17 de julio 2017
Mount Prospect, Illinois, United States
Hello everyone!
I have a few travel posts to catch up on (I'm so terrible at keeping up on this, sorry!) but many people have been asking about my school breaks this coming year (probably my last year?) so they can come visit.
If you can't come during one of the breaks, that's fine! I can meet up with you on the weekends and you can entertain yourself while I go to work.
For reference, Bucaramanga is approximately an hour flight to Bogotá, Medellin, Cartagena, and really anywhere else in Colombia (though depending on the city you'll likely have to fly through Bogotá anyway).
Without further ado, here's my work calendar. I've underlined the larger breaks.
August 8 - First day of work!
August 21 No School
October 7-16 October break, but I have meetings on October 9 and 10
November 6 No School
November 13 No School
December 8 No School
December 14 - January 8 Winter break; I'll be coming home for Christmas, dates TBA
March 19 No School
March 24 - April 1 Spring break
May 1 No School
May 14 No School
June 15 - Last day of work!
I hope you can make it down to visit me!
P.S. I have a new address, email me if you want it. I love mail! For packages, FedEx is best and probably takes a week. Letters/postcards take about a month.
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teaching. Show all posts
Monday, July 17, 2017
Sunday, May 14, 2017
A Cornucopia of Cats at a Conference in Cali
14 de mayo 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Two months ago, as part of my department head duties, I was sent to a conference in Cali, Colombia (not California). The Forum on Teaching and Learning was held at Colegio Bolivar on March 10 and 11. On Thursday, March 9, a group of 6 teachers from Colegio Panamericano traveled from Floridablanca to Cali, Valle de Cauca.
9 de marzo 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
El Dorado Airport, Bogotá, DC, Colombia
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
About the time I would've gone to school on Thursday morning, I found myself at the Bucaramanga airport. I met up with my fellow travelers: Ryan, Rafael, Yenny, Luza, and Mariela, and we embarked on our first flight: Bucaramanga to Bogotá. It was (thankfully) pretty uneventful. At the Bogotá airport, we grabbed some Dunkin Donuts and Bogotá Beer Company to pass the time until our next flight to Cali.
After collecting our luggage, Ryan, Rafa, Yenny, Luza, and I squished into a cab for the (long and expensive) ride to our hotel. The Cali airport is about 45 minutes to an hour north-east of the city, and our hotel was all the way on the south-west corner of Cali. This journey cost us nearly $80.000 COP. For context, a cab ride from my apartment to the Bucaramanga airport is $25.000 COP. This was an official airport cab too, not a guy trying to scam us.
We finally got to our hotel and checked in, but only one of the rooms was ready, so we dropped our luggage and headed to the mall across the street to get some lunch. Many malls (and schools) in Colombia are a combination of indoors and outdoors (for you Chicago-area folks, think Old Orchard Mall). This mall had tons of green space within it, and with all that green space came MALL CATS (which would be a good name for an 80s movie). Everywhere we looked, we saw cats simply chillin' - on benches, hidden among the plants, walking around the mall...
We had lunch in the food court - I'd been craving Chinese food, so I went to a place called Señor Wok. It was pretty decent for food court Chinese. We walked around a bit, then headed back to the hotel to rest a little from our journey.
After a siesta, I joined Rafa, Luza, and Yenny to explore a bit and find some dinner. We ran into Ryan, who had decided to do some wandering of his own, which sparked a discussion about the words wandering and wondering. My Colombian colleagues are quite good at English, but like most language learners, are always ready to learn. It was quite an interesting linguistic discussion - who is a wanderer? Are homeless people wanderers? How is wandering different than wondering? How does wandering compare to exploring or simply walking? I love conversations like this, since it makes me think a lot about my own words and their meanings and etymologies. I, of course, pay back in kind by asking similar questions about new Spanish words I learn. It's a fun exchange.
At the Italian restaurant, as we perused the menu to decide what to order, we had another interesting linguistic discussion. This one included our waiter, who we had fun conversing with. The restaurant, like many Italian places, allowed you to choose your shape of noodle for certain dishes. One of the choices was penne. This amused the Colombians, as pene would be a very different kind of noodle for Spanish speakers. They were joking with the waiter about this and asking what shape penne would be, and if it was anything like pene. It was quite a fun time, and we all had a good laugh. This conversation was all in Spanish, and the waiter asked me (in English) if I knew what was going on and what was so funny. I said I did and showed them what Google said pene pasta would look like (the same image I posted in the second link above). He said the restaurant did not carry that shape of noodle, but that all their noodles were homemade.
After a delicious dinner (I had tricolor lasagna, which looked like the Italian flag with pesto, alfredo, and marinara sauce on it), we headed back to the hotel. (Side note: In Colombia, what we know as marinara sauce is called salsa neopolitana. Salsa marinara is generally a white sauce with seafood in it [mar = sea].) Our hotel was pretty ritzy, and had a neat-lookin' pool, so we decided to go for a swim before we headed into dreamland.
The actual pool proper was pretty chilly, so we hung out in the hot tub (in Spanish, alternately called a Jacuzzi or a Turkish Bath [baño turko], depending on who you ask). We relaxed and chatted about teaching in Colombia versus teaching in the states, and if there were many immigrants teaching in the US. We also compared teaching salaries in our countries to salaries of other professions. It seemed like Colombia has teachers on approximately the same rung as the United States does, and it's not a very high one (unlike Finland, for example).
10 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
The next morning we got up bright and early - the bus to the school was leaving at 6:30 am and we had to get the most out of our complimentary hotel breakfast before that time. We headed down around 5:45 am or so, only to find the restaurant not yet open. We tried to keep our eyes open as we sat in the lobby, getting hungrier by the minute.
Hotel NH Royal served the best free hotel breakfast buffet I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. There was an egg bar, where you could order your huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs) or omelette cooked with various toppings. There was a plethora of fresh fruit, cheeses, and meats. There were several choices of freshly-squeezed juice. There were many tiny pastries and tiny fried goodies (including tiny bagels, tiny almojabanas, tiny arepas, tiny empanadas, tiny buñuelos, tiny creme puffs, tiny pancakes, and tiny croissants). There were also slices of tortilla española (Spanish omelette), waffles, and more. Not to mention coffee (can you have breakfast, especially in Colombia, without coffee?). Oh man. So much food.
We rolled ourselves out the door and through the rain to the bus that would take us to Colegio Bolivar, where the 12th Annual Forum on Teaching and Learning would commence shortly. Bolivar has a HUGE campus. According to their website, they have 1200 students, whereas Panamericano has only 650 (both begin at pre-school and go until 12th grade). So it's almost twice the size in student body, but in acreage I think it has to be at least 4 times the size. There's so much green space. It felt like a college campus. It took 10-15 minutes to walk between some of the sessions. I think I could walk from one end of Panamericano to the other in just over 5 (but somehow so many of my students are late for class because they can't walk 30 feet in 5 minutes).
The keynote speaker for the forum was Bambi Betts, who presented "Facts About Learning and What We Can Do." Through her keynote, we redefined the learning process and discussed myths and truths about learning and how we can adjust our teaching practices to align with the truths about learning and its cyclical processes. It was pretty interesting.
After the keynote, we got some empanadas, juice, coffee, and time to socialize a bit before heading to our first breakout sessions. I had gone through the schedule and chosen 2-3 sessions per time slot, so I spent this empanada-time rereading the descriptions and trying to decide which one I would end up in. I decided my first session with be "Personalized Instruction in Action," where I learned about the Habits of Mind.
This session started with a great quote from Sir Ken Robinson, "We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will flourish." As a class, we explored the sixteen Habits of Mind and how they work in the classroom. We made goals to engage and empower students by integrating digital content, targeting instruction, allowing for student reflection and ownership, and to make data-driven decisions.
A really good question that was posed during this talk was, "What kind of teacher are you? Are you a ferry or a bridge?" Both a ferry and a bridge achieve the objective of bringing people across a body of water. However, a ferry goes back and forth bringing small amounts of people from point A to point B, with the travelers (students) not having to do much of their own work/thinking. A bridge provides the structure to allow for the travelers (students) to bring themselves across at their own pace through their own work. It can be difficult to make the shift from a ferry to a bridge, and it involves a lot of building and scaffolding, but once the bridge is up, it's ready to use.
The next session I went to was "Experiential and Problem-Based Learning with a Focus on Science and Math." This was all about creating shared experiences with the students for them to base their future learning on. It's a great idea, but I wish math had more of a presence in this talk (it is in the title after all). We did an example activity to learn about over-fishing and the necessity of regulations to keep the ecosystem running. This activity was fun, but took up quite a lot of the time provided, so the presenter sped through the rest of his slide deck, which included the math parts at the very end.
After session 2 we all went to have lunch in the school's cafeteria. It was pretty tasty, though I was jealous of Ryan; the vegetarian meal looked (and tasted) so much better than the meat meal (not to say the meat meal wasn't good!). We all ate and talked about the sessions we had seen and the ones we were going to see.
My last session of the day was one of my favorites: "Establishing Relationships for Life-Long Learning." It was all about classroom management and how to have students take control of it to have more effective management. If you have students come up with their common distractions and devise solutions and rules for them, there's more buy-in and a higher chance that students will stick to these rules. It's all about building loyalty, trust, honesty, and humor in your classroom. He showed us some cool word clouds he built with his students on Poll Everywhere and presented on a Blendspace, which is a sort of online board to collect a bunch of resources.
After the last session, we all climbed on the bus to take us back to the hotel. We rested a bit before heading out on the town. After all, what's the point in traveling for a conference if all you go to is the school and your bed?
Unfortunately, by the time we left, it was the beginnings of rush hour. That, coupled with the fact that our hotel was pretty far from the main downtown area (or really anything interesting), made for a long hour in stop-and-go traffic in our cab. Rafael was working on things for his Masters, so Luza, Yenny, Ryan, and I went out to explore the city.
We had the cab drop us off in the neighborhood El Peñon, where we wandered around, exploring and chatting and seeing what there was to see. Mostly that neighborhood was occupied by a bunch of different restaurants, but we saw some cool statues and parks too.
After aimlessly ambling around for a while (and going in circles a few times), we decided to search for a destination. In my brief research about Cali on Trip Advisor, I had seen a park that centered around a statue called Gato de Tejada. Yenny and I had been very excited about all the cats we had been seeing all over the city, and this cat park didn't seem too far away from where we were, so we crossed the river and headed up to find this park.
