Colombia bonita

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Things I'm going to miss #4: Devotion

I had started to think about this aspect of life in Colombia the other day when I saw a teenaged boy walking down the street arm in arm with his mom (or aunt or grandma), but I didn’t know what to call it until I walked past a church today, Easter Sunday.    The church of Santa Beatriz  is between my apartment and the gym and the seamstress and the hardware store and the closest mini-market, so I walk past it pretty often, including most Sundays and holy days that we have off work.  Without fail, when Mass is being celebrated on those days, the place is so packed that people are standing in the doorways or sitting outside in little camping chairs or on tiny folding wooden stools.  Non-practicing-anything heathen that I am, I always think that that seems like a lot of trouble to go to for Mass, but I also always have to marvel at what moves people to do it.  Today I saw this devotion taken to another level.  Not only were people standing in the doorways, but they were doing so in crowds ten people deep.  Others were sitting on the park benches  outside the church next to the avocado seller lady who is a fixture here at Santa Beatriz.  Even later, when the service was over, I noticed (not for the first time) that many people who walked past the now-closed-up church crossed themselves as they went by.   I am not saying that all Colombians line up for Mass (in fact, many are devoted to a wide range of Protestant churches too), or that people in the States don’t turn out in huge numbers at churches on Sunday, but something about the worshippers camped out at Santa Beatriz gives me pause and reminds me of the fervor with which Colombians approach so many aspects of their lives.

Take the family, for example.  Going back to the teenaged boy walking arm in arm with his mom, I have to say that that’s not something that I have seen very often in the States and to me, that gesture captures a simple truth about life in Colombia, namely that family is everything.  Having grown up far away from all but my immediate family and having subsequently moved away from them too, I have to appreciate the closeness that characterizes so many families here.  From my friend Adelaida who spends pretty much every Sunday at her parents’ house and whose sixteen year-old daughter is not above coming to the faculty room to give her mom a hug, to María Elvira who rushes home on her free afternoon to have lunch with her husband and either one of her grown children if they’re around, to Camila who always seems to be doing one thing or another with her mom, her dad, and/or her sister, to my Colombian colleagues who are mystified by my decision to live so far away from my family, to my student (she’s a senior) whose dad meets her and her brother at the school bus stop most afternoons, to my manicure lady whose kids sometimes run around the salon on a Saturday afternoon, family ties are everywhere and are absolutely cherished.

Indeed, it is safe to say that the only thing that can even begin to compete with the treasures of faith and family is the national soccer team.  For the first time in a long time, it has been kicking butt in the latest round of World Cup qualifier matches (except for their 1-0 loss to Venezuela the other day), and people are going nuts.  On game day you can buy a jersey on just about any street corner, and you kind of feel like you need to unless you want to be the only schmuck in the city who isn’t wearing one.  Bars and restaurants are decorated with balloons and streamers, and everybody from the ladies at the salon to the patients in a doctor’s waiting room are glued to the TV.  If for some reason you aren’t watching the game, no worries.  You can tell when Colombia scores a goal by the shouts that reverberate through every apartment building on the block.  I can't wait til they play Argentina in June.

Things I'm going to miss #3: The food

I know.  No surprise that I have a lot to say about this.  While I hope to be reincarnated as Anthony Bourdain so I can just roam planet and eat, until then I have to take a little time to rave about the food in my current corner of the world.  As a rule, Andean fare is pretty bland.  My experiences in Peru and Ecuador taught me that before I ever arrived in Colombia.  Corn and potatoes feature prominently, which can be, well, boring.  But while potatoes (especially) are everywhere here, there are about a hundred different types of them, and they are – hands down – the most delicious potatoes you’ve ever encountered.  Seriously, you get yourself some little tiny boiled and salted papas criollas, and you will tell Idaho to just not even bother. 

Colombian cuisine, however, goes way beyond potatoes.  Take for example what is maybe my favorite (and surely the most lethal) Colombian dish: bandeja paisa (paisa platter, i.e. platter from the department of Antioquia – where Medellín is).  This is truly a heart attack on a plate, and much to my delight, the cafeteria at Colegio Los Nogales does a more than respectable version of it.  It is a delicious spread of rice, beans, ground beef, fried plantain, a fried egg, and chicharrones, all garnished with an avocado.  Calling chicharrones pork rinds really doesn’t begin to do them justice because it just makes them sound like those gross things you buy in a bag at a gas station when, in fact, they are all meaty (ok, and fatty) porky goodness.  I can’t believe it took me until this year to figure out that on bandeja paisa day it is best to go through the lunch line with somebody who doesn’t do chicharrones so you can have theirs.  Gracias, David Aguirre.  Although teaching class after a double helping of pork rinds may not equal stellar history instruction.  Good thing the kids are as comatose as I am.    

