A lesson in mojitos...another day in the Colombian school system.

It was a normal Friday. Work from 6:30 to 11:30am then go home and get the weekend started. Nancy, the Colombian English teacher, approached me on the way to class.

“Oh today there is a change. We are having a girl studying to be a chef come and teach them how to make a recipe.”

Great. Great because it was Friday and that was much more interesting than what we were going to do – write about personal opinions on beauty and practice choreography for an English Day presentation. And that's fun. And interesting. And it means I can just sit there all day and be a member of the audience.

“Yes we will learn how to make cocktails. Mojitos…”

I had a laundry list of questions but I let it slide.

“…without alcohol of course.”

“You say ‘of course’ like it’s obvious,” I said. She laughed her confused laugh that she thinks I can’t differentiate from her normal laugh, even though I can tell the difference 100% of the time. We kept walking.

Daniela is the older sister of one of the tenth graders. Like her sister, Juliana, she speaks English abnormally well for Colombia. She explained the origins and preparation in English, which most of the girls definitely didn’t understand, but they still watched her every move and tried to follow along the best they could.

She poured a Colombian version of sprite into the glass.

“Usually this would be with rum, and you can also replace the soda with beer,” she said. “But because we are in school, we will only use soda.”

“It’s better with beer!” a girl named Isabela yelled from the back of the room.

Daniela finished by garnishing the glass and passing it around for the girls to try.

Nancy explained the next assignment to them. Get in groups and choose a recipe to present to the class in English.

“Remember, NO ALCOHOL,” she told them in Spanish. “We are in school. No alcohol.” I was sitting in the middle of the room among all the girls, watching the presentation for fifth time that day.

“Really just even that you have to tell them that…” I said out loud, but basically to myself.

A couple of months ago they had a mandatory safety check of their first aid kits in all of the classrooms. In one of the classrooms Nancy pulled out a small bottle of rubbing alcohol and handed it to the class representative.

“Get rid of this,” she said and the girl left the room. I was confused.

“Isn’t that kind of an important component to a first aid kit? Like if someone has a cut?” I asked.

“No, they cannot have it. They are teenagers. They’ll try to drink it.” I laughed. She didn’t laugh. Uhhh, well it’s not really… We stared at each other. “It has happened before.”

The mojito made its way to the back of the room. Isabela walked up to the front while taking a drink.

“This is so bad. So bad. It’s better with beer,” she said. She held it out to me.

“No thanks, I don’t like mint.”

“Good. It’s bad. It needs beer.”

“Beer and rum. Just beer and rum?”

“Yes. Beer and rum. Better with beer and rum.” She handed off the glass and got her things to leave.

Daniela packed up her stuff and cleared off the table while Nancy and I shuffled the girls out of the room to go to lunch.

“I think next week they can start presenting their recipes?” Nancy said.

“Yeah maybe next Friday?” I replied.

“I will tell Daniela and see if she can come back to watch.” She walked away.

Another day in the Colombian school system.

It's dead but it's still a little bit alive.

A couple of weeks ago I went out to lunch with some Colombians. I'd never tried arroz chino, "Chinese rice," here, which is apparently a big deal, so we were on the hunt.

After a year in Asia, I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten rice in absolutely every variety imaginable and even some that aren’t imaginable. But I opted to leave that information out.

We found a place they were satisfied with where they served large, shareable plates of rice.  I knew the words for most types of meat – chicken, pork, beef, as well as some more obscure options.

“What does‘ mariscos’ mean?” I asked a friend.

“Seafood.”

My heartrate quickened and my palms began to sweat. That's vague. That's suspicious.

I’ve not eaten a single strange food since I’ve been in Colombia. I’m not actively avoiding it, I just have yet to encounter anything I consider to be that out-of-the-ordinary. Yeah, you have to pick the fish straight off the bone, and the head is still attached to it, but that's child's play. (I am very much hoping to try goat in the not-so-distant future though.)

As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. The food had your standard variety meats with some shrimp and very normal vegetables mixed in. But I’m still suffering from some major food-induced PSD brought on by a year of living in Korea, "The Land of Terrifying Food". That's not an official slogan, but it is a free suggestion if they're looking for a new one.

In Korea, “seafood” meant there’d be a fish brain floating in your soup. That an entire octopus had been cut up and mixed into your rice. That the eel in the main course had just been killed 13 seconds ago and was still moving. Anything, ANYTHING they had managed to dig out of the ocean was fair game. Seafood means your worst nightmare is about to be literally hand delivered on a platter.