It turns out that this park was filled with cats painted by different artists, and each cat had its own little story. We walked through, reading each cat's story and taking photos.
After we had our fill of cats, we decided to find somewhere to eat dinner. Rafael was still hard at work, so we walked around a bit and after a bit of discussion, decided on a burger place. I had a Jack Daniels burger, which used Jack in the BBQ sauce. It was pretty tasty. It was a very American-type place - they even had baseball on TV! Colombia was playing. I didn't even know Colombia had a baseball team.
After dinner, Rafa met us at a salsa club that was recommended to us by the organizers of the conference - Tin Tin Deo. Ryan's not much into salsa, so he left us.
Cali is one of the salsa capitals of the world, and I guess I expected more out of this discoteca, but it was a Friday night and many Colombians work on Saturdays. Tin Tin Deo was pretty empty, with only a few couples dancing at a time. Rafael took us each out on the floor in turn, but Yenny and I aren't as skilled as Luza and Rafa, so we were content to watch them cut a rug.
After our long day and early rising, we were all pretty tired, so we only ended up staying for a drink or two. I was still glad we went, since salsa dancing is a must-do in Cali!
11 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
We got to sleep in a little on Saturday - our bus didn't leave until 7:30 am this time. After another amazing breakfast, we headed back to the school for our last two sessions of the conference.
My first session of the day may have been the best one all weekend. It was called "An Introduction to the SIOP Model Designed for ELLs" The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model was developed to help teachers address the needs of English Language Learners. The model consists of eight parts, (1) Lesson Preparation, (2) Building Background, (3) Comprehensible Input, (4) Strategies, (5) Interaction, (6) Practice/Application, (7) Lesson Delivery, and (8) Review and Assessment. The presenter went through each component, stressing the importance of including both content objectives and language objectives in your lesson plan. Since an overwhelming majority of my students are ELLs, it was great to have some professional development focused on this. Many of my students have a pretty good handle on their Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) but not their Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). (Like I said earlier, everything in education needs an acronym.)
This presenter started out with having us log on to her online post-it bulletin board to share some of our own thoughts and experiences, and then taught us all about the SIOP model and how we can use it in our classrooms. One suggestion I thought was really cool was integrating a private online chat room like Todays Meet or Chatzy to build written skills as well as verbal - while you're having a class discussion or Socratic seminar, you can have the rest of your students that are not speaking typing their thoughts and interacting with each other. She had us practice writing language objectives for different content objectives, and gave us instant feedback. The last few minutes we had time to explore her SIOP Blendspace and share what we learned on Padlet. She had some content-specific materials on there (including math!), which I loved, since (because of some bad experiences in the past) I was afraid the presentation would be only applicable to humanities courses (i.e. English and Social Studies).
We then had a break between the sessions, complete with patacones, juice, and coffee. I talked with a few people who knew the director of my school from way back, which was fun. Everyone in the international school community seems to know everyone else (especially in Colombia).
My final session of the conference was "Bansho Math: An Ontario Instructional Strategy." The Bansho Three-Part Lesson was developed in Canada as an official teaching technique, but is based on how students in Japan learn math. It's all about learning content through problem-solving. It's student-centric, allowing students to be more active in creating their learning. A Bansho lesson would be the first lesson of the unit, before any "formal" teaching about the topic has been done. It draws only on students' prior knowledge. The first step is Activation, where the teacher provides students with a little warm-up activity related to the lesson. Then, the second step is the Problem. The teacher gives students a word problem, without telling them how to solve it. In groups, students work out different ways they can structure a solution, based only on their prior knowledge. They write out their process on a poster while the teacher walks around asking the students questions about their method (but not giving them any direct help) and records the strategies being used by each group. Part three is Consolidation/Highlights/Practice. The teacher chooses one student at random from each group to bring the poster up to the board and describe their strategy. The teacher helps the students reflect on the strategy, and as a class, they write down key words and come up with a name for the strategy. Mistakes are praised as learning experiences, and together the class figures out where and why the error was made and how to repair it. Students then work on similar problems and are encouraged to use some of the different strategies presented by their peers. Those posters then become anchor charts for the rest of the unit.
I thought this was a cool way to structure student-based learning, as oftentimes when its presented it seems so unstructured and free-form. I actually used this a week or two later when I had my seniors begin their sequences and series unit - they needed to figure out how to add the numbers 1 - 100 easily (like the old tale of Gauss as a child).
After the final session we headed back to the auditorium for the Closing Ceremony, which was mostly just the school band playing a series of songs for us.
All in all, I thought the conference was a good learning experience. I was surprised to find that a vast majority (~80%) of the teachers at the conference were from Colegio Bolivar - I definitely felt like one of the few outsiders. Despite that, I think I learned some good strategies to bring back to my classroom.
Our bus ride back to our hotel that day took almost an hour, as opposed to the usual 15-20 minutes. There was terrible traffic, and I fell in and out of a nap. When we returned, all my companions had to head to the airport, as I was the only one staying an extra night to explore the city.
Having begun a series of naps on the bus, I took a proper nap after everyone left, to recharge my batteries to explore the city on my own. Afterwards, I decided to head to Parque Artesanal Loma de la Cruz, an artisan market in an artsy neighborhood. There were lots of cool things there, and seemed like the cool place to hang out. There were lots of groups of young people chillin', playing guitar, and generally hanging out.
I looked around all the shops, exploring what they all had to offer, and then found myself a little spot to chill and enjoy the environment. There were a few performers there too; there was a guy doing a ninja weapon act, and later a stand-up comic.
This was my favorite spot in Cali - the area, the people, everything - it was all so cool. Unfortunately, I broke one of my sandals, but fortunately I was able to buy a new hand-made pair!
I bought a few things but then ran out of money and everything was cash only. I then had to walk about 20-30 minutes away (in the dark!) to get to an ATM to come back and buy more things I really wanted (plus some dinner), since everything was cash only. I did get to see some really cool graffiti on my walk though!
I returned to the market, bought my cat sculptures (because of course), and had some maiz desgranados for dinner before taxiing back to the hotel for my last night in that comfy bed.
12 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
Bogotá, DC, Colombia
My last day in Cali was a rainy one. I had originally thought about going up to see Cristo Rey or Las Tres Cruces, which are both parks on top of mountains that would afford a great panoramic view of the city. After some more research, I found that (1) they were both pretty far away and would take a long time to get to, and (2) were a pain in the ass to get up to. Essentially you've gotta walk up the mountain, or in the case of Cristo Rey, you can take a taxi up, but you have to have it wait for you if you want to go back down. There's nothing up at the top of the mountains except for the statue and the view. On such a rainy day, it just didn't seem worth it.
I had a few hours to kill because I had to leave for the airport around 3:30 pm, and I didn't want to waste my extra day in my hotel room. I hadn't heard great things about the museums in Cali, but I'd heard the zoo was pretty cool and figured it would be a great way to kill a few hours by myself.
It was a pretty great zoo - lots of animals in large habitats, including some neat animals I hadn't seen before (giant anteaters are HUGE - I know it's part of their name, but still!). Plus, free-range peacocks (pavo real = literally "royal turkey") are always cool.
The Cali zoo has a white tiger, which I was excited to see, but unfortunately she wasn't seeing visitors that day. She was inside hiding from the rain. I did see a bunch of tities though (reread that, it's not what you think). The zoo is structured in a big circle and has helpful arrows that guide you around the most efficient path. By the time I made it back around to the entrance, it was time for me to head back to the hotel to get my bags. I couldn't have timed it better.
I returned to the hotel, did an idiot check (didn't find any idiots), and settled in for the long taxi ride back to the airport. I still needed to print my boarding passes, so I headed to the do-it-yourself kiosk. For some puzzling reason, it wasn't working. It would not recognize my reservation number or passport number. I start walking toward the ticketing desk and decide to stop at the departures board on the way.
My flight is canceled.
It's one hour before takeoff, and when I had checked in the taxi, my flight was on time.
It's just now been canceled.
Annoyed, I jump into one of the customer service lines. After about 20 minutes in line, I near the front and find that this line is only servicing passengers flying to Cartagena. I'm confused and irritated and ask where I am supposed to go. I get directed to a much much longer line. It seems a few flights were just canceled. About an hour later, a fist fight breaks out between two men in line. It's quickly broken up, but they continue glaring daggers at each other as they're pulled away. Soon after that, I make it to the desk. They put me on a flight to Bogotá for a few hours later, but unfortunately that flight lands after the last flight to Bucaramanga leaves. So I'm scheduled to fly to Bucaramanga early the following morning. This means I have to stay the night in Bogotá and write another day of sub plans for my classes.
I am then directed to another desk where (within 10 minutes of my approaching the desk) an Avianca representative sets me up with a hotel voucher for Bogotá and begins a complaint ticket for travel compensation (compare this efficiency with my other travel nightmare experience with United back in January).
On my way to the security gate, I saw a cart of chontaduros. I had meant to try one earlier in the trip, since they are typical to this region, but somehow missed all my chances. The fates were aligning in my favor!
I'm glad I tried it, because now I can say that I did, but man was that just not great. It was kind of like an under-cooked starchy potato with a weird aftertaste. I was thankful for the salt, as without it I don't think I would have finished it. I was also thankful for the Subway right after the security gate, where I bought some dinner to wash down the weird flavors in my mouth.
I headed down to my gate, much happier and calmer than I was during my last travel mishap. I look in a few shops, and then try to find somewhere with an outlet to settle down and write my sub plans. Outlets are scarce. I finally find one that doesn't even look safe or like it's supposed to be there; there's a wire coming out of the wall, which is attached to the outlet plate, which isn't screwed into any wall anywhere. It's better than nothing, so I plop down on the floor and open my computer.
There's a child playing with a monkey toy nearby, which wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that he keeps pushing the button that makes the monkey scream its monkey cry. No matter. I'll be boarding soon.
Except I won't.
I keep looking at the departures board, anxious that my flight hasn't begun boarding yet. Then it updates and I find that my flight is delayed two hours (because of course it is).
I sigh, resigned to my fate, and walk another lap around the circle of gates and find something new - a kiosk of outlets for charging things! My phone's been dead for a bit (the janky outlet from before couldn't handle both my computer and my phone at the same time) and my portable battery died after I used it at the zoo. The stools are all taken, but I plug in my devices and pop a squat, reading my Kindle as I squat awkwardly underneath this charging table.
