08.10.2010

Ok, I guess since this is my first post, and it's already been a week for me in Colombia, I'll condense what happened in Bogota, even though it was awfully eventful for me!  (As everyone that was there can vouch for!)  I got to Bogota two days before my luggage did.  I'll just say that.  And, then my phone got held captive by the people at Samsung at the Centro Commercial (Chilean something or other).  But, all is good now.  I've gotten pretty settled in with a family in an apartment very close to the Universidad de Ibagué, where I'm teaching.
The weekend was kind of uneventful.  I thought Alabama was slow, but no, it has nothing on Ibagué.  Hard to believe I know.  I was able to go on a drive around the city with one of my collegues at the university.  He took me to probably all of the homeopathic medicine places in the city to try to find one that was open.  So, if anyone needs alternative medicine while they're here in Colombia, come to Ibagué.  There are a lot.  We also went to the big supermarket that's close by my apartment so that I could become familiar with it.  We had lunch at a little hole in the wall place a block away from the university, which has some of the best food I've had so far.
Sunday, everybody in the apartment plus their extended family went to our apartment's pool to spend the day.  I should've only spent about 20 minutes out there though, and they kept wanting me to use more and more tanning oil, which had essentially no sun protection.  I'm still pretty red, but I got my month's worth of Vitamin D.
Monday, I had my meeting with the Centro de Idiomas department chair, who went along with my sentiments about not being qualified to teach real/serious classes.  So, I'm going to have an all girls conversation class with a very topical basis, and also a teachers conversation club that will be essentially the same format.
What's cooler than all of this is what happened tonight.  I got invited to go with one of the students at the university to the Parque Deportivo for fencing practice.  It was a lot of fun, and like most things that I usually do in Alabama would right now, it made me very happy because it was familiar.  So, even more exciting than going tonight is that I was also told that they want me to go with the club to Cali in two months for a tournament.  Anyone that wants to go to Cali should totally go when I'm there competing (if I actually end up doing it!) because that would be cool.
FYI the power went out twice apartment complex-wide two different times as I was typing all of this.  It's still out now.   I guess I'll have to save this and post it later.  Colombia keeps testing my flexibility and patience.  Maybe I'll actually start going with the flow automatically in a week or two.