The accompanying photographs show two of my other all-time favorite Colombian delicacies.  First, ceviche (above & which I hope you’ve tried somewhere) is just raw fish “cooked” in lime juice.  I don’t know what else to say about it.  I am fortunate to have a great cevichería around the corner, which I go to very often.  Yet as good as it is there, I have actually figured out how to improve on their deliciousness and get it up to the truly-very-special standards of La Cevichería in Cartagena: mint and olive oil.  And while I love that you can find ceviche everywhere, I am not so sure it belongs everywhere.  The movie theater?  I’ll stick to popcorn, thanks. 

And then there are tamales.  If you’re like my mom when she visited Bogotá a couple of years ago, prior to trying good tamales tolimenses you thought that tamales were dried out corn meal stuffed in dried out corn husks.  But just as the tamales I bought from a lady selling them out of a bucket in a market in Oaxaca were nothing like the crap you can get most places in the States, these tamales (wrapped in banana leaves) from Tolima are unlike anything you’ve ever had.  Trust me.  I’m pretty sure that the floppy semi-transparent things in them are just slabs of (chicken?) fat, but combined with the smokiness  imparted by the banana leaves, these bundles of joy are truly memorable.   Sí señor, with some Colombian hot chocolate (minus the cheese that some people melt into it – that’s one food thing I have not been able to get behind), I could probably eat my own body weight in these little gems from Tolima.  Fortunately for me and hung-over Colombians, they are ubiquitous at Saturday and Sunday morning breakfast places.  In my humble gringa opinion, some of the very best ones (pictured here) are to be found at La Puerta Falsa, a tiny place off the Plaza de Bolívar that has been open since 1816.  As part of my Semana Santa stay-cation I schlepped down there today just for the tamales.  Even if it weren’t a block from one of my favorite bookstores in Bogotá, it would have been worth the trip.

Things I'm going to miss #2: Nicknames, pet names, and terms of endearment

As someone who has never had a nickname (in English there’s not much you can do with Sarah), I have loved that in Colombia I have, not one, but two of them.  Like I have always been anywhere in Latin America, here I am Sarita.  But besides “–ita” also Colombians have “-is” as another diminutive/term of endearment that they add to the end of people’s names.  So here I am sometimes Saris, and I love it when people call me that because a) it’s only for people you really like and b) it’s so 100% Colombian.  

Those are some of the things you do with people’s names, but there is also a whole host of other pet names and ways of addressing people that Colombians use that I think are great.  There are some things that are reserved only for people you know really well (like family) and others where the line is more blurry.  I crack up whenever I hear my friends call their husbands or children “gordo” or “gorda” (fatty), especially when they are not at all.  I also love it when people refer to babies or toddlers as “mami” and “papi,” since they are clearly nobody’s parents.  Then there are some of the ways I have been addressed in stores or at the gym or at the market or by people at school.  Among my favorites are: “mi vida” (my life), “mi reina” (my queen), “mujer” (woman – I think this is more a thing from the coast, but the guy at the photocopy place called me it yesterday), and “profe” (short for profesora (teacher)).  There’s also the expression “sumercé,” which is short for “su merced” (your mercy) and is a veeeery old fashioned but widely-used way of addressing someone respectfully.  I’ve always thought it was surprising that the graffiti artists at the Universidad Nacional use it in some of their calls to arms, though I guess it does rhyme with “rebelarse”  (to rebel), which is how it usually appears.  

Things I'm going to miss about Colombia #1

After getting off to a strong start almost four years ago, this blog has been woefully neglected in recent times.  Save for a trip to Cuba and a tear gas incident at the Universidad Nacional, life in Bogotá became just that: life.  It was good, though not necessarily remarkable or anything that felt blog-worthy.  But now this gringa en Colombia is bringing her time here to a close, and I am feeling a need to savor and document my last few months.

On Facebook I have a photo album entitled “Things I’m going to miss about Colombia,” and it brings me a little joy every time I add to it.  So I think that this space needs to be where I record things I’m going to miss for which there is no accompanying visual.  Expect frequent updates.

 

Here begins the list (in no particular order).

1.       The public buses.  This may seem an unexpected listing because, really, these vehicles of questionable origin that hurtle down Bogotá’s streets at sometimes terrifying speeds reflect the best and the worst that Colombia has to offer.  I am choosing to focus on the former.  Bogotá bus culture and etiquette are surprising and refreshing in many ways.  I mean, where else do they play salsa music on public transportation to which passengers unabashedly sing along?  And in what other country on the planet do people hover/squat over a recently-occupied seat to let the butt heat dissipate before sitting down?  They even have a saying for that: “Asiento caliente? Ni de pariente.” (Hot seat? Not even of a relative).  And for all the smack that people from other parts of the country talk about “Rolos” (people from Bogotá) and how cold and heartless they are, there is one bus practice that I love and that I don’t think you would ever see in the United States, or many other places for that matter.  When the buses are really packed and so passengers are even boarding through the back door, these people who are barely squeezing on pass their fare forward via other passengers who then pass back any necessary change.  We are talking money changing hands about 50 times here.  In a similar spirit of solidarity, if a standing passenger has a big or heavy bag or package, then a nearby seated passenger will usually offer to hold it on their lap.  Oh, and also the buses get you where you need to go for less than a dollar.