At long last, my flight begins boarding and we fly to Bogotá. Once in Bogotá, I go to the Avianca customer service desk, where I redeem my hotel voucher and am directed to a hotel shuttle (so much more painless than United). The other stranded travelers and I arrive at the hotel and are quickly checked in. In addition to my hotel room, the concierge also provides me with a dinner voucher. It's nearly 1 in the morning and I'm not that hungry since my chontaduro and Subway earlier, so I save it for a to-go lunch when I leave in the morning (shuttle's at 6 am). This time I am more prepared (I packed everything into my carry-on, no checked luggage), so I change into my PJs and get a few hours of shut-eye.
13 de marzo 2017
Bogotá, DC, Colombia
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
I wake up in the morning and grab my suitcase and head down to breakfast. It's decent, but nothing compares to the Hotel NH Royal. I head to the front desk to ask about ordering a to-go lunch with my dinner voucher and discover it is only valid for dinner, not lunch. So, it's useless. Oh well. I check out and head onto the shuttle bus to the airport.
My flight to Bucaramanga boards and departs on time with no issues, and except for the fact that I have a middle seat between two people that know each other, I have no problems on the flight. I finally get home and once again collapse.
One good thing about this is that I received $200.000 COP travel credit from Avianca, which I just used to book my flight to Medellin for my upcoming trip with my dad in June. Economy was $90.000 and business was a little over $200.000, so I paid the $40.000 (~$17 USD) extra to spring for business class. Travelin' in style. Thanks Avianca!
Travel Nightmare - March 12-13, 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Two months ago, as part of my department head duties, I was sent to a conference in Cali, Colombia (not California). The Forum on Teaching and Learning was held at Colegio Bolivar on March 10 and 11. On Thursday, March 9, a group of 6 teachers from Colegio Panamericano traveled from Floridablanca to Cali, Valle de Cauca.
9 de marzo 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
El Dorado Airport, Bogotá, DC, Colombia
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
About the time I would've gone to school on Thursday morning, I found myself at the Bucaramanga airport. I met up with my fellow travelers: Ryan, Rafael, Yenny, Luza, and Mariela, and we embarked on our first flight: Bucaramanga to Bogotá. It was (thankfully) pretty uneventful. At the Bogotá airport, we grabbed some Dunkin Donuts and Bogotá Beer Company to pass the time until our next flight to Cali.
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| The travel there was effortless. If only all my flights could be this easy. |
After collecting our luggage, Ryan, Rafa, Yenny, Luza, and I squished into a cab for the (long and expensive) ride to our hotel. The Cali airport is about 45 minutes to an hour north-east of the city, and our hotel was all the way on the south-west corner of Cali. This journey cost us nearly $80.000 COP. For context, a cab ride from my apartment to the Bucaramanga airport is $25.000 COP. This was an official airport cab too, not a guy trying to scam us.
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| Cali is a very sprawled city. Everything seems to be so far from anything else. |
We finally got to our hotel and checked in, but only one of the rooms was ready, so we dropped our luggage and headed to the mall across the street to get some lunch. Many malls (and schools) in Colombia are a combination of indoors and outdoors (for you Chicago-area folks, think Old Orchard Mall). This mall had tons of green space within it, and with all that green space came MALL CATS (which would be a good name for an 80s movie). Everywhere we looked, we saw cats simply chillin' - on benches, hidden among the plants, walking around the mall...
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| How many cats can you find in this picture? |
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| They aren't strays, they've been adopted by the mall and vaccinated and everything! |
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| The cats even have little houses where they can chill away from all the people. |
After a siesta, I joined Rafa, Luza, and Yenny to explore a bit and find some dinner. We ran into Ryan, who had decided to do some wandering of his own, which sparked a discussion about the words wandering and wondering. My Colombian colleagues are quite good at English, but like most language learners, are always ready to learn. It was quite an interesting linguistic discussion - who is a wanderer? Are homeless people wanderers? How is wandering different than wondering? How does wandering compare to exploring or simply walking? I love conversations like this, since it makes me think a lot about my own words and their meanings and etymologies. I, of course, pay back in kind by asking similar questions about new Spanish words I learn. It's a fun exchange.
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| We found a delicious Italian restaurant to eat at. (Photo originally posted by Rafael) |
After a delicious dinner (I had tricolor lasagna, which looked like the Italian flag with pesto, alfredo, and marinara sauce on it), we headed back to the hotel. (Side note: In Colombia, what we know as marinara sauce is called salsa neopolitana. Salsa marinara is generally a white sauce with seafood in it [mar = sea].) Our hotel was pretty ritzy, and had a neat-lookin' pool, so we decided to go for a swim before we headed into dreamland.
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| Colored lights give it that cool edgy party look. |
The actual pool proper was pretty chilly, so we hung out in the hot tub (in Spanish, alternately called a Jacuzzi or a Turkish Bath [baño turko], depending on who you ask). We relaxed and chatted about teaching in Colombia versus teaching in the states, and if there were many immigrants teaching in the US. We also compared teaching salaries in our countries to salaries of other professions. It seemed like Colombia has teachers on approximately the same rung as the United States does, and it's not a very high one (unlike Finland, for example).
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| Rafael, Yenny, and I in the baño turko. Luza went up to bed rather than join us. |
10 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
The next morning we got up bright and early - the bus to the school was leaving at 6:30 am and we had to get the most out of our complimentary hotel breakfast before that time. We headed down around 5:45 am or so, only to find the restaurant not yet open. We tried to keep our eyes open as we sat in the lobby, getting hungrier by the minute.
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| It was well worth the wait. |
Hotel NH Royal served the best free hotel breakfast buffet I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. There was an egg bar, where you could order your huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs) or omelette cooked with various toppings. There was a plethora of fresh fruit, cheeses, and meats. There were several choices of freshly-squeezed juice. There were many tiny pastries and tiny fried goodies (including tiny bagels, tiny almojabanas, tiny arepas, tiny empanadas, tiny buñuelos, tiny creme puffs, tiny pancakes, and tiny croissants). There were also slices of tortilla española (Spanish omelette), waffles, and more. Not to mention coffee (can you have breakfast, especially in Colombia, without coffee?). Oh man. So much food.
We rolled ourselves out the door and through the rain to the bus that would take us to Colegio Bolivar, where the 12th Annual Forum on Teaching and Learning would commence shortly. Bolivar has a HUGE campus. According to their website, they have 1200 students, whereas Panamericano has only 650 (both begin at pre-school and go until 12th grade). So it's almost twice the size in student body, but in acreage I think it has to be at least 4 times the size. There's so much green space. It felt like a college campus. It took 10-15 minutes to walk between some of the sessions. I think I could walk from one end of Panamericano to the other in just over 5 (but somehow so many of my students are late for class because they can't walk 30 feet in 5 minutes).
The keynote speaker for the forum was Bambi Betts, who presented "Facts About Learning and What We Can Do." Through her keynote, we redefined the learning process and discussed myths and truths about learning and how we can adjust our teaching practices to align with the truths about learning and its cyclical processes. It was pretty interesting.
After the keynote, we got some empanadas, juice, coffee, and time to socialize a bit before heading to our first breakout sessions. I had gone through the schedule and chosen 2-3 sessions per time slot, so I spent this empanada-time rereading the descriptions and trying to decide which one I would end up in. I decided my first session with be "Personalized Instruction in Action," where I learned about the Habits of Mind.
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| Of course everything in education has an acronym. |
This session started with a great quote from Sir Ken Robinson, "We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will flourish." As a class, we explored the sixteen Habits of Mind and how they work in the classroom. We made goals to engage and empower students by integrating digital content, targeting instruction, allowing for student reflection and ownership, and to make data-driven decisions.
A really good question that was posed during this talk was, "What kind of teacher are you? Are you a ferry or a bridge?" Both a ferry and a bridge achieve the objective of bringing people across a body of water. However, a ferry goes back and forth bringing small amounts of people from point A to point B, with the travelers (students) not having to do much of their own work/thinking. A bridge provides the structure to allow for the travelers (students) to bring themselves across at their own pace through their own work. It can be difficult to make the shift from a ferry to a bridge, and it involves a lot of building and scaffolding, but once the bridge is up, it's ready to use.
The next session I went to was "Experiential and Problem-Based Learning with a Focus on Science and Math." This was all about creating shared experiences with the students for them to base their future learning on. It's a great idea, but I wish math had more of a presence in this talk (it is in the title after all). We did an example activity to learn about over-fishing and the necessity of regulations to keep the ecosystem running. This activity was fun, but took up quite a lot of the time provided, so the presenter sped through the rest of his slide deck, which included the math parts at the very end.
After session 2 we all went to have lunch in the school's cafeteria. It was pretty tasty, though I was jealous of Ryan; the vegetarian meal looked (and tasted) so much better than the meat meal (not to say the meat meal wasn't good!). We all ate and talked about the sessions we had seen and the ones we were going to see.
My last session of the day was one of my favorites: "Establishing Relationships for Life-Long Learning." It was all about classroom management and how to have students take control of it to have more effective management. If you have students come up with their common distractions and devise solutions and rules for them, there's more buy-in and a higher chance that students will stick to these rules. It's all about building loyalty, trust, honesty, and humor in your classroom. He showed us some cool word clouds he built with his students on Poll Everywhere and presented on a Blendspace, which is a sort of online board to collect a bunch of resources.
After the last session, we all climbed on the bus to take us back to the hotel. We rested a bit before heading out on the town. After all, what's the point in traveling for a conference if all you go to is the school and your bed?
Unfortunately, by the time we left, it was the beginnings of rush hour. That, coupled with the fact that our hotel was pretty far from the main downtown area (or really anything interesting), made for a long hour in stop-and-go traffic in our cab. Rafael was working on things for his Masters, so Luza, Yenny, Ryan, and I went out to explore the city.
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| Parque el Peñon |
We had the cab drop us off in the neighborhood El Peñon, where we wandered around, exploring and chatting and seeing what there was to see. Mostly that neighborhood was occupied by a bunch of different restaurants, but we saw some cool statues and parks too.
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| La Negra del Chontaduro. Chontaduros are a fruit native to the region. |
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| The cat lovers with El Gato del Rio |
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| Yara, Goddess of the River. From the depths of the Amazon rainforest comes the conqueror: the River Cat. She is convinced that the water of the two rivers, the Amazon and Cali, converge in an endless romance with the rhythmic sound of water. |
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| Gachuza. She wants to defend herself against the aggression of the environment, the stray cats that see her as irresistible because of her red color and flirty personality, but like the porcupine, she stays alert. She has eyes only for one cat: The River Cat. |
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| About Cats. The cat possesses beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, all the virtues of man without his vices. |
After we had our fill of cats, we decided to find somewhere to eat dinner. Rafael was still hard at work, so we walked around a bit and after a bit of discussion, decided on a burger place. I had a Jack Daniels burger, which used Jack in the BBQ sauce. It was pretty tasty. It was a very American-type place - they even had baseball on TV! Colombia was playing. I didn't even know Colombia had a baseball team.