And no single day of my life has been more scarring than the closing lunch to celebrate the end of the school year, four months after I'd arrived.

We drove out to the middle of nowhere and entered a restaurant where we sat down on the floor, legs crossed. Several waiters brought out huge trays filled with tons of little plates of food. There are always a million plates, all to be shared.

I started gradually picking away at the food on the table in order of normalcy, hoping, I don't know, that a giant asteroid would hit the Earth before we got too far into the meal. Bean sprouts - gone. Spinach - gone. Kimchi - gone. There was a small plate that was unidentifiable.

"What's this?" I asked. I was seated next Shim HyeSeon, English teacher and also the only person I could talk to without relying on 97% body language.

"It's fish."

I don't even really know specific names of most fish so that answer sufficed. I popped a piece into my mouth with the chopsticks. It was weird. 

"Yeah the triangle one." The triangle one? I grabbed my phone and opened Google.

"This?"

"Yeah! The triangle one. What's that called?"

Stingray. It's called stingray. And yes, while technically a fish, I don't exactly put it in the same category as salmon or tilapia. She kept eating.

"You like shrimp, right?" she asked. I looked at the plate. There was shrimp. Whole shrimp. Straight out of the ocean.

"I do, but I don't know...I've never really...It's just that it still has..."

In one fluid motion she grabbed one off the plate and ripped the head off. A few seconds later the shell was ripped off and a piece of shrimp sat on my plate that more closely resembled the "shrimp cocktail" type shrimp I was accustomed to. She put the discarded body parts back on the plate.

The waiters re-entered with more plates. Second course: raw squid, straight from the ocean to our table.

No such luck with that asteroid.

"Try it!" Shim urged, pushing the plate toward me.

"I'm okay actually," I said. I'll just enjoy a nice glass of water."I'm really full from that first course of food. I should save room for the next courses." I'd eaten the same amount as the average two-year-old out to dinner at a restaurant and was anything but full.

"No, try it! There is one for each of us!"

I held it with the chopsticks and looked at it. My hand was shaking a little bit. The legs dangled at the bottom. The eyes stared through my soul. I bit it in half while the lower part disappeared into my mouth. The squid legs were close enough to normal food that I could deal.

"Okay that wasn't so bad," I said, while looking for a place to discard the head.

"No! All of it! You can eat all of it."

I stared at the face, positioned between the two chopsticks in my hand, just a few inches away from my own face. I cannot do this.

They all stared at me, face to face with the squid. Shim inched in closer. She was tired of watching my internal debate.

 “Oh fine if you can’t do it just put it back on the plate!”

 I shoved the other half into my mouth. Oh my God. OH MY GOD. The eyes. The brain. The face. The heart. The organs. The body.

 “Do you want more?” Never again for the rest of my existence.

“Now we will barbeque.”

Well thank God. If there’s one Korean food I could enter into competitive eating with, it’s barbeque. It’s absolutely delicious. The waiter’s disseminated the room with plates stacked to the max with food. Boneless food. Grey food. Scale-y food. Oh my God we’re barbeque-ing snake. And this is only course three which means there’s probably at least four more courses and it’s getting progressively scarier and I’m going to die.

“It is eel!”

She poked it with a chopstick and it moved. I almost jumped out the window next to me. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like for my lunches to be straight out of an episode of Fear Factor.

"It's alive?!" I asked.

"No. Yes. It's dead but it's still a little bit alive."

They all went about their conversation in Korean unbothered while I watched the eel flop around on the grill. We ate our way through most of the plate when there was just a bloody glob left. Trying to be helpful, I started to scoop it onto the grill. She stopped me.

"We will not eat because it is the face." Oh so we do have some limitations. Of course.

Eel sushi, eel spine, and pig skin appeared on the table before the prison sentence ended. By the end of the meal I finally was full, and nauseous.

I think this was the first time I've ever really felt culture shock. My head felt dizzy and it seemed like I was moments away from waking from a dream. When we stepped outside I took a deep breath and tried to recalibrate myself.

"Now we will go get ice cream!"

I never thought I would be scared of ice cream.

Oh, right, nevermind. "Gringa" is fine.

Usually once a week, I eat lunch in my school's cafeteria. I use the term cafeteria as lightly as possible because in fact, it is four tables designated for the teachers and about six designated for the students, all situated around the school's entryway. The food, unlike the cardboard pizza and half rotten apples that were typical in my own school days, is actually not that bad. It's nothing I crave or would go out of my way to eat, but sufficient when I need something quickly.

