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 →
On Homesickness and Holsteins
Yesterday, someone asked if I was homesick and I was surprised to realize that I’m not. Not yet, anyway, or not in the way I have been on past trips, yearning for my normal, or at the very least, the familiar. Like when I spent a summer in Russia and day 5 found me in... Continue Reading →
The Perils of a Monolingual (or Mono-and-a-half-lingual) Existence
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? A: Bilingual. Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language? A: American. Yesterday, the kids and I went to the gym in our building to use up some energy. After some time on the ellipticals and with the weights, the gym attendant approached... Continue Reading →
La Finca de Viannay, or In Which We Make a Series of Dubious Decisions
Last weekend, at the finca [farm] of our Spanish teacher’s mother deep in the Zona Cafeteria where all the coffee made famous by Juan Valdez is grown, the soundtrack in my head was Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. You know, the part where they sing, And you may find yourself living in a shotgun... Continue Reading →
Portrait of Our First Week, or In Which Eric is Hit By a Car
Every morning, after some form of eggs (because eggs are plentiful, healthy and I can cook them with the meager selection of tools available in my rental kitchen) and tropical fruit (to remind us all why we’re here), we walk a kilometer and a half from our apartment to Ana’s apartment, where we leave our... Continue Reading →
On Bungee Jumping, Eating Elephants, Fiesta del Reyes and Betrayal
One of my friends, when I was in the throes of last-minute what-am-I-doing panic, sent me this pep-post: So here's how I see it: It's like bungee jumping... it sounds cool when you decide to do it, but then you have to put on that harness thing and that's totally outside your fashion and overall... Continue Reading →
The Long Goodbye
I like to think of myself as this flexible, go-with-the-flow kind of gal. You know, who rolls with the punches and takes things in stride and all those other vaguely sports-oriented metaphors. It turns out, however, based on a forty-odd year track record of actual evidence, that I’m not. Which is one of the suck-y... Continue Reading →
The Unicorn of Shoes: How to pack for six months of unknown
Packing for a six-month trip is a challenging task, doubly so when you are a person who hates to schlep stuff. Like, hates it. I have this vivid memory of trying to navigate from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare de Something Else in Paris after a cross-country, cross-Atlantic red-eye with all my gear... Continue Reading →
The Two Jameses: Selling a 10-year-old on six months in Colombia
James (pronounced HA-mez) Rodriguez is Colombia’s soccer star. We learned of him during the 2014 World Cup (known obviously to the more rabid fans of San Diego as La Copa Mundial or Copa del Mundo), where we religiously watched the Colombian games as a first step of cultural immersion. And it was a particularly immersive... Continue Reading →
Bureaucracy, American-style
There is an inordinate amount of bureaucracy involved in leaving for six months. The kind of bureaucracy that I usually avoid, with endless phone trees and twelve transfers to different representatives who don’t really know how to answer my questions. It is reinforcing for me the fact that what we’re doing is Unusual and Not... Continue Reading →
The World's Okayest Mom 