Tag Archives: south america

We’re in the newspaper! Does that make it official?

Posted on April 18, 2013 | Leave a comment
"Congratulations to the great city of Barranquilla. From the first time we visited, we felt at home."

“Congratulations to the great city of Barranquilla. From the first time we visited, we felt at home.”

I think we’re officially Barranquilleros now!  The clip to the left is from the April 8th edition of the local paper, La Libertad. The photo and quote were taken when  Gio and I attended “Barranquilla Sabe Cantar” (“Barranquilla Knows How to Sing”), a free community event celebrating the City of Barranquilla’s 200th Birthday. We were asked if we’d like to extend our congratulations to the City, and of course we said yes! Even though our quote was “doctored” a little bit and makes us look more like visitors than residents, we’ll ignore that and instead assume that this means we have indeed arrived. Hooray!

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Posted in Making the Leap

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Top Ten Ways that Going to the Doctor in Colombia is Different than in the U.S.

Posted on April 3, 2013 | 11 comments

As you might imagine or know from personal experience, living in another country requires getting used to certain things that, if you’re lucky, you never have to encounter during short-term travel. Among those are health care and health insurance systems. Besides obvious challenges like trying to describe your symptoms in a language that’s not your native tongue, there are lots of other surprises — good and bad. Here’s my top ten list of how going to the doctor in Colombia is different than in the U.S.: Continue reading →

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Posted in Daily Life, Health

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Divinely Human: Barranquilla’s 200th Carnaval (A Photographic Retrospective)

Posted on March 14, 2013 | 7 comments

DSC00172In some ways, Carnaval is all about dressing up in outlandish ways — either to hide our true selves in order to temporarily be someone we’re not (and perhaps give ourselves permission to indulge in ways that we normally wouldn’t), to allow a usually buried part of our personality to take the stage, or to simply revel in the joie de vivre of life’s excesses, good and bad. And yet, even with all the feathers, the makeup, the glitter, what shines through most is our humanness, our oneness, our inherent beauty. So without further ado (at this point, I recommend cueing up “Human” by the Killers as your viewing soundtrack), I present you with a few of the faces, a few of the people — a few of all of us — who made Barranquilla’s 200th Carnaval an experience to remember. Continue reading →

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Posted in Arts & Culture, Photography, Travel & Tourism

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Fútbol, not Football

Posted on January 30, 2013 | 5 comments

IMG_0784As the United States gears up for Super Bowl Sunday, I thought it would be a good time to provide a little taste of Colombia’s sport of choice – fútbol. We’re talking “fútbol,” the game with the round ball that you kick with your feet, as opposed to American “football,” the one with the pointy pigskin thing (is it really even a ball?) that you mostly touch with your hands, despite the name of the game (honestly, I have been confused by that ever since I was a kid).

Colombia is crazy for fútbol, and perhaps nowhere more so than Barranquilla. Continue reading →

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Posted in Sports & Leisure

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The Question of Why

Posted on January 14, 2013 | 15 comments

It’s a new year, and in many ways, an official start to our “real” life in Barranquilla. Despite the fact that we moved here from Miami on July 23rd, 2012, just two days after our wedding, it wasn’t until our recent return from Christmas holidays in the U.S. that we finally felt settled.

The last six months, while good, were consumed with an almost endless to-do list related to our move: find an apartment, furnish the apartment, get Gio’s cédula (the national I.D. card), get our son Marcello into the national birth registry (so that Marcello could be a Colombian citizen), get Marcello’s passport, renew my expiring tourist visa, apply for my indefinite visa as Marcello’s mother (since Marcello is now a citizen), apply for my cédula de extranjería (the national I.D. card for foreigners) – you get the idea. We set December 13th, the day of our flight back to the U.S. for the holidays, as our deadline for jumping through all these hoops. While I had to put several things – like writing for this blog – on the back burner, we met our goal. Flying back on January 6th, I finally felt like I was coming home.