Last week I sat down at one of the tables and leaned in to confirm my lunch order. I had never seen the woman on the other side of the window before. She was updating the list of who was eating to keep track of payments.

"Como te llamas?" I whipped my head around and looked at her.

"Como?"

It's the most rudimentary question that everyone learns in their first week of high school Spanish class. But I had never, in the entire seven months that I'd been eating in the cafeteria, been asked what my name is. She asked me again, motioning to the paper.

"Como te llamas?"

"Shelby."

She hit me back the same way.

"Como!!?" Edilma, who often times can't remember if my name is Chelsea or Shelby, despite the fact that I've been to her house several times for lunch and talk to her every day at school, happened to be standing nearby.

"CHELVY," She very loudly spoke in the direction of the cafeteria worker. She doesn't know any English and can't make the 'sh' sound. Not uncommon here. "CHELVY. S-H-E. SI. CHELVY. S-H-E-L-B-Y."

The woman tried to follow along. S-H-E-L-D...

"NO. NO. CON 'B'."

S-H-E-L-P...

Whatever. Close enough.

I sat down and ate my lunch. I got up afterward to pay, as I don't like to keep a running tab that will come back to haunt me at the end of the month. I hadn't been paying attention, but she'd abandoned all attempts at writing my name and instead just wrote "gringa." Foreign girl.

But that's the thing: this isn't rude or even uncommon whatsoever here.

I can only imagine if a group of people went to a restaurant in the United States and the server labeled their table "MEXICANS" or "BLACK" or "CHINA". It would be a viral news story. There would be threats of lawsuits.

It's not rude because it's just what you are. Or even if it's NOT what you are, it's close enough for them.

They know I used to live in Korea and still every time they see any of my pictures from Korea, the reaction is usually "Oh, China!"

"No, like it's actually a completely differ...nevermind, yeah, China." Some battles become not worth fighting after awhile.

There's a girl in one of my classes who looks like at some point in her family history their could be some type of Asian mixed into her genes and the girls literally call her "La China." Anyone who is slightly darker than the average person is "Negra" or "Negro" regardless of whether or not they are even actually black.

When I first got here, this was REALLY jarring. But I'm from America, the land of being offended. Even when something isn't offensive, we make it that way. Now I see huge benefits to taking the power of insult out of words.

One of the girls motioned me over the other day.

"Do people in the United States think all Latin people are Mexican? That we're all the same?" I took a deep breath.

"Yeah, honestly there are some people who think that. That everything south of the U.S. is all the same as Mexico. But not everyone." I was trying to gauge her reaction. She didn't look particularly bothered. Or really even bothered at all.

"Okay and do you like Colombian guys or are they ugly?" I laughed and gave her the same vague answer I give every other day when this comes up.

"Depends on the exact person." The bell rang at just the right time. I grabbed my things and went to the cafeteria to buy breakfast. Mona, everyone's favorite cafeteria worker was zipping back and forth around the kitchen when she saw me. She doesn't know my name because she literally could not care less what it is.

"Gringa! Hola! Como estas?!"

My first chiva experience in Colombia

A lot of things happen in Colombia that make me cringe a little bit, but because it’s Colombia, I just sort of look the other way and let it happen. Many of the safety regulations are shockingly less stringent than those in the United States. But it’s not like people are dying left and right here from more lax restrictions, so maybe they’re onto something.

Because of this, there was one thing that I was both eager and terrified to try: a chiva. If we have a word for this in English, I don’t know it. But I’m going to pretty confidently assume we don’t, and here’s why…

After the sun sets, you and 30 of your closest friends (or in my case, a couple people I knew and a bunch of strangers) get on this big, colorful, open air bus type vehicle and ride around for hours dancing, spraying each other with foam, and pouring bottles of alcohol down each other’s throats. I mean it's Colombia, so I'm sure you could also do it during the day if you so choose. It’s like a party bus, but the goal isn’t actually to reach a specific destination, and you can easily topple out the side of it at any second. And it’s being driven around Colombia, where I usually feel like I’m about to fall out to my death on even a standard city bus ride.

I arrived at the meeting point at 7:10, 10 minutes after the planned 7:00 departure time. Right on Colombian schedule, we ended up leaving at about 8:30. There was a decent mix of people. A family on vacation, a bunch of Colombians, some random stragglers from other parts of Latin America and the USA, like yours truly.

