My internet doesn’t work EVER!!!! It wouldn’t be so frustrating if we didn’t supposedly have internet, if we weren’t paying for it. But I’ve got this little “Movistar” stick that occasionally has the incredible ability to connect me to the grand great world and it doesn’t work anymore! So I am reduced to lugging my computer around town, to use it in the food court of the mall or perhaps the beautiful pool of Hotel del Prado.

Recently, this 5-star hotel was left electricty-less. They hadn't paid their bill in a year!

Or even all the way down to Soledad, surely an inadvisable idea given I pass through more than one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city and even a few Zonas de Tolerencia, where anything goes.

It’s really been a while since I’ve written anything here, hasn’t it? Well, we moved up into the privileged enclaves of northern Barranquilla. This city is nooked between the Western bank of the Magdalena river and the Carribbean Sea (but it doesn’t quite reach all the way to the ocean, and so to me it feels more like a river city than an ocean city, if it can be defined by any body of water at all). Soledad is the southern expansion of Barranquilla along the river. The combined cities are more or less laid out in a grid, with Calles going East/West and Carreras going North/South. We used to live on Calle 17, which hugs the river from a distance of about a kilometer, and is avoided by all of the “pupi” people I know here for its dangerous reputation. Now we live on Calle 79. There is nothing especially romantic about this street...it mimics the curvature of Calle 76, which is más o menos a river during any sort of rain activity.

Street in the sun, river in the rain.

From my house, I can walk to cupcake bakeries and patio furniture stores, as well as a pole dancing school. In short, much has changed (ah, “much” and “many”, one of the banes of my students’ existence!).

I’m so fascinated by this change! I can’t stop mulling over it. It’s not that I just discovered that disparities in money and opportunity exist, but maybe I feel like I experienced this disparity a teeny tiny bit more than I ever have and I want to get whatever I can out of that before time and my own astounding good fortune smooth out the memory. Living in a poor (but not nearly the poorest) neighborhood in Colombia was...I don’t want to say “a really interesting” or “eye-opening” or “hard” or “wonderful” experience. I was living as a rich person in a working-class neighborhood. I was living there for no reason other than chance, with the knowledge that I could leave whenever I wanted. I wasn’t miserable, but it was hard for me to be happy. Why? Did it have anything to do with the income of my neighbors, or was it the “shock” of the first six months living in a very foreign country? Was it that we were far away from the cultural activities going on in Barranquilla? Was it the aesthetics of a planned community in an industrial zone? Was it because we were three single ladies living in a neighborhood of huge families? The nosy neighbor? The language barrier? I tried to write about this in the Vida Idealista blog, but I couldn’t articulate what I wanted to say. I am happier here in this uptown neighborhood. Who wouldn’t be? There are trees, I can walk from place to place, we are nearer to our friends (why didn’t we make friends in our old neighborhood?). We also moved here with six months of life in the city behind us. We’re not bewildered or delighted by every little encounter anymore.

My on one of GGM's old type-writers!

The apartment in Soledad cost about US$200.00 a month. This new one is a little more than US$400. Because of Colombia’s strata system, our utilities have increased exponentially. But really, by USA standards, the price difference is negligible, around $300 a month to go from lower-working class to fancy art-dealers and restaurant owners. From an apartment complex built over a former slaughter-house and overlooking smoke-spewing factories, to a small building on a green block with an wonderful portero. I just think it’s interesting.

Watching FIFA football in Washington park

And now for the funny little anecdote! Hm, I don’t have one. I live here now, all the crazy things seem normal to me! But, for the next time, I want to tell you all about my new students, the managers of our sponser, Transelca! Yup, I am now giving private lessons to two fancy-shmancy bosses at one of Colombia’s big energy companies (on behalf of Fundación Alliarse, of course). Yesterday Cecilia tried to explain her tactics to becoming mayor of Barranquilla between Blackberry beeps and whistles. Her secretary brought me one water, one coffee and one zapote juice in milk. She would like to play tennis with me at the country club on Saturday. But don’t worry, I’m still with my beloved young-uns down in Soledad: I just finished a 2 week “vacacionál”: 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. It was actually fun!

Pretty graveyard in Minca

Next time, I’ll talk about teaching. Besos!