As you might imagine, a benchmark like this leads to some reflection. It seems like a good time to address the two questions that my husband and I are asked most often about our move: 1) Why? and 2) Do you like it? Continue reading →

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Posted in Making the Leap

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I Should Be in a Nike Commercial

Posted on October 16, 2012 | 7 comments

Okay, no, I am actually not that vain! Or that deluded. I have neither the level of fitness nor the physique, even at its worked-out best, to warrant a Nike commercial. (And I’m not sure that I could in good conscience advertise for them, although geez, I do like their running clothes….)

At the finish line of the Reykjavik Marathon in Iceland, 2009 (I think).

But that is how running often makes me feel: self-delusional in a good way – the kind of way that makes you get more done, act confidently, and generally avoid being a neurotic stress case. After years of running (and almost 1,400 miles logged on that Nike+ tracker thing), I can tell you with absolute certainty that the “runner’s high” is real.

So it’s no surprise, then, that one of the first things I asked Gio after his April scouting trip to Barranquilla was, “Can I run there?” Continue reading →

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Posted in Daily Life, Running, Sports & Leisure

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On Homesickness

Posted on September 22, 2012 | 6 comments

I have reached a stage in our transition to Colombia that most expats probably experience but would rather skip – homesickness. Homesickness is a funny thing. We all experience it at some point. Sometimes it’s as a child, during our first sleepover at a friend’s house, or maybe as a “tween”, during that first week of summer camp. Maybe it’s when we leave college to set up our “real life” for the first time, or perhaps even later, after a divorce or a break-up, when the same house we were living in before suddenly ceases to feel like home due to the absence of the relationship that defined it. Of course, a move to another country can do it too.

Transition Point: Different colored stripes of water form at the horizon where freshwater from the Rio Magdalena, on which Barranquilla is situated, empties into the saltwater of the Caribbean Sea.

We never become completely immune to homesickness, and no matter our age, its basic anatomy remains the same. Homesickness is about identity. Continue reading →

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Recycling, Colombian-Style

Posted on September 6, 2012 | 6 comments

Barranquilla is a very modern city. Nonetheless, it’s still common to see horse-drawn carts on city streets. The guys with the carts (I have yet to see a woman with this job) are usually buying or selling something, which they announce via  megaphone — that way, you can hear it from your apartment and come down to meet them (think ice cream truck in the U.S.).

The odd thing is that they always announce what they’re buying/selling in this nearly unintelligible monotone with no pauses between words. The following 7-second video will show you what I mean. Continue reading →

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Posted in Daily Life

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The Good, the Bad, and the Seriously Tasty

Posted on September 4, 2012 | 5 comments

I’ve been in Colombia six weeks now… long enough to miss a few things from the U.S., and long enough to fall in love with a few in Barranquilla. Here’s the short list of both:

I really, dearly love…

  • Limonada Natural. These tart, frozen lemonade drinks are on almost every menu. There are high-end and low-end versions, with the former being this all-natural, elegant granita concoction and the latter basically a mouth-puckering Slurpee.  But they are ALL delicious!  Mmmmmm! Continue reading →

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Posted in Food & Coffee

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Barranquilla – Where North is West-ish

Posted on August 31, 2012 | 5 comments

Ever since Gio and I began contemplating a move to Barranquilla, we were told to live in “El Norte”, the northern part of the city. Our neighborhood, Torcoroma — named after a Romanesque style church in the area that I have yet to see — is definitely considered to be smack in the middle of El Norte. When we take a cab toward El Centro, the center of town (I know, I know, you never would have guessed that “El Centro” means “center”!), everyone says we are headed South.

The orange pinpoint is Torcoroma, our neighborhood. “El Centro” is the area sort of between “Boston” and “Bolivar” on this map.

So imagine my confusion when one afternoon, on just such a drive, I realized that the sun was in the wrong place. Continue reading →

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Posted in Daily Life, Uncategorized

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