A couple minutes past departure, amongst a lot of screaming and dancing, a guy pushed his way through with a bag of alcohol – rum or aguardiente, I don’t remember which. I don’t know the name for it in English or in Spanish, but it’s literally a leather bag you can sling over your shoulder with an opening at the end like a sports drink bottle. He held it up to Robert, an American guy here visiting his Colombian girlfriend. Robert offered up the small coffee cup that was hanging from a string around his neck – something he’d been given before we left. The guy pushed his hand away and pointed at his mouth.

Robert craned his neck back and opened his mouth. The guy tilted the bag up and squeezed with full force until the rum, or aguardiente, or whatever, was about to spill out of Robert’s mouth. Then he proceeded to go around to every single person on the bus, before making another round.

The chiva made three stops throughout the night at various tourist sites in Medellin. Each time we unloaded, the “leaders,” leather bags in tow, would yell at the group in Spanish “AGUADIENTE HERE, RUM HERE” while motioning for us to make two lines. It was like a weird fraternity initiation hazing. Except actually not at all because it was the most fun thing ever. Colombians are completely insane. Literally all of them that I know. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Maybe not even just Colombians. Maybe everyone south of the US border. Because at one of the stops we picked up new passengers – three guys from Mexico. Three guys that no one on the chiva had ever even seen or spoken to before. They wandered onto the chiva and everyone just kind of let it happen. I didn’t know any of their names so I refer to them as Muscle-y Tank Top Guy, Black Shirt, and The Other One. Black Shirt and The Other One huddled together chugging aguardiente straight from the bottle while Muscle-y Tank Top Guy gambled with his life on the side of the chiva.

I looked over at the guy next to me. He was on vacation withhis family from Florida. He was leaning in and out of the chiva.

“Seriously, can you even imagine this in the US?” I yelled.

“No! Not at all!”

“Like how many people would die the first weekend it was operating?” A lot. The answer is a lot.

The chiva slowed down and the Muscle-y Tank Top Guy jumped off only to take a running leap back on when it sped up again. He held on with one hand while leaning off and attempting to high-five random strangers on the street.

“He’s definitely going to die.” (Spoiler alert: he didn’t die. At least not while on the chiva. I’m not sure what happened during the rest of his night. He probably died.) In a questionable moment of judgement, I passed my phone to the guy from Florida so he could lean out the side and take a picture. This is the best he could do (but thankfully my phone is still in my possession, not in multiple pieces on the side of the road):

It was the best picture he could get, given the circumstances.

After several hours, we were all dropped in a park in Poblado, in one of the party areas of town so the night could continue. And just like that my first chiva ride was over. We all made it sort of alive and sort of well.

...Like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs

“I love seeing teachers outside of school. It’s like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.”-Mean Girls, 2004

I was 13 years old when I sat in my hometown’s theater seeing Mean Girls for the first of what would become about 1000 times. It was like the 2000s teen girl’s bible. It hasn’t been THAT long since I was in school and, yeah, seeing your teacher at the grocery store shopping or out to dinner with their family was weird. It was so easy to forget that they had a life outside of 8:05 to 3:20 when school was in session. At the time, I was a seventh grader who wore too much makeup and spent all my time instant messaging friends and looking at clothes online. I never once thought I would assume the opposite role.

I was just a little younger then than my own students are now.

It’s happened three times now. Me, being a dog, walking on my hind legs. The first time, I was taking a casual Sunday afternoon stroll around my neighborhood, just minding my own business. One of my students was leaving basketball practice near my house right as I happened to be walking bythe sports complex. We had a pleasant and pretty awkward short conversation before going our separate ways. No big deal.

The second time, I was in a small town about an hour outside the city with a couple of friends. We were sitting up on a lookout point admiring a river and the bridge built across it when suddenly a girl in sunglasses knelt down about 8 inches from my face.

“Hola!” She pulled off her sunglasses, unsure if I recognized her. I did. A quiet girl who’s never exactly an eager volunteer in class, but never a problem either. She joined her family a few yards away for a mini photoshoot. Then a couple of minutes later she waved me over so her mom could take a picture of us in front of the bridge. A pretty strange coincidence to see her there, but still a positive interaction. Here we are:

But the most recent time? Now that’s the stuff nightmares are made of. It’s no accident that I live about an hour away from the school by public transportation, or thirtyish minutes by car. It can make for a rough commute, but outside of working hours, I have a huge safety net for maximum work-life balance. Once I leave the school, all responsibilities are out of sight and out of mind.

