the barranquilla follies, mona's birthday and other short stories

can you think of the last time a stranger asked you for help? do you remember what you said?

sitting next to luis on the overnight bus to medellin, not yet knowing his name, i am silent. it has been three or four days since i have spoken to anyone - a real conversation, anyway. and i am waiting for the hum of the engine, the crank of the gears, to shift into background noise to sing me to sleep.

early in the day, i took a bus from cartagena to barranquilla for the much hyped and highly touted carnaval. a five day celebration of music and dancing throughout the streets of the city. i am supposed to meet the guys from santa marta here tomorrow. or the next day. i'm not sure. i have no idea how we will meet up. while contemplating how it is i am going to find them, i am interrupted by the bus stopping short of its terminal destination. so, there i am, in nowhere, barranquilla, unsure of what the hell i am doing. with stone rubble filled streets and dozens of buses flying by en route to who knows where, i am forced to seek help.

i test out my spanish on the first person i see; a teenage kid hanging on the street. we hardly understand each other. rather, i hardly understand him. they speak very, very fast on the coast in colombia. he tells me his name at least 9 times. still, now, i have no idea what it was. we'll call him the dude.

the dude gathers i am a tourist in town for carnaval and an ignorant one at that. i gather nothing, but he begins walking, elbow bent and hand winding for me to follow.

why not?

we arrive at his house, doubling as his father's convenience store. when i encountered the dude, he was dressed in fraying shorts and t-shirt, dirt brown cap and thong sandals. now, after offering me coca-cola, yuca and fish that looked as though it was pulled out of the magdalena river 2 minutes ago, the dude is transforming into the dudette; blow drying his hair, applying facial cream after changing into tight jeans, a pink london exchange t-shirt, pumas and two giant diamonds in his ears. before beginning every sentence, he tightens the ends of his mouth and smacks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. he tells me he will accompany me into town, help me get situated.

five hours of miscommunication later, we are in a taxi, the dude returning to his burroughs, and me to the bus terminal. all of the hotels were either run down shit holes, overpriced or full. i have comprehended one of every one hundred words coming from the dude, given up hope of finding my amigos and just want to get the hell out. F the festivities. when the dude gets out at his stop, i thank him for everything and tell him i'm sorry for the trouble. he is pissed and mumbles, "claaaro." "of course" and returns home.

as our bus pulls away, the people are gathering in the streets and the party is beginning. i cannot sleep. aside from the fact that i am not tired, the guy next to me on the bus is a big, big boy, and stretch space is limited. i ask him what his story is to help pass the time. his name is luis, he is 23 and is on leave from work for his once a month visit to wife and baby. his spanish is clear and he also speaks a little english. the knot in my chest loosens a bit. finally, a breakthrough. we talk about medellin, its beauty, how much we both love food, how his english sucks, how my spanish sucks and where he would go if he could go anywhere in the world. he chose alberta, canada. really??

i am wearing shorts, t-shirt and sandals, and the buses here BLAST the air conditioning. luis sees my teeth slamming together like they are connected to a motor.

"are you cold? here, take this."

and i am an honorary member of the colombian division of caterpillar machine technicians. in the middle of the night, luis nudges my shoulder to move aside. it's his stop. he tells me to keep the shirt and leaves his telephone number in case i need anything in medellin.

the next time my eyes open, i am at the medellin northern bus terminal. i needn't mess with another bus or the taxis, as medellin has a well designed and efficient metro system. i get off at only what i assume to be the stop nearest the hostel i am looking for. with address in hand, i ask a random middle aged woman on the street where "this" address is.

rocio asks nearly every damn person we pass how to get to the hostel and walks me all the way there. she tells me to drop my things because she is going to show me around. we pick up another hosteller for the trip. she takes us to her apartment, feeds us a snack. takes us to her niece's house to meet her niece. takes us around the neighborhood to see where the restaurants are. no doubt she would have held my hand the entire day if she did not have a meeting with a friend a couple of hours later. she leaves me with another telephone number to call, just in case.

that evening, sitting on the steps of the catedral de metropolitana, i am watching the monthly flea market fold up as dusk sets in. a guy next to me asks me something, but i don't quite understand his spanish. i ask him if he speaks english and to my surprise, he does. him and his buddy both teach english, one at the university and one at a high school. javier and antonio.