After dinner, Rafa met us at a salsa club that was recommended to us by the organizers of the conference - Tin Tin Deo. Ryan's not much into salsa, so he left us.
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| Friends & Micheladas |
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| After all, if you go to Cali and don't dance salsa, have you really gone to Cali? |
11 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
We got to sleep in a little on Saturday - our bus didn't leave until 7:30 am this time. After another amazing breakfast, we headed back to the school for our last two sessions of the conference.
My first session of the day may have been the best one all weekend. It was called "An Introduction to the SIOP Model Designed for ELLs" The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model was developed to help teachers address the needs of English Language Learners. The model consists of eight parts, (1) Lesson Preparation, (2) Building Background, (3) Comprehensible Input, (4) Strategies, (5) Interaction, (6) Practice/Application, (7) Lesson Delivery, and (8) Review and Assessment. The presenter went through each component, stressing the importance of including both content objectives and language objectives in your lesson plan. Since an overwhelming majority of my students are ELLs, it was great to have some professional development focused on this. Many of my students have a pretty good handle on their Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) but not their Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). (Like I said earlier, everything in education needs an acronym.)
This presenter started out with having us log on to her online post-it bulletin board to share some of our own thoughts and experiences, and then taught us all about the SIOP model and how we can use it in our classrooms. One suggestion I thought was really cool was integrating a private online chat room like Todays Meet or Chatzy to build written skills as well as verbal - while you're having a class discussion or Socratic seminar, you can have the rest of your students that are not speaking typing their thoughts and interacting with each other. She had us practice writing language objectives for different content objectives, and gave us instant feedback. The last few minutes we had time to explore her SIOP Blendspace and share what we learned on Padlet. She had some content-specific materials on there (including math!), which I loved, since (because of some bad experiences in the past) I was afraid the presentation would be only applicable to humanities courses (i.e. English and Social Studies).
We then had a break between the sessions, complete with patacones, juice, and coffee. I talked with a few people who knew the director of my school from way back, which was fun. Everyone in the international school community seems to know everyone else (especially in Colombia).
My final session of the conference was "Bansho Math: An Ontario Instructional Strategy." The Bansho Three-Part Lesson was developed in Canada as an official teaching technique, but is based on how students in Japan learn math. It's all about learning content through problem-solving. It's student-centric, allowing students to be more active in creating their learning. A Bansho lesson would be the first lesson of the unit, before any "formal" teaching about the topic has been done. It draws only on students' prior knowledge. The first step is Activation, where the teacher provides students with a little warm-up activity related to the lesson. Then, the second step is the Problem. The teacher gives students a word problem, without telling them how to solve it. In groups, students work out different ways they can structure a solution, based only on their prior knowledge. They write out their process on a poster while the teacher walks around asking the students questions about their method (but not giving them any direct help) and records the strategies being used by each group. Part three is Consolidation/Highlights/Practice. The teacher chooses one student at random from each group to bring the poster up to the board and describe their strategy. The teacher helps the students reflect on the strategy, and as a class, they write down key words and come up with a name for the strategy. Mistakes are praised as learning experiences, and together the class figures out where and why the error was made and how to repair it. Students then work on similar problems and are encouraged to use some of the different strategies presented by their peers. Those posters then become anchor charts for the rest of the unit.
I thought this was a cool way to structure student-based learning, as oftentimes when its presented it seems so unstructured and free-form. I actually used this a week or two later when I had my seniors begin their sequences and series unit - they needed to figure out how to add the numbers 1 - 100 easily (like the old tale of Gauss as a child).
After the final session we headed back to the auditorium for the Closing Ceremony, which was mostly just the school band playing a series of songs for us.
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| Colegio Panamericano at Colegio Bolivar! |
All in all, I thought the conference was a good learning experience. I was surprised to find that a vast majority (~80%) of the teachers at the conference were from Colegio Bolivar - I definitely felt like one of the few outsiders. Despite that, I think I learned some good strategies to bring back to my classroom.
Our bus ride back to our hotel that day took almost an hour, as opposed to the usual 15-20 minutes. There was terrible traffic, and I fell in and out of a nap. When we returned, all my companions had to head to the airport, as I was the only one staying an extra night to explore the city.
Having begun a series of naps on the bus, I took a proper nap after everyone left, to recharge my batteries to explore the city on my own. Afterwards, I decided to head to Parque Artesanal Loma de la Cruz, an artisan market in an artsy neighborhood. There were lots of cool things there, and seemed like the cool place to hang out. There were lots of groups of young people chillin', playing guitar, and generally hanging out.
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| Plus there was a great view of the city! |
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| The #littledinosbigworld enjoyed the view too. |
I looked around all the shops, exploring what they all had to offer, and then found myself a little spot to chill and enjoy the environment. There were a few performers there too; there was a guy doing a ninja weapon act, and later a stand-up comic.
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| It's a gorgeous area |
This was my favorite spot in Cali - the area, the people, everything - it was all so cool. Unfortunately, I broke one of my sandals, but fortunately I was able to buy a new hand-made pair!
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| Luckily I got it fixed when I returned to Bucaramanga. |
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| New green macrame sandals! In my size! (Very hard to find my size; women in S America are generally not as tall as me.) |
I returned to the market, bought my cat sculptures (because of course), and had some maiz desgranados for dinner before taxiing back to the hotel for my last night in that comfy bed.
12 de marzo 2017
Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia
Bogotá, DC, Colombia
My last day in Cali was a rainy one. I had originally thought about going up to see Cristo Rey or Las Tres Cruces, which are both parks on top of mountains that would afford a great panoramic view of the city. After some more research, I found that (1) they were both pretty far away and would take a long time to get to, and (2) were a pain in the ass to get up to. Essentially you've gotta walk up the mountain, or in the case of Cristo Rey, you can take a taxi up, but you have to have it wait for you if you want to go back down. There's nothing up at the top of the mountains except for the statue and the view. On such a rainy day, it just didn't seem worth it.
I had a few hours to kill because I had to leave for the airport around 3:30 pm, and I didn't want to waste my extra day in my hotel room. I hadn't heard great things about the museums in Cali, but I'd heard the zoo was pretty cool and figured it would be a great way to kill a few hours by myself.
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| I'm great company. |
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| Zoo snacks in Colombia > zoo snacks in the United States (Granadillas are great!) |
It was a pretty great zoo - lots of animals in large habitats, including some neat animals I hadn't seen before (giant anteaters are HUGE - I know it's part of their name, but still!). Plus, free-range peacocks (pavo real = literally "royal turkey") are always cool.
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| Wanna fight? |
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| The pavo real in all its glory |
The Cali zoo has a white tiger, which I was excited to see, but unfortunately she wasn't seeing visitors that day. She was inside hiding from the rain. I did see a bunch of tities though (reread that, it's not what you think). The zoo is structured in a big circle and has helpful arrows that guide you around the most efficient path. By the time I made it back around to the entrance, it was time for me to head back to the hotel to get my bags. I couldn't have timed it better.
I returned to the hotel, did an idiot check (didn't find any idiots), and settled in for the long taxi ride back to the airport. I still needed to print my boarding passes, so I headed to the do-it-yourself kiosk. For some puzzling reason, it wasn't working. It would not recognize my reservation number or passport number. I start walking toward the ticketing desk and decide to stop at the departures board on the way.
My flight is canceled.
It's one hour before takeoff, and when I had checked in the taxi, my flight was on time.
It's just now been canceled.
Annoyed, I jump into one of the customer service lines. After about 20 minutes in line, I near the front and find that this line is only servicing passengers flying to Cartagena. I'm confused and irritated and ask where I am supposed to go. I get directed to a much much longer line. It seems a few flights were just canceled. About an hour later, a fist fight breaks out between two men in line. It's quickly broken up, but they continue glaring daggers at each other as they're pulled away. Soon after that, I make it to the desk. They put me on a flight to Bogotá for a few hours later, but unfortunately that flight lands after the last flight to Bucaramanga leaves. So I'm scheduled to fly to Bucaramanga early the following morning. This means I have to stay the night in Bogotá and write another day of sub plans for my classes.
I am then directed to another desk where (within 10 minutes of my approaching the desk) an Avianca representative sets me up with a hotel voucher for Bogotá and begins a complaint ticket for travel compensation (compare this efficiency with my other travel nightmare experience with United back in January).
On my way to the security gate, I saw a cart of chontaduros. I had meant to try one earlier in the trip, since they are typical to this region, but somehow missed all my chances. The fates were aligning in my favor!
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| So many colors |
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| The traditional way to eat it is with salt |
I'm glad I tried it, because now I can say that I did, but man was that just not great. It was kind of like an under-cooked starchy potato with a weird aftertaste. I was thankful for the salt, as without it I don't think I would have finished it. I was also thankful for the Subway right after the security gate, where I bought some dinner to wash down the weird flavors in my mouth.
I headed down to my gate, much happier and calmer than I was during my last travel mishap. I look in a few shops, and then try to find somewhere with an outlet to settle down and write my sub plans. Outlets are scarce. I finally find one that doesn't even look safe or like it's supposed to be there; there's a wire coming out of the wall, which is attached to the outlet plate, which isn't screwed into any wall anywhere. It's better than nothing, so I plop down on the floor and open my computer.
There's a child playing with a monkey toy nearby, which wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that he keeps pushing the button that makes the monkey scream its monkey cry. No matter. I'll be boarding soon.
Except I won't.
I keep looking at the departures board, anxious that my flight hasn't begun boarding yet. Then it updates and I find that my flight is delayed two hours (because of course it is).
I sigh, resigned to my fate, and walk another lap around the circle of gates and find something new - a kiosk of outlets for charging things! My phone's been dead for a bit (the janky outlet from before couldn't handle both my computer and my phone at the same time) and my portable battery died after I used it at the zoo. The stools are all taken, but I plug in my devices and pop a squat, reading my Kindle as I squat awkwardly underneath this charging table.
