Of the 36 countries I have visited in my life, Colombia is hands-down the friendliest. A close second was Egypt, a country where (at least in 1998) strangers would lean out of upper story windows to welcome us to their neighborhood, take us by the hand to lead us where we needed to go, and... Continue Reading →
Monos, Nenes and Gordos (Monkeys, Babies and Fatsos)
When we first arrived in Medellin, someone referred to my children as monos. Mono in Spanish means “monkey” so, for obvious reasons, I was a bit taken aback. “Sure, Jack has a lot of energy, “ thought I. “But are you, as a complete stranger, allowed to call my children monkeys?!” It turns out that... Continue Reading →
The Doldrums, plus Poems of Homesickness
As we tried to channel our longing for home in a productive manner, poems happened. TWO-VOICE POEM by Retta San Diego Both Santa Marta You grew up with me You’re experiencing with me I am newfangled I am native I am here, I am waiting I can teach you I can comfort you I can... Continue Reading →
Perspective is Everything: Ciudad Perdida, Colombia’s Machu Picchu
There is plenty of time to reflect during a 26-mile hike in the jungle. About life and love and why I believed that a five-day trek to Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City) would be fun. Because it wasn’t. It was a lot of other things, of course. Magical. And torturous. Stunning. Profoundly uncomfortable. Challenging. Tedious.... Continue Reading →
Halfway There: Reflections
We are at the halfway point, the apex of this journey. For three months we’ve been climbing up from our monolingual, baffled-by-everything starting point, and now we’re teetering at the top, starting the long slide toward our return to “normal” life. In the grand tradition of Buzzfeed, where every article is “26 Male Celebs With... Continue Reading →
Cartagena and the Road Through Barranquilla
Cartagena is a strange stew -- one part Rodeo Drive, one part the seedier section of New Orleans, and one part quasi-third-world nation. The juxtaposition is startling. Painfully picturesque, but smelling vaguely of urine and sweat. Toothless men push sloshing handcarts of dodgy limeade past gorgeous arrays of high-end handicrafts gleaming behind spotless plate glass... Continue Reading →
Eight (Sarcastic) Reasons to Take the Public Inter-Village Buses in Coastal Colombia
You will gain deep insight into local culture. In fact, you can watch the entire life cycle of couple’s relationship -- meeting, courtship, marriage, first baby, the inevitable descent into nagging and stony silence -- as the bus crawls sllloooowwwly past. You can complete all of the primary research required for a PhD dissertation on... Continue Reading →
Minca: In Which We Give the Grandparents the Ride of Their Lives
There are, to American eyes, five seats in Cero’s Land Cruiser: a driver’s seat, a passenger seat and a bench seat for three in the back comprised of ripped leather, wayward springs and rusty exposed bolts. This being Colombia, however, nine of us squeezed into his vehicle to tour the mountains above Santa Marta, one... Continue Reading →
A Stranger in a Foreign Land
For all of us who have lived outside our own culture whether by choice, by necessity or even by accident of birth, this: Everyone stares. Your skin is too pink, or too brown. Your hair is too bright, or too curly. You are too tall, or too curvy, or too something. Little kids squirm in... Continue Reading →
On Hammocks and Bohemian Street Cred: Tayrona National Park
Sleeping in a hammock on a beach has a certain romantic charm, in concept. It sounds adventurous and bohemian and edgy, the kind of line that will start stories when I’m eighty: “We were staying in hammocks on this beach in Colombia’s Tayrona National Park…” That charm wears off a bit when you climb in... Continue Reading →
The First Week: My non-Catholic, barely-Spanish-speaking kids’ thoughts on Colombian Catholic School
The following thoughts are culled from various one-off discussions with the children (aka “interviews”) when they felt like sharing information about this new world – Colegio de la Presentacion – that they have entered. For Retta, these discussions come in a daily hour-long monologue where the English that has been building up all day comes... Continue Reading →
Interviews with Nuns, and Other Harrowing Tales of Creating a Life in a Foreign Place
Everything in Colombia is difficult. That sounds melodramatic, and I recognize that the degree of difficulty would be much greater in, say, a remote African village, or an Asian country where I can’t sound out street signs, or anywhere in the Middle East, but there, I'd have lower expectations. Here, everything seems straightforward and simple.... Continue Reading →
Peak Experiences: Climbing glaciers at the equator
It started to snow during the first kilometer, which is not what you’d expect, hiking in Colombia. It wasn’t a soft, New Hampshire, get-out-the-cross-country-skis snow, but a Rhode Island coastal snow, halfway between snow and sleet, that uniquely snot-like texture that sticks to and soaks through everything. Which is unfortunate since we were wearing 90%... Continue Reading →
Utopia: Finding a place of our own in a foreign land
Dear Universe, Thank you. We asked for somewhere lovely to spend our time here, and then we hustled around talking to everyone and following leads and sweating in the noontime heat and habla-ing and exercising patience and here we are. Paradise. Spanish-speaking Shangra-La. Ex-Pat Xanadu. An idyll for idling. Sixth floor. The whole floor of the building.... Continue Reading →
Learning to sit with the discomfort, and other shitty adult things
It turns out, interestingly enough, that I’m not so good with ambiguity. It will surprise none of you who have spent more than five minutes with me to hear that I like to get the facts, decide and move on. Every professional -- and most of the amateurs -- of whom I’ve asked life advice... Continue Reading →
No Dar Papaya, and The Truth about Juan Valdez
When I was in Russia, my favorite folk saying was, “Don’t hang noodles from my ears.” It took the place of, “Don’t pull my leg” but provided more picturesque imagery of an obsequious bureaucrat carefully hanging strands of pasta from his boss’ ears, or what 50 years of Communism probably felt like. In Italy, they say... Continue Reading →
Home Schooling Goes Awry, or “Why I am Not a Teacher”
The second-most frequent question people ask about our trip -- after, “Why Colombia?” in a variety of tones from simple curiosity to horror -- is, “Can you just pull your kids out of school?” This often comes in a scandalized tone, and phrased more like, “But what about the kids’ school?!” as though we were asking... Continue Reading →
To Be or Not To Be: The Unnecessary Complexity of Spanish Conjugation Undoes Me
In Spanish, there are four different ways to say “I was”: estuve, estaba, era and fui, meaning variously, “This one time, I was…”, “For a while, I was…”, “I pretty much permanently was yet something changed since then,” and something else that I haven’t quite grasped because that word can also mean, “I went,” and... Continue Reading →
A Portrait of Medellin
The equator runs through Colombia, so -- on a flat map -- it looks consistently tropical. But the dizzying heights of Machu Picchu’s Andes don’t end abruptly at the Peruvian border, instead pushing northward, splitting into three fingers (known as cordilleras) of snow-capped and volcanic peaks divided by deep river valleys. Bogota sits along the... Continue Reading →
A Lesson in Letting Go, plus a 7th grader’s perspective on Colombia
Last night, we had what is becoming a quintessentially Colombian lesson in letting go: of plans, of control, of the idea that we are masters of our own destiny. It went like this: At 6pm, we went to Conversation Club at our language school, where we practice speaking painfully slowly, clearly and correctly... Continue Reading →
The World's Okayest Mom 