they offer to take me out to dinner for a plato tipico of medellin. uh, hell yes, please. beans, rice, fried egg, steak, tomato, and a giant avocado. i forget the name of it now, but it was AMAZING. i am invited to javier's apartment to hang and listen to music. i know none of the artists they like and relishing the opportunity to collect some new music.

javier: "have you heard of this one?"

me: "no."

javier: "how about this one?"

me: "no."

javier: "HEELLLLOO. ohmygod. what do they listen to on jupiter?"

awkwardness rears its head again when antonio accidentally pops up the download program with "men at play," a 45 minute gay porn downloading and quickly closes it. oooooooh dear.

javier asks if i want to stay the night. not so much. i awkwardly make it over abundantly clear that i like the dames.

me: "yeah, i have a girlfriend back home. like 3...7, actually. yep. love girls. love 'em..."

while i fumble my words and act like an idiot, javier handles it like a champion and calls me a taxi back to my hostel. before leaving, he invites me on a minitour of the city the next day and to celebrate their friend, mona's, birthday up in the mountains of santa elena.

why not?

hell of a time. the minitour included visits inside the cathedral (boasting the most bricks of any basilica in the world; 1.2 million or something like that) and the cemetary of san pedro, a 165 year old burial ground, displaying beautiful statues and mausoleums. however, my favorite part of the day, was the trip to santa elena.

mona is celebrating her 53rd birthday. mona lives by herself, choosing life away from the hectic chaos of the city, making stained glass pieces as her trade. we are about 2400m above medellin, surrounded by peace. celebrating with her are javier, antonio, antonio's mother, sister, brother and sister-in-law. oh, and me. we were there for three hours or so and i may have said fifty words, tops. but they embraced me like family, walking me through the woods to the mountain top for a bird's eye view of medellin, feeding me pastries and coffee and hot chocolate, playing dice and card games for pocket change.

antonio pulls me aside every now and again, pointing to a tiny dot in medellin, saying in his high nasally tone, "myyykoooool, come here. do you see that?..." and goes on to explain a part of medellin history that i will only vaguely remember.

when they play, they scream and yell and laugh with eruption. with their whole bodies. even when i don't know what's going on, i do the same. its contagious. i leave with a hung and kiss from the whole family as well as the birthday girl, herself.

aside from javier's attempts to gay me up a little, mostly in jest, i couldn't have planned those couple of days better. not only did i get to see sides of the city and country i would have never found on my own, i made a couple of new friends and got to work on my spanish with the two tutors that would have been worth an endless amount of money per hour.

i venture off on my own the next day, to see what this paragliding is all about. apparently, medellin is the place to do it in colombia, being breeding grounds for extremely high winds as the city is buried in a valley below the mountains.

if you get a chance to go paragliding, DO IT! high in the mountains again, about 2300m up, i don't even have time to think how high i am before the wind snatches my tandem flyer, felipe, and I into it's grasp. i am overly fearful of heights, but for some reason i am completely at ease floating thousands of feet above the ground. almost too much at ease.

me: "felipe, are we going to go down more?" i just want something to get a little more movement going.

he responds with something that sounds like maneuvers.

me: "SIIII!"

oh god.

my stomach flies somewhere toward santa elena while felipe rips us left, right, down, upside down....

felipe: "otra vez?" again?

me: "yeeeeeeeep."

before i was able to have a 2300m spew, the ride is over and we are landing softly on the mountain side.

i am headed to salento, coffee country, this morning to go hammocking and do nothing but drink cafe con leche for the next couple of days until my body tremors out of existence.

i have been overwhelmed by the friendliness and hospitality of the people here. i tried to explain to javier and antonio how these things would rarely happen in the states, but it became this tangled and insensible diatribe about national paranoia and terrorism. what the hell was i talking about?

am i wrong though? is this common place in the states? and if not, why not?

in other news, i had my first solid bowel movement in 8 days this morning. happy super tuesday, yeah?

also, something has been bugging me the past few days and i have not been able to get the answer. there is an old and rare looney tunes episode in which the road runner and speedy gonzalez face off in a foot race. do you remember that one? WHO THE HELL WON THAT RACE?! don't ask me why or how this came up. i have no idea.

be good,
michael