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.
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 