Each year, Medellin has the “Feria de las Flores,” a week-long flower festival. To kick-off the festival, there’s a big party a couple of minutes from my house. It was Friday, so yeah, I went. Music and dancing. Beer and Colombia’s own aguardiente, alcoholic licorice in a bottle.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. After the aguardiente started flowing, the Spanish soon started flowing much more easily as well. And since I was practicing speaking Spanish, it was educational. Basically the same thing as being at home studying. I was the only American in the group, which is pretty rare when going out. Spanish can make me uncomfortable because it means doing something I’m not particularly good at. So I like putting myself into situations where I don’t have a choice but to be forced to practice.

Everything was good. Everything was normal.

“Oh! Sheeeeeelby!” I heard from behind me. No. No. Nope.

I froze before turning halfway around and going white as a ghost.  I looked at the guy next to me. No.

“Oh my God, a group of my students,” I mumbled to him. It wasn’t just one or two of them either, more like six. I needed to remove the look of complete horror from my face.

“HEY GIRLS!” I forgot how to control the volume of my voice.

It was the overly fake greeting you give to someone you absolutely hate. They are actually a very sweet group of girls, I just hated that of all the millions of places they could be on this Earth, in that moment they had to be standing in front of me. They had just arrived, probably dropped off by their parents because none of them are old enough to drive.

I gave a couple of awkward hugs, trying not to breathe when I got too close, in an attempt to conceal the aguardiente on my breath. After some “how are you?” exchanges in Spanish, one of them took a brief scan of the circle of people in which I had been standing, all of whom happened to be Colombian.

“Helloooo!” she said to the group, ready to welcome everyone to her country.

“Umm…de Colombia,” was all I could manage to get out while shaking my head. She shrugged, already over it. We all stared at each other for a few very long seconds. They pointed toward the stage at the other side.

“Okay, bye Shelby!” They disappeared into the crowd. I turned back into my circle of people.

“My students are here. I’m at a party with my students. My 14-year-old students are here, at this party that I’m at. My life is actually over. Please pour me another drink.”

Old New Beginnings

I live in Medellin, Colombia. The most common response is “Why?” in a very, very confused manner. I don’t have an answer. One day at the end of last year I had a thought that maybe I’d like to go to South America, maybe to Colombia, maybe eventually in the nearish future. Less than three months later, I was on a flight to Bogota.

Unlike some people assume, I’m not dodging bullets on the street and fending off knife attacks around every corner. Which, to be fair, that is kind of what I too assumed I would be doing when I stepped off the plane in Bogota last January. And I was sure that I would be kidnapped and it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. I was unwilling to admit it at the time, but I was terrified. Absolutely terrified. Colombia is still shedding its infamous reputation. I discovered most of my fears could be attributed to my own ignorance. I had never been anywhere near Colombia before, and all I had to goon was what I had heard. At one time, Medellin was considered the most dangerous city in the world. That’s not the case anymore. Of course there are still precautions to be taken.

Luckily, I received a lot of advice, or rather, mandatory instructions, on how to stay safe:

-DO NOT hail a taxi off the street. You’ll be kidnapped and killed.

-DO NOT take an overnight bus. Bandits will intercept it and you’ll be robbed and killed.

-DO NOT go to *name of poorer neighborhood where at some point in time something bad has happened*. You’ll definitely be killed.

-DO NOT have your cell phone out while walking down the street or while in public. It will be stolen, and for the sake of consistency, you’ll probably be killed.

Last January, I was as vigilant (read: paranoid and scared)as they come. But it’s been 7 months and I’ve loosened up a little…or well, a lot. So I’ve done these things once or twice, or every day in some cases.

Now, to be fair, I do know an unsettling amount of people who have had things, usually phones, stolen here. It hasn’t happened to me(yet…?...?). But all of the instances I’ve heard about were from pickpockets, which seems less traumatic than being robbed with a knife to your throat. Either way, I guess having something stolen is an unfortunate inconvenience.

And the other stuff, yeah. There are some neighborhoods that I’m definitely not trying to go to, especially alone and being the person that I am. Overnight buses do have a reputation for robberies, but the ones I’ve taken have been fine. And taxis. I don’t know. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve stepped into 2016 and finally started using Uber, but I’ve taken dozens by myself, and even more with other people, without any concerns.

But since I’m being as authentic as possible in keeping up with Colombian time and starting to document my experiences after being here for seven months, it’s impossible to sum up. Nothing about any aspect of life here is at all what I was expecting. In some ways it’s much better, in others it’s worse. But every good moment and bad moment have made it what it is, a really bizarrely wonderful experience.