bucaramangering!

Sunrise over Central America, I think. This is hour 12 of our 16 hour ride from Portland to Medellin. The plane does land and we do not crash and burn, the wine is free...Chilean! This Juan Gabriel our couchsurfing host in Medellin, the other guy is me, note that I haven't slept in three days. Juan Gabriel is a great guy, a computer programmer and engineering student. He lives above a rock bar and 24 hour copy shop so night 2 brings no sleep.

This is Medellin, Escobar is gone and so to is Pepe his hippopatomus who escaped to the Rio Medellin (a large concrete torrent) and was murdered by the government. Look it up! Medellin is clean for a South American city and bears reminders eveywhere that the people of Medellin are concerned with the environment. The people are so friendly and the weather is like being in a sauna. The midday sun grinds upon me like cassava upon a tin grater.

This is a view from the Metro. The Metro is a light rail very similar to the max. It costs 1500 pesos to ride. 75 cents roughly The metro zooming by. In these stops there are auxillary police, 16-17 year old young men with batons who keep order but by no means are menacing. This gives jobs and other to otherwise wayward youth. The force is quite large. One of them told me to get my feet off a concrete block, I obeyed as to not be met by his truncheon.

This is an image a giant space worm

Along with the growing environmental conciousness, there is a growing sense of community and well being and the government holds free fitness classes throughout the city. We saw three going on and one was quite large with several hundred people rhythmically moving their hips to electro beats.

You can translate this yourself! Tomas was a muy famoso colombian poet.

"Happiness, so long as we create it, is not outside, it's inside ourselves, sensory or however you call it. We must be quiet as so not to scare it, as it's a bird that flies away at the slightest noise. Let it repose within us, so that it might emerge when we least expect it. It's true that happiness that does not always rest in any soul, but the souls have their summers, and the swallows return; they have their spring and the roses open."

The graffiti is rad. There are alot of octupus themed diddies and as some you might now that is sort of my mascot. Viva cephelopa! This one seems to have "problemas con su pelo."

Holy shit! This is our apartment in Bucaramanga, la ciudad bonita. It is really, really nice. 2 bedrooms lotsa furniture. I don't own furniture, some of you may also be aware of my furniture phobia. I own no furniture of any merit, I am proud of this fact. I do enjoy having a couch looking out over the city though. The apartment is really sweet and i feel very fortunate to have it as most people here struggle to make 500,000 (250 bucks) pesos a month and live in communal situations with extended families. I am insanely fortunate to be so free, I thank the universe for my current prosperity. This reminds me of how much educated,intelligent, free people owe to the other billions. We have a different debt, maybe two, discovering the nature of our debt (not monetary) and finding the bravery to begin to repay.

This next image is the leaf cutter and which seem to really like red flowers to chop up and grow their fungus on. They are ubiquitous.

These are crazy little pollinating wasps. They come back to the paper-tube hive in a manner that looks like they are being sucked in the hive. You can see the pollen on their legs as they come back, they are not bees.

A main street in Buca, lotsa trees and hot as hell down in the center of the city.

Up near La Floresta (paradise) in the hills there are many tall condo buildings and huge arboreteum that called La Flora , it's like a big maze...

Your host with the most.

Making jugo de pina from fresh pineapple and drinking Aguila cervesa. The pineapple was 1.50 US and was amazingly sweet and fresh. It was from the hills about 30 minutes from here. This pineapple was hard as a ****ing rock and the knife was as dull as a bleeping stone.

The virew from our balcony. At night hudreds of murcielagos(bats) gobble up the mosquitos. It's a great sight at they whip back and forth at eye level.