At long last, my flight begins boarding and we fly to Bogotá. Once in Bogotá, I go to the Avianca customer service desk, where I redeem my hotel voucher and am directed to a hotel shuttle (so much more painless than United). The other stranded travelers and I arrive at the hotel and are quickly checked in. In addition to my hotel room, the concierge also provides me with a dinner voucher. It's nearly 1 in the morning and I'm not that hungry since my chontaduro and Subway earlier, so I save it for a to-go lunch when I leave in the morning (shuttle's at 6 am). This time I am more prepared (I packed everything into my carry-on, no checked luggage), so I change into my PJs and get a few hours of shut-eye.
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| My hotel room's toilet had a phone. Why? |
13 de marzo 2017
Bogotá, DC, Colombia
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
I wake up in the morning and grab my suitcase and head down to breakfast. It's decent, but nothing compares to the Hotel NH Royal. I head to the front desk to ask about ordering a to-go lunch with my dinner voucher and discover it is only valid for dinner, not lunch. So, it's useless. Oh well. I check out and head onto the shuttle bus to the airport.
My flight to Bucaramanga boards and departs on time with no issues, and except for the fact that I have a middle seat between two people that know each other, I have no problems on the flight. I finally get home and once again collapse.
One good thing about this is that I received $200.000 COP travel credit from Avianca, which I just used to book my flight to Medellin for my upcoming trip with my dad in June. Economy was $90.000 and business was a little over $200.000, so I paid the $40.000 (~$17 USD) extra to spring for business class. Travelin' in style. Thanks Avianca!
Travel Nightmare - March 12-13, 2017
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Los Animales de Colombia
13 de mayo 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Interestingly enough, I haven't seen a lot of wildlife in Colombia. I went on a few hikes through the jungle, but didn't see anything other than birds. There are definitely a lot of cool-looking birds here, and some weird-sounding frogs I've heard but not seen, not to mention some malicious squirrels. Here's an animal update from the past several months.
Lulo la Gata
20 de septiembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
You may or may not know that I adopted a tiny kitten back in September and named her Lulo ( #LuloLaGata ). My mentor, Janeth, introduced me to her maid, whose cat had had kittens, and 6 weeks after their birth, was looking to rehome them.
My students have given me a lot of shit about naming my female cat with a male name (in Spanish, names ending in -o are male and names ending in -a are female), but I wanted to name her after one of my favorite Colombian fruits. It's a fitting name, as she's a fruity cat. Plus, with her green eyes and orange-tinged fur around the eyes, it's like her eyes are little lulos.
My students are always coming up to me with photos of cats that need homes and offering these cats to me. They want me to give them names like Maracuyá and Guanabana so I can have a whole fruit salad of cats. At this point in my life, one cat is enough for me. It turns out this little nugget is quite the handful.
17 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
I woke up the morning of November 17th sans cat. Usually, Lulo sleeps in my bed and starts meowing and biting me around 5 am when she thinks it's time for breakfast. Her bowl was empty and she was nowhere to be found. I go to the kitchen and fill her bowl, hoping she'll turn up at the sound of food, but no luck. I start freaking out and look in every drawer, cabinet, closet, and crevice (she's gotten herself trapped in a few places, including my drawers of clothes). No cat. By this point, Colleen is helping me look, and we're both going to be late for work. No luck. We look outside a little bit, calling her name, but find no sign of the little cat. We head to school and hope she'll turn up later.
I worry the entire day of school, hoping my little baby cat is ok. I made some signs and printed out a bunch of copies to hang up around the building after school. My 11th grade students told me they killed her because they don't like cats (they have a very grotesque sense of humor). They then were trying to convince me to adopt a kitten one of them had and it would be the new Lulo, or maybe it would be Maracuyá. I tell them all I want is my Lulo back.
I walk home with my signs and see no sign of Lulo on my way up to my apartment. My Spanish is still pretty terrible, so I wait a bit for Colleen to come home and help me knock on doors. Colleen gets home, also without a sign of Lulo. We grab our keys, posters, and tape, and head out to canvas our neighbors.
The instant we walk out the door, we hear a very familiar meowing. We look down the stairs and who do we see but our own little monster, little Lulo! I sprint down the four flights of stairs, grab her, and run back up and inside the apartment.
We deduce that what must have happened is she jumped out the kitchen windows (a good 5 feet from the ground). It's possible she landed on the palm tree below the window on her way out. I text my vet and he comes over to check out my baby. He tells me there's nothing broken, no internal problems, just some bruising on her tailbone. This little nugget fell four stories with hardly a scratch!
During this terrifying experience, I learned that cats can survive falls from very high up. I also discovered that cats have nine lives, but gatos tienen siete vidas.
Unfortunately, some months later, Lulo's sister Buca (adopted by my friend Amanda) would fall out her 17-story balcony, land on a car, and not survive. Amanda's students would then get her a hamster named Little Buca for her birthday to try to fill the hole in her heart.
23 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
It wasn't long before Lulo got herself into more trouble. The morning of November 23, I woke up and reached for my phone (terrible habit, but one that most people in this day and age share). I went to unplug it from the night's charge, and found that the cord was in two pieces. My little derp had chewed through it overnight, while it was charging.
However, her hunger for electrocution didn't stop there. A few weeks later, she gnawed enough of Colleen's Macbook charger to prevent it from charging. Colleen brought it to the IT guys at school and they MacGyver'd it to work. I also bought her a replacement cord over Christmas break (man those are expensive, damnit Lulo).
16 de enero 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Over Christmas break, I needed someone to watch Lulo, as I only plan to subject her to the terrors of flying once - when I return to the United States at the end of my Colombian adventures. I asked my maid Marcela (Yes, I have a maid. Every 2-3 weeks she comes to clean my house and do my laundry for $50.000 COP, or $17 USD.) and she took Lulo to her home, as well as Courtney's cat Leo, Amanda's cat Buca, and Amanda's dog Lila. She texted us updates about the animals every few days.
About a week after Lulo returned home from her Christmas break (she was so happy to see me!), it was time for her spay appointment. My vet came and picked her up; she was going to stay the night at the animal hospital for her early-morning surgery.
The next day, I was out shopping and looked down at my phone - I had several missed calls, texts, and voice messages from my veterinarian. I listen to the voice messages and am a bit puzzled...my Spanish is getting better, but I still have trouble understanding things over the phone. I call him back and he's talking very fast with a lot of excitement in his voice. I hear "quatro sopresitas" (four little surprises) and he says he'll send me a picture.
I look at the picture and ask him incredulously, "¡¿Ella está embarazada?!" and he tells me that yes, she was pregnant. He was already inside and saw what he thought were her kidneys, but then noticed that there were four extra ones. He looked closer and realized they were four fetuses. Since he was already inside (spaying is an invasive surgery in which the vet removes the uterus and ovaries), he just removed the fetuses, turning the procedure into a combination spay/abortion.
He informed me that at her age of 5-6 months, she is at the developmental stage of a 10-year-old human. She is a small cat, and still a kitten herself, and it was not medically wise for her to bring kittens to term. Chances are she would have died, and the babies probably would have too. (My 11th graders still called me a murderer, despite this information.)
After keeping her under watch for a few hours, waiting until she woke up from the anesthesia, he brought her back to my home. Poor Lulo had a cone on her head and was still pretty drugged up. She drunkenly zig-zagged her way to my room, where she just kind of fell over and laid down pathetically exhausted.
The babies were about the size of ping-pong balls (for comparison, Lulo's head is only about the size of a tennis ball) and took up much of her abdomen, so with them gone, she looked emaciated.
The vet came back a few days later to check on her and give her antibiotics, and he instructed me on how to clean her wound and told me to put bacitracin on it to speed up the healing. Despite the cone, Lulo kept trying to bother the stitches, so I had to watch her for that. She had to keep her cone on for about 10 days, and by that time the stitches had some time to start dissolving.
When I first found out she was pregnant, I messaged Marcela, but she had no idea when this would have happened. The vet said the babies were only a few weeks old, placing the conception during Christmas break. Marcela's only cat is a female, Buca is female, Leo is male but was neutered several months prior, and she said the animals never left the house. Lulo is a sneaky little bugger, so I'm betting she found a way out, and while she was out, a gato found her and had his way with her. Personally, I didn't even know she was old enough to be in heat, and Marcela hadn't mentioned her going into heat, but I guess she hit puberty pretty quickly.
My count is that she's used up about 4 of her lives so far: (1) covered in fleas in the cold wet box on the moto ride to school, where I adopted her, (2) when she fell (jumped?) out the fourth-story window and was lost for nearly an entire day, (3) when she ate an active charging cord and was likely electrocuted, and (4) when she was impregnated as she barely began puberty and had a combination spay/abortion. We've gotta be careful, as she's a Colombian kitty and they only have 7 lives (or does she have 9 because she's being raised by an American? Is it nature or nurture when it comes to superstitions?).
Anyway, flash forward to today and Lulo is a healthy little cat (though not as little as she once was!) and enjoys normal cat things, like chasing/eating bugs, meowing at nothing and sprinting quickly to other rooms, and trying to eat all my food (including but not limited to: meat, vegetables, cereal, oreos, popcorn, and more). She's also extremely smart - if I forget to lock the window, she knows how to (and does) open it (luckily she hasn't jumped out again); she slides open my closet doors to hang out with my shoes; she opens the pocket door to the hall bathroom just enough to get a paw in, then grabs the rug and pulls it through the crack, using it as a tool to finish opening the heavy door. As my Oma would say, she's a little stinker.
The Kamikaze Bird
3 de febrero 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
One sunny day in February, I was sitting at my desk during one of my planning periods, working on grading some papers. It was hot, so I had all my windows open and my ceiling fans on high. My classroom has two walls of windows, so it makes for a nice cross-breeze. There's a tree right outside the window that's behind my desk, so sometimes I work to birdsong. It's a pleasant way to work.
Or at least, it was.
As I'm working, I suddenly hear a huge THUMP and a bird lands on the floor not even two feet from my chair. I scream and look at it; its eyes are open and it's opening and closing its beak, and then, it closes its eyes and beak and I watch the life fly from the bird.
Needless to say, I freak the fuck out and run out of my room, panicking. I try to tell the secretary what happened, but Spanish is difficult in my frightened state. Through a combination of stuttering Spanglish and sign language, I get the point across.
I'm still hyperventilating, so I go tell Colleen what happened - she has a class, but it's only a few students due to a field trip. She and her students all come look at the bird, and I notice that an entire wing landed a full 6 feet away from the rest of the bird.
