Bus in Bogotá
Do you ever pay attention to how people interact on buses? Or public transportation in general? It’s quite an interesting microcosm, if you think about it; all of these strangers squeezed into a tight place, arms, shoulders, legs, and butts all touching with people you’ve never met before and will probably never see again.
Over a year ago when I first arrived in Barranquilla, I was at school setting up my Kindergarten classroom. I had to make name cards for my kids´ desks. One of my little girls was named Maria García Rojas, but her name was too long to fit on the card, so I just wrote Maria García, thinking it was no problem. I was wrong.
Recently I have gone on two job interviews, one in a school and one in a university, and wow, interview questions (at least in my experience) in Colombia are way different from those in the States. I have never felt so interrogated in my life.
The first interview was with a school for a 10th and 11th grade English teaching position. The interview began with a personality assessment test called the Wartegg test. Personally, I think personality tests and quizzes to “find out about yourself” are completely bogus. Basically, they are the same as fortune-telling. Occasionally what they say will be true, but usually it’s just luck or coincidence. I really dislike tests trying to tell me about me.
Wartegg Personality Assessment
When discussing cultural differences of a place, one simply cannot ignore the food. Colombia has some very interesting and different foods that also vary within different regions of the country.
First, the fruits. There are some crazy fruits found in Colombia. Well, crazy to a gringo, that is. No Colombian meal is complete without a pitcher of freshly made fruit juice. In the coast, I drank juice of pineapple, mango, blackberry, passion fruit, guava, strawberry, orange, mandarin, lulo, corozo, tomate de arbol, guanabana, and many others. There are even more unusual fruits that are not commonly made into juices. My favorite is definitely tomate de arbol. It’s sort of like a citrusy tomato juice—think V-8 Splash, not the regular V-8.
Arepa de choclo con queso-Medellin
Frozen White Corn Arepas
I’ve been back in a Colombia for two weeks and have been extremely busy looking for jobs and apartment hunting. Thus far, the job search has been going much better than the apartment hunt. I think I grossly underestimated how much I can expect to pay for a decent apartment in a good location. I have a few more prospects that I am going to check out this weekend, and one actually is well within my price range, but I’m a bit skeptical.
Bogotá from Monserrate
You may have noticed, Dear Reader, that in my posts I do not use the term “American” to describe people from the United States. I try to say “North American” or “people from the US.” This is because many Latin Americans I have spoken with are slightly miffed that we do not consider them “American,” because really, we are all Americans. North American, Central American, South American, Latin American…whatever kind, we are all from the same big continent of America. At least, that is how many people not from the US view it. Students in Europe and Latin America, among other places, often learn that there are six continents instead of seven.
I mentioned briefly in my last post the difference of the lack of personal space here. This, I believe, is a very big difference. In Colombia, people live with their families until they get married, which is generally not until their late twenties-early thirties. In the States, we’re outta there at the age of eighteen. (Maybe not financially, depending, but out of our parents’ houses as soon as we are able.) To me, this speaks a lot about the individualism of the US versus the family- and community-oriented culture of Colombia, and Latin America in general.
As a North American in Colombia, I notice that at first glance, in many ways, my birth country and my new country of residence are not all that different. The coastal city of Barranquilla where I lived could easily be a small town in Southern California. Sunny, palm trees everywhere, tall apartment buildings, stucco houses, malls, paved roads with cars…These are all superficial observations, of course, but they are similarities nonetheless.
Perhaps this is the reason I’ve never had a big “wow I’m in Colombia moment.” In all of the other places I have traveled to, and especially the ones where I have lived, at some point shortly after my arrival I find myself thinking, “Wow! I can’t believe I’m really here! Is this for real?!” But in Colombia, that never happened. I felt more like, “Cool, I’m in Colombia.” My life here is very normal. I wake up, go to work, come home, watch Friends on my computer, hang out with my roommates, eat dinner, go to sleep. I go to the mall, the grocery store, bars, the pool, and friends’ houses on the weekends. The same can happen in every corner of the world.
Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, once said:
“People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.”
I could not agree more with Mr. Annan. I believe cultural differences are some of the most beautiful and interesting things about our world, and they are my favorite things to learn about and explore. Continue reading
Well, I’ve done it. I have finally started a blog. I am embarking upon my fifth living-abroad excursion, this time to Bogotá, Colombia (I have previously lived in Cannes, France; Rabat, Morocco; Kumasi, Ghana; and Barranquilla, Colombia). To be honest, I was always kind of against the whole blog thing; I saw them as narcissistic ramblings with poor grammar—I mean, do people really want to read the thoughts and activities of their friends as well as strangers? Well, as it turns out, apparently they do, because there are thousands of popular blogs available on the net, and new ones are always popping up (like this one…).
The Wanderlust Chronicles 