Yo prepare' un vaso de jugo de pina. Pineapple is my favorite fruit...i love it.

a few more snapshots

The Christmas decorations have come out in full force, especially for the Virgin de Guadalupe Day feast which took place on December 12th... there were a lot of firecrackers going off and public gatherings in plazas, and pinatas!
I love all the lights everywhere. I've had it pretty easy here actually, in terms of winter darkness: it was 26 degrees C today but it's going to be 8 degrees C tomorrow.... Aaaaaaahhh!!
I had the best street food that I've had during my time here at this cart... omg. I don't remember what it was called, where it was or how I'll be able to find it again. But if you happen to be in the neighborhood near the Parque Viveros (this huge park where families like to hang out and have BBQs), ask somewhere where the taco cart is, across the street from the Pemex gas station and OXXO convenience store, that serves the amazing sopes with carne asada and cheese... you won't regret it, I promise.
Ghetto cooking in Nuevo Laredo. Yes, that is a floor tile... (I clean it!!)
BURRO! I love burros. The man who was driving the truck shouted out "Se vende!" (For sale!) as the loan officer and I pulled away.
Driving with the loan officers is always a mildly terrifying experience, especially when the cars are lacking sidemirrors.
An example of a house in Nuevo Laredo, permanently under construction.

Nine days left...

A Visit in Nuevo Laredo

Corey is now gone but the signs of his stay are still all over my apartment: the black peppercorns spilled all over the floor (he was smashing them with a floor tile to put into my pepper shaker), the two magnets of Mt. Hood on the fridge that he brought me to give as gifts to people, the box of leftover shrimp rice in the fridge (I should probably throw that away). All in all it was a wonderful visit. Even though we didn't go anywhere (neither of us felt like dealing with long bus rides), it felt like a real vacation. On Thursday and Friday we had to go to the office because I had work to do but we left after 3pm on Friday. We did all the Nuevo Laredo things I wanted us to do. On Friday night we went to the karaoke bar and met up with my friends. On Saturday morning that we took the bus to the Wal-Mart mall, bought a ticket to 2012, watching 3/4ths of it and then sneaked into Inglorious Bastards (what a pointless, boring movie). We tried to stick it out but left shortly after Brad Pitt dug his fingers into the German actresses' bullet wound. We ate a LOT. Corey ate so many meat tacos, I was actually a little shocked. We also went to some nice seafood restaurants. On Sunday afternoon we went to the market; in the afternoon we walked over the border together (the first time I've been in Laredo, surprisingly enough!), said goodbye and I sent him in a taxi. It was a wonderful visit and best of all I'll be back in Portland for Christmas in only three weeks. And then I guess we need to start planning our trip back to Ecuador... eek!

Here are some more photos:
Driving across the border with my amazingly kind and nice co-worker who took the time to do so. There were so many cars, it took well over an hour to drive across the bridge over the Rio Bravo (when I walked across it, it took about two minutes).
Too bad I got the time of Corey's arrival wrong; we ended up waiting in the Laredo airport for 2 1/2 hours. Whoops!
Corey arrives! We are happy to see each other, obviously. I think this is a pretty cute picture, even with the blurriness and my Skeletor hand.
Daaw.

And that's it. I took NO pictures during his visit because I am made of FAIL. Honestly, I think taking pictures is kind of annoying, which once again makes me wonder about the purpose of this blog... it has such a weird, ambiguous, almost pointless identity for me. I guess it's sort of a vague travel blog? Hmm. Maybe when we go back to Ecuador things will become clearer...

Anyway, here's some photos of my apartment when I first moved in. Check out the nasty fridge (that was no fun to clean, I tell ya) and the random bucket crusted over with dry flakes of cement.

In Nuevo Laredo

I miss writing here. I've been writing for the Kiva Fellows blog while I complete the Kiva Fellows internship in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, with Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva (FVP). I recently learned that for my next placement I might be placed with a partner microfinance institution in Quito, Ecuador. I really hope this ends up happening because it would be really great if Corey and I could return to Ecuador again. How funny if we were to have the chance to return to that strange little equatorial country.

Anyway, so even though I now officially have less than a month (!!) here in Mexico, I'm going to try to update here during the little time that remains. So to start with, here are some pictures of my time so far in Nuevo Laredo.

This is the view from the office window of the two competing taco carts across the street, Tacos Tony and Tacos El Guero. Apparently the the GM merger, many office staff wondered if a merger of the two carts would result in Tacos Tony El Guero or Tacos El Guero Tony. Thankfully, said merger never took place.


FVP's mission statement: "to generate positive, enduring change..."


Ensalada de nopales in the local vegetarian restaurant, El Nuevo Sol.


A lady stops by the office once a week to sell tamales, including 10-peso chicken tamales with salsa verde. I'm always so excited when she comes, because they're soooo good.