Maintenance comes to collect the carcass, and the cleaning lady cleans the floor, but by the time my next class begins, there's still feathers EVERYWHERE. I tell my students the story, and explain why the windows on the tree-ward side of the classroom are now closed. One of my seniors looks up at the wall and asks, "Miss, is that blood?" I had an entire class of 10th graders in my room for an hour and no one noticed that I had a big splatter of blood and guts up on my wall near the ceiling where the bird must've hit after being thrown from the fan before it hit the ground. I tell the cleaning lady and she calls maintenance, and they say they'll come back and clean that after school when I no longer have students in my room. So I get to stare at it the entire rest of the day.
For months I've been terrified to open the windows on that side. Birds still get in through the vents above the windows, the skylights, the windows on the other side of the room, and the door, so it's a dumb fear. I've only recently started to sometimes open those windows again on really hot days. I get sad every time I see one of those little abuelitas walking around.
The School Squirrels
13 de mayo 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Colegio Panamericano has a thriving squirrel population. Part of the reason these squirrels are doing so well is that the kids feed them. These squirrels have no fear and will come right up to you while you're trying to enjoy your empanada. I had one nearly climb onto my foot before I ran away (squirrels aren't my favorite).
A few weeks ago, I saw a few boys from elementary feeding a squirrel. One boy was hand-feeding it and petting it as it ate. His friend then threw a bottle cap at the squirrel, and when I yelled at him for (1) cruelty to animals and (2) littering, and told him to pick up the cap and throw it in the garbage, he seemed scared to approach the squirrel. Nevertheless, I persisted. He tried to walk away, but I kept telling him he needed to pick up the cap and respect the environment and the animals that live in it. He was still afraid, as the squirrel was still there, looking for more food. Eventually, the boy that was hand-feeding the squirrel walked over and picked up the cap, just so I'd stop and they could leave.
Last week, a few of the teachers were sitting at the bottom of the stairs to the high school, below a tree, deciding where we were going to go to celebrate the beginning of our three-day weekend. Pieces of fruit keep falling from the tree above, and we look up and there's a squirrel sitting up there throwing these down at us like little bombs.
Earlier this week, Nestór, the physics teacher, told me that recently there was a squirrel sitting in the little tree right outside the science rooms. The students looked out the window and screamed - the squirrel was eating a bird! It was eating one of the little abuelita doves, spitting the bones onto the ground as it gnawed down on the flesh.
These squirrels are vicious little buggers. I feel I have cause to be afraid of them now.
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Interestingly enough, I haven't seen a lot of wildlife in Colombia. I went on a few hikes through the jungle, but didn't see anything other than birds. There are definitely a lot of cool-looking birds here, and some weird-sounding frogs I've heard but not seen, not to mention some malicious squirrels. Here's an animal update from the past several months.
Lulo la Gata
20 de septiembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
You may or may not know that I adopted a tiny kitten back in September and named her Lulo ( #LuloLaGata ). My mentor, Janeth, introduced me to her maid, whose cat had had kittens, and 6 weeks after their birth, was looking to rehome them.
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| Lulo and her siblings, Buca(ramanga) and unidentified brother (I wonder whatever happened to him). They survived a harrowing moto ride in the pouring rain in this box. They were very cold and very afraid. |
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| I picked up each kitten to decide which one I wanted to adopt. This little one gave me a hug, and that decided it. Colleen and I wrapped her up in a towel and took her home. |
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| So happy and so tiny! |
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| Lulo la gata y jugo de lulo |
My students are always coming up to me with photos of cats that need homes and offering these cats to me. They want me to give them names like Maracuyá and Guanabana so I can have a whole fruit salad of cats. At this point in my life, one cat is enough for me. It turns out this little nugget is quite the handful.
17 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
I woke up the morning of November 17th sans cat. Usually, Lulo sleeps in my bed and starts meowing and biting me around 5 am when she thinks it's time for breakfast. Her bowl was empty and she was nowhere to be found. I go to the kitchen and fill her bowl, hoping she'll turn up at the sound of food, but no luck. I start freaking out and look in every drawer, cabinet, closet, and crevice (she's gotten herself trapped in a few places, including my drawers of clothes). No cat. By this point, Colleen is helping me look, and we're both going to be late for work. No luck. We look outside a little bit, calling her name, but find no sign of the little cat. We head to school and hope she'll turn up later.
I worry the entire day of school, hoping my little baby cat is ok. I made some signs and printed out a bunch of copies to hang up around the building after school. My 11th grade students told me they killed her because they don't like cats (they have a very grotesque sense of humor). They then were trying to convince me to adopt a kitten one of them had and it would be the new Lulo, or maybe it would be Maracuyá. I tell them all I want is my Lulo back.
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| I made a bunch of signs to hang up around my apartment complex. |
The instant we walk out the door, we hear a very familiar meowing. We look down the stairs and who do we see but our own little monster, little Lulo! I sprint down the four flights of stairs, grab her, and run back up and inside the apartment.
We deduce that what must have happened is she jumped out the kitchen windows (a good 5 feet from the ground). It's possible she landed on the palm tree below the window on her way out. I text my vet and he comes over to check out my baby. He tells me there's nothing broken, no internal problems, just some bruising on her tailbone. This little nugget fell four stories with hardly a scratch!
During this terrifying experience, I learned that cats can survive falls from very high up. I also discovered that cats have nine lives, but gatos tienen siete vidas.
Unfortunately, some months later, Lulo's sister Buca (adopted by my friend Amanda) would fall out her 17-story balcony, land on a car, and not survive. Amanda's students would then get her a hamster named Little Buca for her birthday to try to fill the hole in her heart.
23 de noviembre 2016
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
It wasn't long before Lulo got herself into more trouble. The morning of November 23, I woke up and reached for my phone (terrible habit, but one that most people in this day and age share). I went to unplug it from the night's charge, and found that the cord was in two pieces. My little derp had chewed through it overnight, while it was charging.
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| Of course I had to do some #catshaming |
However, her hunger for electrocution didn't stop there. A few weeks later, she gnawed enough of Colleen's Macbook charger to prevent it from charging. Colleen brought it to the IT guys at school and they MacGyver'd it to work. I also bought her a replacement cord over Christmas break (man those are expensive, damnit Lulo).
16 de enero 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Over Christmas break, I needed someone to watch Lulo, as I only plan to subject her to the terrors of flying once - when I return to the United States at the end of my Colombian adventures. I asked my maid Marcela (Yes, I have a maid. Every 2-3 weeks she comes to clean my house and do my laundry for $50.000 COP, or $17 USD.) and she took Lulo to her home, as well as Courtney's cat Leo, Amanda's cat Buca, and Amanda's dog Lila. She texted us updates about the animals every few days.
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| Moto-gatas |
About a week after Lulo returned home from her Christmas break (she was so happy to see me!), it was time for her spay appointment. My vet came and picked her up; she was going to stay the night at the animal hospital for her early-morning surgery.
The next day, I was out shopping and looked down at my phone - I had several missed calls, texts, and voice messages from my veterinarian. I listen to the voice messages and am a bit puzzled...my Spanish is getting better, but I still have trouble understanding things over the phone. I call him back and he's talking very fast with a lot of excitement in his voice. I hear "quatro sopresitas" (four little surprises) and he says he'll send me a picture.
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| Quatro sopresitas. |
He informed me that at her age of 5-6 months, she is at the developmental stage of a 10-year-old human. She is a small cat, and still a kitten herself, and it was not medically wise for her to bring kittens to term. Chances are she would have died, and the babies probably would have too. (My 11th graders still called me a murderer, despite this information.)
After keeping her under watch for a few hours, waiting until she woke up from the anesthesia, he brought her back to my home. Poor Lulo had a cone on her head and was still pretty drugged up. She drunkenly zig-zagged her way to my room, where she just kind of fell over and laid down pathetically exhausted.
The babies were about the size of ping-pong balls (for comparison, Lulo's head is only about the size of a tennis ball) and took up much of her abdomen, so with them gone, she looked emaciated.
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| Pobrecita |
The vet came back a few days later to check on her and give her antibiotics, and he instructed me on how to clean her wound and told me to put bacitracin on it to speed up the healing. Despite the cone, Lulo kept trying to bother the stitches, so I had to watch her for that. She had to keep her cone on for about 10 days, and by that time the stitches had some time to start dissolving.
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| After I took off her cone, I noticed it was made from some old x-rays. |
My count is that she's used up about 4 of her lives so far: (1) covered in fleas in the cold wet box on the moto ride to school, where I adopted her, (2) when she fell (jumped?) out the fourth-story window and was lost for nearly an entire day, (3) when she ate an active charging cord and was likely electrocuted, and (4) when she was impregnated as she barely began puberty and had a combination spay/abortion. We've gotta be careful, as she's a Colombian kitty and they only have 7 lives (or does she have 9 because she's being raised by an American? Is it nature or nurture when it comes to superstitions?).
Anyway, flash forward to today and Lulo is a healthy little cat (though not as little as she once was!) and enjoys normal cat things, like chasing/eating bugs, meowing at nothing and sprinting quickly to other rooms, and trying to eat all my food (including but not limited to: meat, vegetables, cereal, oreos, popcorn, and more). She's also extremely smart - if I forget to lock the window, she knows how to (and does) open it (luckily she hasn't jumped out again); she slides open my closet doors to hang out with my shoes; she opens the pocket door to the hall bathroom just enough to get a paw in, then grabs the rug and pulls it through the crack, using it as a tool to finish opening the heavy door. As my Oma would say, she's a little stinker.
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| But she's my little stinker! |
The Kamikaze Bird
3 de febrero 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
One sunny day in February, I was sitting at my desk during one of my planning periods, working on grading some papers. It was hot, so I had all my windows open and my ceiling fans on high. My classroom has two walls of windows, so it makes for a nice cross-breeze. There's a tree right outside the window that's behind my desk, so sometimes I work to birdsong. It's a pleasant way to work.
Or at least, it was.
As I'm working, I suddenly hear a huge THUMP and a bird lands on the floor not even two feet from my chair. I scream and look at it; its eyes are open and it's opening and closing its beak, and then, it closes its eyes and beak and I watch the life fly from the bird.
Needless to say, I freak the fuck out and run out of my room, panicking. I try to tell the secretary what happened, but Spanish is difficult in my frightened state. Through a combination of stuttering Spanglish and sign language, I get the point across.
