Haven´t written in a while so this is long....

Over these last few days, it’s become very apparent that my alcohol tolerance is dangerously low and needs to be worked on. As they say, practice makes perfect and I hope I will be practicing a lot now that I have a new friend. He has red hair and looks like Henry Waxman (though not nearly as good looking), but other than that, I have no complaints. Maybe I will make even more friends soon!!!

In other news, I am very excited to report that Adriana and Cassandra -- my two favorite girl cousins on my mother’s side who hail from Manassas -- are visiting at the end of July. I am thinking that if it resembles Colombia 2004/2005, there will be much dancing and merrymaking, for in three years of college, ten years of international travels and nearly 1.5 years of living in Latin America, I have never met anyone who embraces the art of partying more than Adriana. No one even comes close. It is truly a gift from the good Lord himself. I am very excited for their visit!

In yet more news, my blackberry and I will be taking a much needed break/separation during my time in Colombia. It’s not easy and I will miss it, but I guess I need to prove to myself that I can live without it after all those months together. It allowed me to G-chat with my U.S. friends and family and change my Facebook status with great frequency and flexibility. It was a great companion when I was stuck in the rain and couldn’t get to my computer. On those days when my new house still had no internet, it was my portal to the world. It refined my texting skills and made me look very busy and important. Anyway, over the last three months, the blackberry and I became inseparable; you wouldn’t catch one of us without the other. However, I think this forced separation is for the best. In fact, you can see how very sick this relationship is by the fact that I wrote more about it than I did about my new friend or my cousins’ visit. A little bit shameful. But I completely understand why President Obama didn’t want to get rid of his.

Arriving in Colombia is always very exciting and emotional. I always feel like I’m coming home even though I wasn’t born here and didn’t grow up here. But sometimes I think, I could have grown up in America or Europe or Asia, but no matter where I grew up, my connection to Colombia would always be there. I think it’s the smell that gets me: Old lady perfume, wonderful scent of something frying, diesel and the occasional whiff of garbage and urine. But all very subdued because it´s too cold for the smell to get too pungent.

Bogota is pretty much as opposite of Panama City as it gets. It’s a very somber, gray city framed by dark pine forest mountains. Very melancholy in a way. The people wear a lot of dark colors and scarves and shawls and are extremely polite and formal, almost archaically so. In Panama City, you hardly ever see someone wearing a suit; in Colombia, almost everyone does. All these old men with their white hair, big umbrella eyebrows, always wearing navy blue suits and berets sit around drinking coffee at the Juan Valdez stand in Unicentro. There are dozens of amazing cafes, a rundown but historically and culturally rich Spanish quarter, dozens of first rate museums and an excellent dining scene. The architecture is kind of futuristic and a bit chaotic, but the city blocks are organized and manageable, even for someone with a sense of direction of a five year old. It’s exciting landing almost 10,000 feet in the middle of the Andes, despite the terrain-induced turbulence.

I guess if Panama City was Miami, Bogota would be New York. In a city of nine million inhabitants, I’d say at least one million live in extreme poverty. In Panama City you don’t see the little boys picking up glass and plastic bottles in decrepit old carts pulled by decrepit old horses for a few dollars a day or the street children – gaminos -- who sniff glue all day because they’re hungry and bored and don’t have anything else to do. Panama City has ghettos, but nothing like the massive, sprawling mountainside ghettos of Colombia that could be huge cities of their own. Panama’s are small and contained. But then again, I think poverty is all the more striking in a cold, cloudy, rainy, mountainous city. It´s strange that people in most Spanish speaking countries think Colombians are so horrible and crooked because you don´t really see it when you´re here around the people. Maybe it´s the politeness that makes it hard to see.
I wanted to go to the internet café last night to check my e-mail, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me go alone because she said I might get mugged or get my hand cut off or some other terrible atrocity. Despite being nearly 80 years old, she said she’d go with me to make sure none of these terrible things happened. The Internet café is about ten feet from the apartment door. When I come here, I think that because all of them are so much older, they think I am like five years old. I try to remember that they´re old and scared, but sometimes I just want to go out on my own…

For me, Colombia is five old ladies drinking hot chocolate with queso fresco and eating pastries while discussing the news. It’s my grandmother, her sister Lorenza, a couple neighbors and friends and maybe a distant aunt. They sit in one of their respective living rooms, all decorated in an antiquated, victorianesque way, and talk about this politician or that, how Bogota gets more and more violent every day, and how people just aren’t good they way they used to be. None of them have husbands because they left, they died or they just didn’t marry. They’re always impeccably dressed, their hair hairsprayed into a perfectly stiff, tall bob, a requisite of all Latin American women of a certain social class. I just kind of sit there watching them. They ask me questions about my life and give me advice, which always includes not getting married until I’m over thirty (if at all) and the importance of eating iron and yogurt. And despite being surrounded by half a dozen old ladies, I always enjoy it and it’s one of the principal memories of my life. There are only like five or six of those that stand out more prominently than the others.

I am so happy to be here even though it’s impossible to get warm at night.