any lucky penny will do fine...

friday night. crepe night part two. i took over sarah and alex's kitchen for the second week in a row and put my amazing french cooking skills to work. ok, so perhaps crepes don't exactly merit amazing cooking skills, but there was nutella and ice cream and fruit and wine and lots of good friends and it made me happy. plus the doorman at their apartment now knows me by name and sends me right upstairs. "otra sarah, si?" si.
saturday night. suprise party for andy. goofy birthday hats and pinatas. packed apartment. traditional colombian band. in usual fashion, we danced the night away. the music, the laughter filled the apartment in a way that cannot possibly be explained, only felt.
sunday night. felt a little bit more like FAC as the guys and i ordered round after round of beer and rang up a crazy long tab. we sat out on the terrace of an otherwise empty bar for hours of the afternoon and into the evening, proving that minnesota and wisconsin could keep up with the german guys sans probleme. i made nicos and patrick get chuzo for dinner with me - costeno fast food at its best - and the weekend was complete.
i love it when the girls go out to dinner for girls night and the guys stay in to cook dinner for guys night but then the guys invite the girls back for dessert because they made chocolate fondue and have wine for us.
after harrassing everyone i know (ok, and people i don't know as well) for weeks, i have finally found a roommate who i am excited about living with and my hopes of moving into my own place are finally becoming more realistic. apartment hunting starts tonight.
after being in barranquilla for a month and a half, i have finally stumbled on close substitutes for some of "my spots" at home that i have missed the most. i probably spent as much time at barriques when i wasn't working as when i was. despite the enormous amounts of coffee produced by this country, outside of bogota, the concept of a coffeeshop is pretty much nonexistant. which is why i was so excited when alex told me about la dulcerna, a gourmet pastry shop/bakery/coffeeshop close to my apartment. the cappuchinos may not be quite up to barriques standards, but not bad for b'quilla standards. they even have wireless. that is enough to make me not even mind missing LTM and sitting on my computer working for much of the weekend.
i finally splurged and joined a gym as well. i miss having the serf so close and so FREE. the sorry excuse for the gym at the university (read: small shitty weight room with old equipment and one treadmill that you have to pay for anyway) was no motivation at all. so i busted out the credit card and now have a membership at one of the best gyms here. it may be overpriced but i like it.
next two weekends: santa marta with the girls.
fall break mid-september: venezuela with alex to visit mariel and axlds people.
winter break part 1: backpacking argentina and uruguay with sarah.
winter break part 2: tanja comes to explore colombia with me and start the 2 month long carnaval season off right.

i heart travel plans.

If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life

The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.
~William Arthur Ward

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Until about the age of 14, the answer to that question was always the same. I wanted to be a teacher. I got to high school and decided that while I had no one idea what I really wanted to be, the last thing that I would choose was a teacher. College came around and it wasn't until after several major switches that I finally decided to study International Relations. I put in the time, I received my degree, and I found a job. As a teacher.

what?!

Classes are finally underway at Universidad del Norte, and after the first few weeks of not having much to do, I am finally teaching. While I still hold to the claim that this is definitely not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, I can honestly say that I love my job and I am 150% convinced that this is exactly where I am supposed to be at this point in my life.

My students are amazing and make every class so much fun. Each class that I teach has a completely different dynamic to it, but I have yet to get bored and the two-hour periods fly by.

I told my level 5 students on Thursday that we would be having a test on Tuesday, which of course was answered with complaints.

"Oh, teacher, we don't have enough time to study, we have so many other tests next week...."

"Guys, I just graduated from the university about 3 months ago. I know every single line and excuse that you can come up with because I have already used it. You can go ahead and try that on your other teachers, but I'm not going to buy it"

About half of the class had to translate for the other half, but once they all figured it out, they just scowled and said "oh."

But I gave them an extra long break before we reviewed and brought in Tom Petty and Red Hot Chili Peppers for them to listen to, so I think we are on good terms again :)

My night conversation class began this past week, and while I complained that I would have to stay at the university until 830 twice a week, I ended up absolutely loving it. I am teaching that class as part of the extension program for non-UNINORTE students, which means that the group ranges from 16-60. They are some of the most motivated people I have worked with yet here, since most of them are spending two hours learning English instead of going home to relax after a long day of work. Their English level is extremely advanced, which means that instead of spending two hours teaching grammar structure and reading strategies, I can have real conversations.

