the day.  One of those days where your hair is in a frizz, your clothes don't seem to match, and you wonder why one earth you can't get yourself to do even a couple of push-ups or sit-ups on a daily basis.  You get your normal amount of email, but aren't excited about it.  The weather is nothing to complain about.  You realize at lunch that your morning coffee has made you jittery and anxious and you have trouble focusing on anything.  For me, I felt like I couldn't control my feet in my salsa lesson and when the bus got stuck in interminable traffic coming back downtown, I was feeling a little blue.

The nice thing about days like that, where nothing really bad happens, is that little things can pick you right up.  For me on Wednesday it was a nice IM from my sister-in-law Karin.  Momentum shifted, and suddenly I was on a path to having a very pleasant Thursday.

Thursday was everything that Wednesday wasn't.  On the bus up to my lesson, I had brought along my mp3 player, listening to and visualizing salsa the entire hour long journey to the school.  I did my steps with confidence and made it back to the hostel afterward in record time.  The evening was spent with friends made here in Colombia.  First was dinner with my Costa Rican friend Alejandra.  Alejandra has spent months in Bogotá and other cities doing research for her PhD thesis.  Back in January, when Abe was here, we had all become friends, so it was nice to have a send off dinner.  We returned to the hostel in time to see that the Celtics were playing a tight game against the Cavaliers and she turned to getting the remainder of her items packed.  Meanwhile I went out to have a beer with a German couple I had met at the Spanish school.  Patrick and Frederika are two incredibly nice people, and seeing their apartment and five-inch thick binder of visa's and legal documents did make me a bit wistful for my own documents not coming together.  We had a lovely time and will undoubtedly be seeing one another again before I depart.  In fact, I may go with Patrick next Saturday to see where he is teaching German to children.

Today could not live up to yesterday, but it has had its pluses.  With Alejandra gone, I have moved up to her room, up a steep ladder above the rest of the dormitory beds.  I will post pictures of this soon.  For now, I am drinking yerba mate from a gourd and getting down to the business of doing some computer programming.  I will leave you with two pictures I took on the way home, with the sun shining through a mist coming down from the clouds.

Back in Colombia

Hello.  Well clearly I have some catching up to do here.  But let's jump to the present for now and work on the past later.

In January (I know, but I'm seriously about to jump to the present) I came to Colombia hoping to volunteer with an organization here in Bogota.  One of the byproducts of that almost but not quite happening is that I left a bunch of stuff in the hostel for safe keeping.  So if for no other reason than to pick up my stuff, I needed to return.  As I began to be at peace with the delays in my plans to volunteer, I thought I might as well make the best of the situation.  Since a tourist visa gives you thirty days in the country, I figured why not spend four weeks learning how to dance salsa?  I have a little experience with the basic steps and a ten hour a week job, so certainly I can spend some time on a life skill like that.

I signed up with the AfroLatinaSalsaShow people.  Well, I didn't exactly signed up.  I emailed them and said I'd like to learn salsa.  They emailed back and said great!  I emailed and said, "Can we work out a schedule and how much does it cost?"  They emailed me back and said to just show up and we'd figure it out.

So the morning after I arrived in Bogota, I walked ten minutes down to the nearby TransMilenio stop (Museo de Oro) and hopped on a bus heading for 142nd street.  This would be one of two times I would get on in the week when there would actually be a seat.  1.6 million people ride the TransMilenio daily, mostly jammed in next their fellow rider.  The plus side of the jamming in is that when the driver brings the bus to a screeching at an all too predictable red light, you get a nice little buffer, particularly if you are in the back of the bus.  Since the buses don't have great acceleration nor do they suffer from the back-of-the-bus-launch school buses face when hitting potholes, the back of the bus is definitely the place to be.  I would like to say that the bus makes for good people watching, but in general it looks like a lot of people stuck on a bus trying to get across town.  You do occasionally get to observe people talking into cell phones as if they were walkie talkies, rotating the phone in front of their mouths when they are talking then quickly rotating it back to their ears when it's the other persons turn.  I don't recall seeing this before arriving here.

An interesting thing about the Calle 142 stop is that it stops on Calle 145.  The next stop is called Calle 146 and, as I did not see another stop a block up the road, I'll have to report back to you on that one.  This particular line is a bit like the light rail in L.A. and drops you off in the middle of the small freeway.  Fortunately they had the foresight to build pedestrian bridges for many of the stops.  I am staying on Calle 9 in the historic heart of the city.  Where I am is full of older Spanish-style houses and there is a mix of tourists and students during the day.  At Calle 142/5 you enter an upper middle class neighborhood, a mix of condos and single family houses with lawns and large defensive fences.  There are lovely well-maintained parks and higher-end restaurants and retail stores.  There is also a dance studio.  Or at least there was until this weekend.

No worries there -- they are just moving to a new location ten blocks north.  For my first week I had two one hour and one two hour dance lesson.  My instructor is Andres, perhaps the most professional sixteen year old I have ever met.  We spent the first class going over the basics, the second working on a 26 measure sequence and the third practicing it and adding on a few bits here and there.  Andres pointed out that one of the keys to looking like you know what you are doing is to constantly be stringing together moves and only very occasionally doing the basic step.  Even though I only have a few moves under my belt at this point, it has been fun just practicing constantly switching between them.  It has been a bit challenging as the floors in the hostel are extremely slippery, but I dance around with my headphones on all the same.

Classes resume Monday, so tomorrow will be spent catching up on a bit of work and finally going to see some of the museums.  I may start with the aforementioned Museo de Oro as it is one of the most prestigious in the city.

Signing off for now, but hoping to get caught up in the coming days!