Medellin          Birds and plants are amazing, but my father would have said, “hey, that’s true in other countries, too, Wade, what makes Columbia unique, that’s what I want to know.”  My old man was no pushover, so I have to keep my eyes open for things that would hit the mark.

As an accountant, one thing that would have interested and impressed him was that every bill in any café or restaurant automatically included the propinqua or tip.  Not street sellers of course or some coffee stands, but if you sat down, it was included.  A quick look indicated that it was always figured at less than 10%, closer to 8 or 9%, which was interesting as well.  Likely, if workers receive these tips, they do better with everyone paying, even if it is less than 10 or 15%, with some paying nothing or less and others paying more.  Additionally, in restaurants and in all stores, it was routine to receive a long receipt on any credit card or other purchase that was more than a foot long, rather than just the one or two inches that came out of the handheld card reader.  I wonder if all of this is a law?  I’ll have to check.

For all of the reputation that Columbia has for danger, in cities like Cartagena and Medellin or even along the Santa Marta coast, there’s no police and military presence with machine guns slung over the shoulder like you see in Mexico, Peru, and even parts of Brazil and Argentina.  Something else that’s very different:  you can drink the water!  At least that was the case in Cartagena and Medellin, and maybe in Santa Marta, but we weren’t 100% sure, depending on what we read.  The sewer systems in Santa Marta and Cartagena had not been able to keep up with population growth, and this was likely the situation in Medellin, but we were less sure, since there were not the same warnings and admonitions everywhere.  One surprising thing we encountered in all three cities was the inability to get hot water.  In Medellin, lukewarm was a win, since elsewhere the water was cold except for a minute or so when you were scalded. Weird.  On the plus side, sophisticated safety equipment is ubiquitous in private and public facilities.  They are ready!

Cartagena, despite its historic place in the world as a major port in the country’s founding with a still active waterfront, presents as a more touristic city.  The historic district is jammed.  Plazas are packed.  We happened upon a great bakery, Nia’s, which we were excited to find, since that had been my mother’s nickname, and later found it was ranked as perhaps the best bakery in South America and was operated as a social enterprise by a manager from a bakery in Norway, that people who know such things believe may be the best bakery in the world.  Santa Marta was a beach for locals, even among the high rises.  Minca was an old school hippie, hostel, and backpacker zone.  Medellin was a world-class city.  The central plaza on New Year’s Day was packed, but with Columbians and other Latin Americans, and only the occasional European and virtually no evidence of Yankees. In a zone of great museums and churches with a central plaza of touts, hawkers, and homeless, a block away you felt like you were in the old business district of Lima, even as the mountains soaring everywhere around were crowded with steeples of condos and apartments, underscoring the divide.  The mountains dominate the city as well.  To even get into the city from the airport you travel through two tunnels to make the trip, and one is more than five miles long.

I finally found a book on the birds of Columbia in English in a mall before we left, and am only now reading an anthology on Columbia from founding to modernity on Kindle.  We watched a couple of episodes of Marquez’s classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” on Netflix.  Truth to tell, though, we only scratched the surface.  Columbia is a complicated and diverse country.  I can’t wait to learn more and return with clearer vision and better questions.