I told the students that for the first class, I had not planned anything. I wanted them to get to know each other and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, with the main goal just being to lose some of their nervous inhibitions over speaking English. We broke the ice with introductions and after a little encouragement, they quickly opened up and were more than eager to join in the discussion. Within two hours, we covered anything and everything from personal goals and life ambitions to marriage/divorce to the culture of Barranquilla's CARNAVAL. That led to questions about Thanksgiving and 4th of July, and more questions about me. They wanted to know about Wisconsin and what made me decide to come to Colombia. Like so many others, they asked what Americans thought about Colombia, which turned into a heated debate about the responsabilities vs. the realities of the media. They asked me why I had studied International Relations and what my views on the Middle East were. We spent a long time talking about the Israeli/Palestinean conflict, which made me grateful for the AIESEC event we held on the topic, as well as discussions that I had had with Lisa, because I felt like I could hold my own and play devil's advocate much better than I would have been able to otherwise. We ran out of time far before anyone was ready to stop talking...

an inspiration, a reminder, a reason, a reward...

Think Globally, Act Locally

- Tanja

Sometimes we need a reminder of why we do the things we do, of what drives us, of what our passions are. Sometimes we look around, confused, and wonder how we got to where we are. Sometimes we stop to question why we chose the road less traveled when there could have been countless easier options.

The past several weeks have not been easy. In fact, they have been pretty tough. At times, frustrating, lonely, exhausting, annoying, confusing...

REWARDING

Despite all of the tough times that I have been through, this experience has already been so rich and I know that over the next several months, I will continue to take so much out of it. It won't necessarily get easier, but I didn't come here for it to be the easy way out. I came for the challenge. I came to question and be questioned.

I had no expectations other than to grow stronger from the journey. I have gotten much more than I bargained for.

Tanja sent out an email this morning that was simple, but powerful. Think globally, act locally. Why am I doing this? Because I believe in the beauty of discovering new cultures. I believe in going beyond people's expectations of what I can achieve. I believe in each and every one of my friends, who I miss more than anything in the world, but who are all so unbelievably inspiring and continue to motivate and push me everyday even when I am thousands of miles away from them. I believe in Colombia. I believe in defeating assumptions and judgements that do not reflect reality. I believe that if I can impact one person, I have succeeded. I believe in the mission of AIESEC.

La Feria de los Flores

Yesterday was the one month mark of my time in Colombia, but it kind of passed in a blur. The last week and a half has been rough, both physically and emotionally, but I have been riding it out and hoping that things will be better soon. It started off when my camera got busted in Medellin (hey, it was a traumatic experience!...but Gracie is helping me pick out a new one), but has mostly revolved around a bad combination of being ill and super homesick. I know that the homesickness is to be expected at times, and that it comes and goes, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier when all you can think about is that your closest friends are on a different continent than you are.

On a better note, I was reading over my blog and realizing that Medellin never got a proper entry (ahhh! did I just say proper? I think the UK girls are rubbing off on me. scary!). Our trainee weekend down there was, without a doubt, the best 4 days so far. Medellin is a beautiful city (hoping to go back in December to visit Xiomara, if not sooner!) and the @’ers from EAFIT and EIA, as well as other LC’s around Colombia, provided an unbelievably warm reception to over 20 trainees from around the world.

The weekend got off to a rocky start. After emailing the OC on a daily basis to change our travel plans of when we expected to arrive, since none of our jobs could agree on how many days the 5 of us could take off, Kate, Kylie, Jen, Claire, and I finally set off Wednesday evening. Bus travel around this country is an adventure in itself...to say the least. Not even a couple hours into the trip, the bus was pulled over by the military, all the passengers were ordered to get off, the men were patted down thoroughly as they stepped down (although the girls were just given a hand to climb out of the bus), every single piece of luggage that we were carrying on board, as well as every single corner and compartment of the bus was scrupulously searched. The reason? Oh you know, just to make sure that no one is carrying any firearms that they were planning to use in order to hold up the bus and take any hostages. Despite continuous improvements in security all over the country, especially since the beginning of the Uribe administration 4 years ago, moments like this are a harsh reminder of the reality – that life is still far from SAFE as we know it in the US – and while I rarely feel scared, as many people before I left implied that I would on a daily basis, I can’t help but get nervous during moments like this, knowing that there is a pressing need for the military to conduct such searches.

Other than that, the drama of the bus journey was limited to out of control air conditioning that turned the bus into an igloo, air conditioning vents that leaked when it started to rain around 4am, and traffic being held at a standstill for no apparent reason for several hours the next morning. The bus company claims it takes 12 hours to travel from Barranquilla to Medellin. The @’ers told us to realistically expect between 14-15 hours. 19 hours after we left, we pulled into the bus terminal in Medellin.