I'm still hyperventilating, so I go tell Colleen what happened - she has a class, but it's only a few students due to a field trip. She and her students all come look at the bird, and I notice that an entire wing landed a full 6 feet away from the rest of the bird.
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| These little doves are called abuelitas - little grandmas |
Maintenance comes to collect the carcass, and the cleaning lady cleans the floor, but by the time my next class begins, there's still feathers EVERYWHERE. I tell my students the story, and explain why the windows on the tree-ward side of the classroom are now closed. One of my seniors looks up at the wall and asks, "Miss, is that blood?" I had an entire class of 10th graders in my room for an hour and no one noticed that I had a big splatter of blood and guts up on my wall near the ceiling where the bird must've hit after being thrown from the fan before it hit the ground. I tell the cleaning lady and she calls maintenance, and they say they'll come back and clean that after school when I no longer have students in my room. So I get to stare at it the entire rest of the day.
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| Interpret the blood spatters how you will. |
For months I've been terrified to open the windows on that side. Birds still get in through the vents above the windows, the skylights, the windows on the other side of the room, and the door, so it's a dumb fear. I've only recently started to sometimes open those windows again on really hot days. I get sad every time I see one of those little abuelitas walking around.
The School Squirrels
13 de mayo 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Colegio Panamericano has a thriving squirrel population. Part of the reason these squirrels are doing so well is that the kids feed them. These squirrels have no fear and will come right up to you while you're trying to enjoy your empanada. I had one nearly climb onto my foot before I ran away (squirrels aren't my favorite).
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| They're kinda cute, until you're afraid they're going to attack you. |
Last week, a few of the teachers were sitting at the bottom of the stairs to the high school, below a tree, deciding where we were going to go to celebrate the beginning of our three-day weekend. Pieces of fruit keep falling from the tree above, and we look up and there's a squirrel sitting up there throwing these down at us like little bombs.
Earlier this week, Nestór, the physics teacher, told me that recently there was a squirrel sitting in the little tree right outside the science rooms. The students looked out the window and screamed - the squirrel was eating a bird! It was eating one of the little abuelita doves, spitting the bones onto the ground as it gnawed down on the flesh.
These squirrels are vicious little buggers. I feel I have cause to be afraid of them now.
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Noviembre y Diciembre en Colombia
5 de febrero 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Several small things happened in Colombia in November and December that I haven't gotten a chance to write about, so I figured I'd smoosh them all together in one post in the interest of getting to more recent stuff (while still reminiscing!). So, here's a bunch of small(ish) blog posts all in one.
25 de noviembre 2016
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
In most of Colombia, US Thanksgiving isn't a thing, which makes sense. They start decorating (and having sales) for Christmas before Halloween is over. However, due to the amount of North American staff, Thanksgiving is a thing at Colegio Panamericano. The week prior, we were told to head to the main office to get our Thanksgiving present from the school. I had never received a Thanksgiving present before, so I was excited!
The box for the speaker advertises that it uses "Beats technology," which makes it sound like it's made by Beats. Unfortunately, as noted by the "S" where you'd find a "B" on Beats, it is not. When turning on, changing modes, or connecting devices, the woman's voice that guides you has an accent that is a mix of British-English, German, Japanese, and robot. It's actually quite an interesting feat to get all those sounds together. Interestingly, the + and - buttons do not change volume, but skip tracks and change radio stations. There is not a volume adjuster anywhere on the speakers. This is fine when you're listening to your phone, but there is only one volume for radio - loud. All that being said, it's always nice to get unexpected gifts, and the speakers have pretty decent sound!
In addition to the gifts, Colegio Panamericano throws a hell of a Thanksgiving party for the staff. On Friday (we had school on Thursday), school gets out a few hours early so all the teachers have time to go get their hair and nails done and put on their suits and elegant dresses (Shout out to Kelsey for helping me with my makeup!). The party began promptly at 7, which in Colombian time meant 7:45 or so. Each guest was handed a cocktail on their way in, some sort of strong but tasty fruity thing. Waiters walked around offering glasses of sangria and scotch when it looked like your drink was getting low.
After a few drinks, dinner was served. They did their best to give us a traditional American Thanksgiving meal, and man, did they deliver.
Once everyone had gotten some food, they started announcing winners of the raffle every so often. This wasn't a little basket-o-food raffle - they broke out the big guns. Everything from food processors to tablets to TVs were given away as door prizes, with a few winners picked every half-hour to an hour. While we all anxiously waited to see if we'd be the next lucky winners (Kelsey won a tablet!), we danced to the live band (and when they were on break, the DJ).
Around midnight, people walked around handing out masks and silly string and it got pretty crazy. I left a few hours later, but the party was nowhere close to finishing, and they hadn't even given out all the prizes yet, but it was time.
27 de noviembre
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
That Sunday, all the expats had our own (low-key) potluck Thanksgiving. We met up on the roof of Ryan and Kate's apartment building, which is gorgeous. It's got a pool and a great view of Floridablanca.
In addition to the gorgeous weather and beautiful view, everyone brought delicious food to share. A fantastic time was had by all and we had to roll ourselves out of there!
7 de diciembre 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
The eighth of December marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (aka the Impregnation of the Virgin Mary), and it's a pretty big deal here in Colombia (and one of Colombia's many national holidays). The Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is a big deal as well - Colombians get together with their families, light candles, pray, and enjoy each other's company.
Noche de las Velitas, or Candle Night, is one of Colombia's Christmas season traditions. In the weeks leading up to the event, every store and street vendor sells packs of colorful little candles so you can stock up. Each family gets together and lights one for each member of their family and for loved ones who have passed away. They pray for everyone, eat, and enjoy the evening.
On this night, Courtney and I went over to Amy and Denise's apartment. On my way there, I saw families lighting tens and hundreds of brightly colored candles. It was pretty beautiful. The four of us sat on the balcony and lit candles for all our people and had some delightful conversations. Rather than the traditional buñuelos, we ordered Domino's for a little taste of home to go with our wine. It was quite a delightful evening.
8 de diciembre 2017
Piedecuesta, Santander, Colombia
On our day off (on a Thursday right before finals), my host family invited me and a few others to their house for a party. Vero and her friend Ximena picked up Colleen and I, and we headed out past Piedecuesta to where my host father calls "the boonies" and where their gorgeous villa is located. Colleen's host family and one other family also joined the fiesta later.
This house is HUGE and was built to my host family's specifications. The master bathroom has a bidet, and the bathroom between the fitness center and the workshop has a urinal.
The kitchen is enormous - two ovens (one doubles as a microwave) and a giant island in the center.
In his fitness center, my host father has one wall dedicated to a map full of pins of places he's been (he used to be an airline engineer before he retired). I hope to one day have that many pins on my map.
In their giant yard, they have a huge outdoor cooking pit (probably mostly used as a paella pit).
My host father Luis is from Spain, and his wife Luz Elena is Colombian. Their daughter Samara was born (and lived her first 7 years) in Florida. Luis loves the United States and is hoping to move the family back there soon.
We had quite the Spanish smorgasbord - we started off with pan con tomate - like Spanish bruschetta - which was made by cutting tomatoes in half, grating them (with a cheese grater) so you get all the juice without the skin, grating in some garlic, and adding salt and olive oil. You then spoon it onto some nice fresh bread. They had gotten some kick-ass garlicky bread, apparently from Mas por Menos, a grocery chain! It was so delicious and I think I ate a whole loaf by myself.
Next on the menu was tortilla española - Spanish omelette. We sliced up a bunch of potatoes and onions into thin-ish slices, and then in a deep cast-iron pan, Luis heated up about 2-3 inches of olive oil. He cooked the potatoes and onions a while in the oil, then added several eggs and scrambled it all together. After it had hardened enough, he used a plate to flip it over and finish the omelette on the other side. When finished, this concoction was about 3-4 inches deep. We cut it into little cubes and snacked on it (and I think I probably ate almost half of this delicious dish).
Next, Luis headed out to the grill to start work on the paella, while the rest of us had a little descanso on the porch. Colleen and I actually curled up on a hammock and a bowl-shaped chair and took a little siesta.
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
Several small things happened in Colombia in November and December that I haven't gotten a chance to write about, so I figured I'd smoosh them all together in one post in the interest of getting to more recent stuff (while still reminiscing!). So, here's a bunch of small(ish) blog posts all in one.
25 de noviembre 2016
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
In most of Colombia, US Thanksgiving isn't a thing, which makes sense. They start decorating (and having sales) for Christmas before Halloween is over. However, due to the amount of North American staff, Thanksgiving is a thing at Colegio Panamericano. The week prior, we were told to head to the main office to get our Thanksgiving present from the school. I had never received a Thanksgiving present before, so I was excited!
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| It's a Bluetooth Speaker! |
The box for the speaker advertises that it uses "Beats technology," which makes it sound like it's made by Beats. Unfortunately, as noted by the "S" where you'd find a "B" on Beats, it is not. When turning on, changing modes, or connecting devices, the woman's voice that guides you has an accent that is a mix of British-English, German, Japanese, and robot. It's actually quite an interesting feat to get all those sounds together. Interestingly, the + and - buttons do not change volume, but skip tracks and change radio stations. There is not a volume adjuster anywhere on the speakers. This is fine when you're listening to your phone, but there is only one volume for radio - loud. All that being said, it's always nice to get unexpected gifts, and the speakers have pretty decent sound!
In addition to the gifts, Colegio Panamericano throws a hell of a Thanksgiving party for the staff. On Friday (we had school on Thursday), school gets out a few hours early so all the teachers have time to go get their hair and nails done and put on their suits and elegant dresses (Shout out to Kelsey for helping me with my makeup!). The party began promptly at 7, which in Colombian time meant 7:45 or so. Each guest was handed a cocktail on their way in, some sort of strong but tasty fruity thing. Waiters walked around offering glasses of sangria and scotch when it looked like your drink was getting low.
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| Beginning of the evening - only 2 drinks (and one half-hour) in! |
After a few drinks, dinner was served. They did their best to give us a traditional American Thanksgiving meal, and man, did they deliver.
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| Yum. |
Once everyone had gotten some food, they started announcing winners of the raffle every so often. This wasn't a little basket-o-food raffle - they broke out the big guns. Everything from food processors to tablets to TVs were given away as door prizes, with a few winners picked every half-hour to an hour. While we all anxiously waited to see if we'd be the next lucky winners (Kelsey won a tablet!), we danced to the live band (and when they were on break, the DJ).