One of the loan officers cuts her birthday cake. Office birthday parties are definitely a cause for excitement, especially the mango cakes. Too bad there's no more birthdays left for the year.


Just hanging out, eating and cracking jokes, business as usual at FVP.


Local neighborhood Jesus wall. Landmarks such as these are important for locating clients on confusing streets.


A quesadilla de carne asada prepared by a Kiva/FVP client. So much for vegetarianism, eh? You gotta accept the gifts you're given, though!


A lot of FVP clients run little albarrotes, or grocery stores. You walk past these all the time, but you never really think of the story behind the person who runs it, you know?


The intern prepares for the client interview.


Nelly the loan officer manhandles a giant calculator (she left her own calculator at home and had to use the one the client had for sale in the store) in an effort to calculate whether or not the client's business is resulting in a profit or a loss. Stressful!


Just a regular Nuevo Laredo street.


Going door-to-door visiting clients' houses (this one already had several loans to FVP for housing improvement. Looks pretty nice, doesn't it?).


A menu that fills my heart with joy.


A huarache, which also means leather sandal. God, this was so good.


Quesadilla de huitlacoche, a type of corn fungus. O, as Corey so lovingly put it, rotting corn. Wikipedia is a little less harsh with the term corn smut. These are really, really delicious, very salty and shroomy-tasting.


Local gardening in the form of papaya trees. People also tend to grow chili peppers.


A client I visited who made gorgeous art work. She ended up giving me a pillow with the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, complete with sequins and glitter. I keep it on the armchair in my apartment. Now whenever I sit on this armchair I always inevitably end up with red and blue glitter on my clothes.


My workstation, filled with the most common accessories. Note the screen recovering the crashed Open Office documents, the Styrofoam cup of banana batido (I've stopped buying these since), the mess of papers and the cluttered nightmare desktop with Excel documents.


A michelada, or beer with lime, salt and chili smeared around the rim. Quite tasty.


Eating a cheese quesadilla after consuming a big bowl of menudo, or tripe soup. It was actually quite tasy, perfect stuff for a rainy, gray day.


I swear to God we walked 5km, looking at stall after stall of clothes bought from Ross and the Goodwill bins from the U.S., TVs, computer parts, washing machines, refrigerators, mattresses, pirated DVDs and CDs, children's toys, cellphones... basically anything and everything you would ever need, you could find here.


At las pulgas with co-workers and their kids. Las pulgas means the fleas, which I assume is short for flea-market.


Estacion Palabra is like the local reading/cultural center, built with money from none other than Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who apparently traveled through Nuevo Laredo while embarking on his road trip through the U.S. south (which he writes about in "Vivir para contarla"). I told you the world was small!


LOOK AT HOW BIG THAT HAMBURGER IS. It was the size of my head!! But it was sooo good. Man, I want one now. Mexico, you have turned me into a vicious carnivore, much to my chagrin.


Competition for FVP? (It's a pretty sketchy flier advertising easily available loans, no questions asked... interesting that the interest rates are not posted...)


Laredo's version of the border wall. Pretty different from the five fences in the Tijuana-San Diego region, complete with helicopters, Batman-like lights at night in the sky and helicopters chopping away overhead.


My puny view of America, on the other side of the fence. I haven't walked across the border since I got here, but I will tonight when I go to pick up Corey at the airport... :)


Huge Mexican flag right by border wall. I wonder if the American one is this big up close.


On Guerrero, the main street in Nuevo Laredo.


Mural in a square. I thought it was interesting the text was in English. Nuevo Laredo and Laredo are often referred to as "los dos Laredos" in the media. There's plenty of newspapers that cover news for both cities, and also in dialogue many people simply refer to "Laredo" when speaking of Nuevo Laredo, as though the two terms were interchangeable. It's definitely the healthiest, friendliest relationship between two U.S.-Mexican border cities I've ever seen (compared to Juarez-El Paso and Tijuana-San Diego).


This was line to see "2012" at the Wal-Mart mall. It was so long!! My friend was REALLY happy to see this many people, because he said it was good for Mexico's economy.


Miau sardines ("miau" is the sound a cat makes).


These birds always make so much noise in the evening! They're crazy, always cawing and calling away.


My street.