We immediately headed over to EAFIT, one of the two universities, where we had made it just in time for the global village, an excellent showcase by trainees and other international students that AIESEC had found to host stands in the center of the campus, complete with food, flags, pictures, traditional clothing, Colombian dance and music groups, and a Brazilian capoeira group, just as a global village should be. For me, the absolute best part about it was when I was talking with Diana, a good friend from AXLDS who was on the OC for their global village, and she told me, “It was actually after I was talking to you earlier this spring and you were telling me about how your event team was holding a global village on campus that we came up with idea of incorporating a global village into the Trainee Weekend. When else, other than at a conference, would we have so many international AIESEC'ers all together at once? Here in Colombia, we don’t have an “event planning team”, but I love how you guys focus so much on cultural events that can help spread AIESEC’s mission to non-AIESEC students on your campus. We have had so many people tell us today how much they liked seeing this, how they have never tasted food from Romania, or English tea, or learned how to make Japanese origami…and asked how they could find out more about AIESEC”. This conversation made me so damn proud of all my event planners from last semester who worked their asses off to help make our Global Village such a success. Impact can spread so much farther than you would ever expect.

From Thursday until Sunday, our days were filled with exploring Medellin and our nights were spent in true @ form – dancing the night away, often until 4 or 5 am. We saw the city race past us through the windows of the only metro in the country and took photos from high up in the mountains with the city sprawled out behind us. We soaked up the culture of the city through the art of Botero, shopping (it is the fashion capitol of the country), and the Flower Festival. From the first night out at the newest and largest club anywhere in Latin America (seriously, it had opened the previous weekend and holds 4000+ people…I have never seen anything like it) to the chiva the last night, there was never any lack of salsa dancing, reggaeton to rock out to, or aguardiente.

While I met a ton of people over the course of the weekend, the people I stayed with were without a doubt the best of the best: Maria, our host, King Wong (Manizales-Hong Kong), Mandy (Bogota-Beijing), Lucho (Monterrey-Barranquilla), Kate (London-Barranquilla), and me (Madison-Barranquilla). The 6 of us bonded as we all piled into the same cab on more than one occasion and laughed at Lucho and King Wong dancing YMCA in the middle of downtown Medellin during one of the parades. Maria’s family made us dinner each night, as we watched Gilmore Girls¸ of all things:) We were the last of the @’ers to leave the club Saturday night, and when we got back, we sat around the kitchen making quesadillas, laughing for hours longer. Sunday afternoon, we crowded among thousands of spectators to brave the heat and watch the flower parade, which was unlike anything I have ever seen. Maria told us the history behind the festival, how each float and stand was made from millions of fresh flowers early that morning (probably around the same time that we were enjoying our late-night snacks), and how people from surrounding villages begin to train for the event from the time that they are little children. She told us about dancing in the parade when she was much younger…how she remembered that she wasn’t even tired by the end of the parade route, and now she is certain that she couldn’t do it without being exhausted from the heat.

Vamos a Medellin, por la Feria de los Flores.

The weekend, the city, and the festival captured every ounce of Colombian culture and spirit that I love. I will be returning.

Gourmet cuisine for the adventurous

Colombia's big-butt ants entice gourmets

BARICHARA, Colombia - The first loud crackle tastes and feels like popcorn, but by the time the juices spray wildly in your mouth and the filament-like legs slide down your throat, there's no mistaking this toasted ant queen.

The people of sun-soaked northern Colombia have been eating ants for centuries. They believe the accurately named "hormiga culona" — big-butt queen ant — is everything from a natural form of Viagra to a protein-rich defense against cancer.

Now the invertebrates are going global: A businessman in Santander province exported more than 880 pounds of the inch-long queen ants last year, many of them to be hand-dipped in Belgian chocolate and sold in fancy packaging at $8 for a half dozen at upscale London department stores like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason.

But even as the delicacy begins to expand beyond Colombia, the ants appear to be dwindling in Santander, and that worries the region's ant-eating bipeds. This year's harvest, which usually begins around Easter and lasts as late as June, was one of the worst on record, with peasants in the artist colony of Barichara reporting half their normal year's haul. Entomologists say the winter was unusually harsh and spring rains were late, which may have disturbed the virgin queen ants' nuptial flights — the one time a year when they emerge from their dune-like ant hills to seek a mate and form a new colony. Almost as often, the queens are grabbed by lizards, birds or humans. Expanding fields of beans, tomatoes and tobacco also have replaced the region's last remaining wilderness and farmers consider the leaf-cutting ants — the species atta laevigata — to be serious pests.