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| All dolled up |
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| After dinner |
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| Party time! |
27 de noviembre
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
That Sunday, all the expats had our own (low-key) potluck Thanksgiving. We met up on the roof of Ryan and Kate's apartment building, which is gorgeous. It's got a pool and a great view of Floridablanca.
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| Betcha none of your Thanksgiving celebrations had this view. |
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| Figuring out what to wear really tripped me out - usually when I think "What do I wear to a Thanksgiving party?" the answer is a sweater... |
In addition to the gorgeous weather and beautiful view, everyone brought delicious food to share. A fantastic time was had by all and we had to roll ourselves out of there!
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| Another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat! |
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| Nuestra Familia de Colegio |
7 de diciembre 2017
Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
The eighth of December marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (aka the Impregnation of the Virgin Mary), and it's a pretty big deal here in Colombia (and one of Colombia's many national holidays). The Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is a big deal as well - Colombians get together with their families, light candles, pray, and enjoy each other's company.
Noche de las Velitas, or Candle Night, is one of Colombia's Christmas season traditions. In the weeks leading up to the event, every store and street vendor sells packs of colorful little candles so you can stock up. Each family gets together and lights one for each member of their family and for loved ones who have passed away. They pray for everyone, eat, and enjoy the evening.
On this night, Courtney and I went over to Amy and Denise's apartment. On my way there, I saw families lighting tens and hundreds of brightly colored candles. It was pretty beautiful. The four of us sat on the balcony and lit candles for all our people and had some delightful conversations. Rather than the traditional buñuelos, we ordered Domino's for a little taste of home to go with our wine. It was quite a delightful evening.
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| Floridablanca is #lit |
8 de diciembre 2017
Piedecuesta, Santander, Colombia
On our day off (on a Thursday right before finals), my host family invited me and a few others to their house for a party. Vero and her friend Ximena picked up Colleen and I, and we headed out past Piedecuesta to where my host father calls "the boonies" and where their gorgeous villa is located. Colleen's host family and one other family also joined the fiesta later.
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| This place could be a hotel. |
This house is HUGE and was built to my host family's specifications. The master bathroom has a bidet, and the bathroom between the fitness center and the workshop has a urinal.
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| No excuse not to work out. |
The kitchen is enormous - two ovens (one doubles as a microwave) and a giant island in the center.
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| This is the kitchen of my dreams. |
In his fitness center, my host father has one wall dedicated to a map full of pins of places he's been (he used to be an airline engineer before he retired). I hope to one day have that many pins on my map.
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| I want to be a world traveler. |
In their giant yard, they have a huge outdoor cooking pit (probably mostly used as a paella pit).
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| Time to make the paella |
My host father Luis is from Spain, and his wife Luz Elena is Colombian. Their daughter Samara was born (and lived her first 7 years) in Florida. Luis loves the United States and is hoping to move the family back there soon.
We had quite the Spanish smorgasbord - we started off with pan con tomate - like Spanish bruschetta - which was made by cutting tomatoes in half, grating them (with a cheese grater) so you get all the juice without the skin, grating in some garlic, and adding salt and olive oil. You then spoon it onto some nice fresh bread. They had gotten some kick-ass garlicky bread, apparently from Mas por Menos, a grocery chain! It was so delicious and I think I ate a whole loaf by myself.
Next on the menu was tortilla española - Spanish omelette. We sliced up a bunch of potatoes and onions into thin-ish slices, and then in a deep cast-iron pan, Luis heated up about 2-3 inches of olive oil. He cooked the potatoes and onions a while in the oil, then added several eggs and scrambled it all together. After it had hardened enough, he used a plate to flip it over and finish the omelette on the other side. When finished, this concoction was about 3-4 inches deep. We cut it into little cubes and snacked on it (and I think I probably ate almost half of this delicious dish).
Next, Luis headed out to the grill to start work on the paella, while the rest of us had a little descanso on the porch. Colleen and I actually curled up on a hammock and a bowl-shaped chair and took a little siesta.
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| It felt like we were on vacation |
After an hour our two, the paella was finished - complete with mussels, shrimp, octopus, calamari, lamb, chicken, and rice. The pan was probably about a 2-foot diameter, and it was their smallest paella pan.
Even with about 10 adults and 4 kids eating, we only got through about half of the paella. I was all ready to put my pickiness aside and eat the seafood, until the little octopus on my plate waved at me as I carried my plate to the table. I picked at it and ate some of the land-dwelling animals and the rice, but I couldn't bring myself to get over it and try the seafood. It'll be my challenge for next time.
9 de diciembre 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
The next day was an odd one at school, since we had just had a day off (that for me and Colleen felt less like a 4-hour party and more like a 3-day weekend). We had a half day at school because the students had to finish preparing for their Christmas show that evening.
Kindergarten, elementary school, middle/high school band, and the senior class had been working hard for the past month on their dancing, singing, and musical performances. The seniors had been taken out of class for much of the previous week to finalize their choreography (their dance was superhero themed...not sure how that relates to Christmas). It was quite a to-do. On top of all these performances, we were also treated to a mini-concert by Ivanna, winner of La Voz Kids Colombia, a 7th grader at our school. Man that girl's got pipes. Here's a video posted by the school about the event:
Mesa de los Santos, Santander, Colombia
On our last weekend before we all left for Christmas break, Rosa and I jumped on a bus and headed up to Mercado Campesino in Mesa de los Santos for a bit of Christmas shopping. The bus from Piedecuesta made a bunch of stops to pick up and drop off people, sometimes seemingly in the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain.
We finally got there and got some breakfast of arepas de choclo, platanos con guava y queso, y cafe.
We wandered around, looking at everything from homemade pasta to salves made from marijuana and coco leaves.
We made several lists of more things we need to eat next time we're there, including fried quail eggs on a stick. Unfortunately, our first meal filled us up too much to have anything other than Colombian-made German beer and fresh coffee that was roasted and ground specifically for our cups.
As we waited almost an hour for our bus that was supposedly supposed to come every half hour, a trio of young people came up to us and asked if we knew the name of God. Rosa said she didn't think of God as having a name, and I guessed Yahweh. Apparently we were wrong, and they dug out the bible passage to tell us his name was Jehovah. We were trapped waiting for the bus and did our best to seem uninterested, but they kept telling us about their church in Bucaramanga and how we should look them up. The bus eventually (finally) came and we hopped on to head home.
11 de diciembre 2017
Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia
The next evening, after hanging out with Dan, Colleen, and Kelsey, Rosa and I went to Parque San Pio to look at the lights and shop a bit more. Bucaramanga went above and beyond in its Christmas decorations (starting in October). Lights everywhere, especially in the parks. Of course, Bucaramanga is known as the City of Parks, so, really, everywhere. Luckily, most of the light displays are made from recycled materials like plastic cups, so it's actually pretty green.
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| Dayum |
Even with about 10 adults and 4 kids eating, we only got through about half of the paella. I was all ready to put my pickiness aside and eat the seafood, until the little octopus on my plate waved at me as I carried my plate to the table. I picked at it and ate some of the land-dwelling animals and the rice, but I couldn't bring myself to get over it and try the seafood. It'll be my challenge for next time.
9 de diciembre 2017
Colegio Panamericano, Floridablanca, Santander, Colombia
The next day was an odd one at school, since we had just had a day off (that for me and Colleen felt less like a 4-hour party and more like a 3-day weekend). We had a half day at school because the students had to finish preparing for their Christmas show that evening.
Kindergarten, elementary school, middle/high school band, and the senior class had been working hard for the past month on their dancing, singing, and musical performances. The seniors had been taken out of class for much of the previous week to finalize their choreography (their dance was superhero themed...not sure how that relates to Christmas). It was quite a to-do. On top of all these performances, we were also treated to a mini-concert by Ivanna, winner of La Voz Kids Colombia, a 7th grader at our school. Man that girl's got pipes. Here's a video posted by the school about the event:
In addition to the performances, the school was also hosting a silent auction of paintings made by students and their parents, with all proceeds benefiting a foundation that helps underprivileged children. I put my name down on several cool pieces of art, and I got a text a few days later that I had won one! Plus, it was painted by one of my seniors, Camila, so that was extra exciting. They also threw in another painting that they had forgotten to display (a 9th grader named Maria Jose), so now I have two beautiful pieces of art by Colegio Panamericano students.
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| On the left is Maria Jose's, and the right is Camila's. |
10 de diciembre 2017
Mesa de los Santos, Santander, Colombia
On our last weekend before we all left for Christmas break, Rosa and I jumped on a bus and headed up to Mercado Campesino in Mesa de los Santos for a bit of Christmas shopping. The bus from Piedecuesta made a bunch of stops to pick up and drop off people, sometimes seemingly in the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain.
We finally got there and got some breakfast of arepas de choclo, platanos con guava y queso, y cafe.
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| These are likely my favorite food in Colombia. |
We wandered around, looking at everything from homemade pasta to salves made from marijuana and coco leaves.
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| All these meats just out in the open air...the stray dogs and the flies really liked this aisle. |
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| Market buddies! |
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| Baby chiva! |
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| Spending some time with the local wildlife |
We made several lists of more things we need to eat next time we're there, including fried quail eggs on a stick. Unfortunately, our first meal filled us up too much to have anything other than Colombian-made German beer and fresh coffee that was roasted and ground specifically for our cups.
 |
| And the man roasting the coffee wasn't too hard on the eyes either. |
As we waited almost an hour for our bus that was supposedly supposed to come every half hour, a trio of young people came up to us and asked if we knew the name of God. Rosa said she didn't think of God as having a name, and I guessed Yahweh. Apparently we were wrong, and they dug out the bible passage to tell us his name was Jehovah. We were trapped waiting for the bus and did our best to seem uninterested, but they kept telling us about their church in Bucaramanga and how we should look them up. The bus eventually (finally) came and we hopped on to head home.
11 de diciembre 2017
Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia
The next evening, after hanging out with Dan, Colleen, and Kelsey, Rosa and I went to Parque San Pio to look at the lights and shop a bit more. Bucaramanga went above and beyond in its Christmas decorations (starting in October). Lights everywhere, especially in the parks. Of course, Bucaramanga is known as the City of Parks, so, really, everywhere. Luckily, most of the light displays are made from recycled materials like plastic cups, so it's actually pretty green.
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| Happy as a sunflower! |
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| Botero's lady is admiring the tree |
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| Cheesy Christmas-card-esque photo |
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| It's like a fairy forest |
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| Of course I needed a photo of this... #mathnerd |
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