"It's an age-old dilemma for the farmer — should I kill it or eat it?" said Andres Santamaria, who was given a $40,000 grant from Santander's government to develop an environmentally sustainable, export-oriented program for breeding the ants. Whatever the local conditions, overseas demand by itself won't endanger the ant supply, say those involved in the trade. "We're never going to eat Colombians out of their ants," said Todd Dalton, a 30-year-old chef in London whose yen for the exotic dish led him to create Edible, a novelty food brand whose products are not for the squeamish. Last year, Edible sold some 220 pounds of the ants, most of them dipped in chocolate, along with other specialties like lollipops with scorpions inside.

In Colombia, people generally toast the ants in salt at community gatherings and eat them as a snack. But there is innovation. Restaurants in Barichara offer an ant-based spread for bread and an ant-flavored lamb sauce. Stuffed tortilla "atta wraps" led the menu at a recent tasting at the Montreal Insectarium, an insect museum in Canada. "In France, they're so highly regarded people started calling them the caviar of Santander," said Stephane Le Tirant, curator at the Montreal Insectarium.

During harvest time in Santander, ants by the bagful are sold at almost every roadside stop. But although relatively abundant, they're not cheap — costing as much as $11 a pound. The culona is a source of regional pride, its image gracing everything from the logo of a long-distance bus company to the provincial La Culona lottery. It also connects locals to the province's indigenous past, when ants were a part of a complex mating ritual of the Guane Indians. Rising demand from the outside has helped push up prices that peasant harvesters are getting. "A few years ago they cost half as much," said Hernando Medina, the province's main exporter. Not everyone is cashing in. Jorge Raul Diaz maintains 37 ant colonies on a small farm outside Barichara, but in homage to native culture, he gives them away.
During last year's harvest, he organized the first culona-gathering contest, in which 22 participants competed over two months to see who could bag the most insects. Carmen Rondon, a jovial 71-year-old cleaning woman, finished second and won an electric blender. She no longer eats the ants, because of a near toothless mouth, but Rondon says she eagerly awaits the yearly hunt, when she scrambles about on hands and knees while ants crawl up and down her legs. "Whenever the culonas come out, I'm there the first day!" she said.


Haven't eaten any ants yet...but we are planning a trip to Buchamaranga one of these weekends, so I am sure they will be on the menu!

B'Quilla rainstorm

Torrential cannot even begin to describe it...

Pause. iPod is turned off as I notice the black clouds beginning to gather menacingly outside the bus window. There is a change in the air. I know what this means. Time is quickly running out. Still closer to the university than I am to my apartment, there is no way that I will make it to the bus stop before the storm begins, let alone survive the 4 block walk from that point to the front door of my apartment.

In the amount of time that it takes me to contemplate what I will do next, raindrops appear on the windshield of the bus. There is no time for indecisiveness. Within minutes, every taxi within the city limits will have been claimed instantaneously. Exito, the shopping center, should be my best bet. It is still two blocks away, which will be pushing it.

I lose.

The water level in the streets begins to rise as I yell for the bus driver to stop. As I run across the street, I grab my shoes off my feet. Barefoot is only slightly less dangerous than heels. Within 30 seconds, I am standing in the entryway, drenched, looking as if I dove into a lake without bothering to remove my clothing. The security guards smirk at all the fools caught off guard, who rush inside, soaked.

I head downstairs to the parking lot and give my address to the taxi driver. "Cuanto cuesta?" "5000". It is never more than 4000. I do not even consider arguing. The storms are usually enough to double the price in a second. The journey begins.

We pull out into the street, where the flood waters are already becoming dangerously high. Every other block, we make an extra turn out of the way just to avoid the rivers rushing through the downhill slanting streets. I make small talk with my cab driver and tell him how the first time I had seen it rain in Barranquilla, I had never seen anything like it before in my life. He asks me if I got nervous when it rained. I laugh. "Of course not, it's only rain..right?" I look outside at the water level rising above the bottom of all the cars and coming frighteningly close to my window. Well, maybe a little bit nervous.

Each time that we turn back in the right direction, the cabbie struggles to keep control of the vehicle, but more often than not, it isall he can do to make sure that we aren't floating into any of the other cars around us. Garbage cans, tires, tree branches, and any other random loose object not cemented down sweep past us. The streets become more and more empty as cars, taxis, delivery trucks, and buses pull into driveways, parking lots, or anywhere else than can offer some chance of protection.

We manage to make it within one block of my apartment. I can see my building, yet know that there is no way we could turn directly into the flood on my street. The cabbie apologizes as he explains that we need to wait for a minute. A minute turns into 10. I watch the waves crash around us, whirlpools forming in every direction. About 25 minutes after I had first gotten into the taxi for what is normally a 5 minute ride, I am dropped off at my front door. I race up to the gate, pound on the window for the doorman to buzz me in, and bolt inside.

When it rains, it pours. And you better get the hell out of the way because wherever you are, you will be stuck.

Best friends...

...make long distance international phone calls just because they know you are having a bad day and that hearing their voice will make everything right again.

What trainees have to worry about while they are working...

Alex and I are trying to decide if anyone would notice if we put a hammock up in our office....

press release

BBC World News: Uribe sworn in amid high security

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe has been sworn into office for a second term as tens of thousands of police patrolled the capital, Bogota.

Before presidents and officials from more than 20 countries, he pledged to seek peace with left-wing rebels and improve the country's economy. The ceremony took place amid tight security with tanks on the streets and military helicopters overhead. Officials feared a repeat of his 2002 inauguration, which came under attack. Rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) fired a barrage of mortars at the presidential palace, killing at least 20 people in a poor neighbourhood a few streets away. The group had killed more than 20 security officers in the past week. Police said they deactivated a car bomb outside Bogota on Monday.

Less war

In his inaugural speech, President Uribe highlighted the successes of his last four years and set out his plans for his next term. "We strived without fear in our actions to secure peace," he told Congress. "Fear will not stop us negotiating. I confess my concern is something else - the risk of failing to get peace and slipping back in security." The ceremony was attended by 11 South American heads of state as well as dignitaries from other nations. Increased security in Bogota included army and police checkpoints on the outskirts of the city, snipers positioned on rooftops around the presidential palace and a ban on alcohol consumption. President Uribe, an ally of Washington, goes into his second term in office amid high expectations, says the BBC's Jeremy McDermott. He has won praise for his relentless offensives against Marxist guerrillas and a generous amnesty law for right-win paramilitaries over the last four years. But there is a feeling that he has failed to come close to defeating the rebels and the Colombian public has made it clear it wants more talk and less war in the next four years, our correspondent adds. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in decades of fighting among rebels, right-wing paramilitaries and state forces. President Uribe also pledged to tackle Colombia's social problems, promising to improve education, health and housing for people while balancing free-market economic policies. Half of Colombians live below the poverty line, and 13 million have no access to any form of pension.

Nos vemos...

Conferences are great places for people to make extravagant travel plans, promises to come visit, or meet up in some other exotic destination, but the reality of it remains that there is a good chance that life will lead you down other roads. After a week's worth of some of the most stirring conversations you have ever had with people who have become such close friends, often the pictures are all that remain to remind you of those moments.

Bienvenidos a MEDELLIN.

After the UK girls and I survived our "technically 12 hours, but plan on 15, turned into 19 hour long" bus ride, we were picked up at the bus terminal and headed to EAFIT. The afternoon was completely surreal as one by one, I was reunited with some of my best friends from AXLDS and ConoSur. I could hardly believe that 4 months ago, these were the people who had opened my eyes to the beauty of Colombia, showed me the passion and the fun of the culture that I quickly fell in love with, and completely changed my life. Others I had seen just a few weeks ago, thousands of miles south of here, in Argentina.

Diana, Andres, Lucas, Cata, Kelly, Tiffany, Santi, Liney, Sebastian, Fedde...

As Diana told me about how our Global Village at Madison sparked the idea of hosting a similar event here at the university yesterday in conjunction with trainee weekend - which was a HUGE success, great work OC :) ...as I sat on the sidelines of the football field with Andres, talking for ages, in Spanish instead of English this time...as we all danced the night away at the newest, most happening club in Latin America...I could not imagine being anywhere other than where I am right now.

I can't believe that I am here. I can't believe that all of you are here. I can't believe that we made this happen.

AIESEC Trainee Weekend 2006

escaping to the city of eternal spring...

No shortcuts allowed...

When in Colombia...

Restaurants do not serve Coke or Diet Coke...

Do not order un coca or un coca light as you may normally be inclined to...

It is always ALWAYS ALWAYS Coca-Cola.