Colombia 2

´´Mi ojo es rojo.´´

In my limited Spanish, that was my way of saying ´´I have pink eye right now, which is why I´m wearing dark sunglasses at night / while shopping at this supermarket / while having an intimate conversation with you in this candle-lit restaurant.´´

Pink eye was the only thing really afflicting my stay in Medellin, the isolated city high up in the center of Colombia.

Homicide rate in Medellin: 17 murders per day! 

Luckily for me (and ... everyone) that statistic dates back to 1991. Now that drug cartel boss Pablo Escobar is sleeping in the ground, the city is vastly different, emerging from its bloody past wearing bright colors, big ideas, and a wide smile

Last year Medellin surpassed both San Francisco and Tel Aviv to be named the Most Innovative City in the World. People buzz around, restaurants and clubs operate at Level 11, and the Metro system, built 20 years ago despite widespread belief that it would never, ever work, is the City´s mark of pride, fast, efficient and completely devoid of litter or graffiti. On top of all this, there is a new gondola system that whisks people above the Santo Domingo-Savio neighborhood, the city´s barrio where police once feared to tread. It´s accessible now. Though it is still a bit freaky though and I wouldn´t go near there at night.

My overnight bus ride to Medellin from Cartagena was a glorious, gorgeous and gregarious 13-hour journey, the moonlight, sunrise and subsequent sunshine kissing a moving cinema of towns, slums, rivers, churches, moss, agave, bouganvillea, cats, dogs, cows, horses, donkeys, waving children, three old men in cowboy hats, two men holding machine guns, one bus fallen over on its side, and so much mist.

Again: Medellin! Salads here! Vegetable soup! The weather, eternal springtime! And the world´s friendliest locals! Every time I asked someone on the street for directions, he/she walked with me for 8-10 blocks chatting like a giddy schoolkid. I was in love. My plan to stay one night turned into a stay of six nights and a reluctant departure

Towards the end of one particularly long day, I´d been walking around el centro for 9 or 10 hours, experiencing a circus of taxis, motorcycles, blaring stereos, pornography both live and DVD, and some of the most picturesque prostitutes I had ever seen, usually posturing in front of churches. I looked up at one point and saw a stand selling ´´Arepas de Choclo.´´ Holy shit, I thought, arepas with chocolate. Not even remotely hungry after hours of grazing the multitudinous street food everywhere, I decided it would be foolish to pass up such an offering. I searched my pockets for money and found the equivalent of maybe 45 U.S. cents, just enough to buy an arepa and render me further peniless. I ordered one and quickly learned that ´choco´refers to a type of corn, not anything to do with chocolate. I was served an arepa the width of a Beatles record and one inch thick, slathered in butter. I and the girl serving me were mired in confusion. Then as I left, she gave me her phone number.

Like I said, I loved this town. I cried a bit on the bus out of town towards my first WWOOF farm. Maybe sad to leave, maybe missing all you loves back home, maybe feeling in my heart this nation´s complex identity polarized with happiness and violence, pride and pain. 

On the bus en route to the farm in Cartago, I missed the stop I was supposed to get off at, because I was asleep. I was probably asleep because of what I´d eaten the last time I was awake: a heavy fish stew (heavenly) followed by a mini dulce de leche for dessert (98% sugar) which I questioned at time of eating. At any rate, I woke up when the bus stopped in a little town called Guadalajara de Bugo, 2 hours past my stop in Cartago. In the torrential outpour of expression from the Spanish-speaking passengers who understood my plight, I deduced that I should get off the bus immediately and get a bus going back in the opposite direction. 

I could only imagine what this situation would mean on a similar journey back in California -- say Greyhound from San Francisco to Los Angeles, stopped maybe 90 minutes north of Bakersfield, as the sun set and rain began to pour as in my current situation.

Half of me thought Holy Mother of Fuck. I ignored that and went with the other half of me, which approached the situation with meditative calm and acceptance. Hearing one woman call me ´´mi amour´´ as I exited the bus with my giant backpack out onto the highway, I walked into a FLOW situation where everything clicked before I had a chance to overthink. 10 feet in front of me appeared a man on a motorcycle. He whisked me to the nearest transportation terminal, and the very first bus company I questioned sold me a ticket to Cartago leaving in 15 minutes. Remember ´´Esta Es el Punto´´ from my previous Facebook post.

What is a truck stop in the USA? A grimy, fluorescent-lit, Pepsi-sponsored cesspool of 64-ounce sodas, deep-fried hot dogs made from quasi-meat biproduct of cows with gonnorhea, teeming with with fat racist truckers coming down off crystal meth? It´s different in Colombia! Mouth-watering food slow-cooked by stout local women, served by ludicrously attractive young Colombians. You sit at tables made of solid wood, dining in semi-outdoor space overlooking green mountainsides that difine the word bucolic. Around you, 20 or 30 Colombian families also eating. Your bus leaves in 30 minutes.

I looked in the mirror today. My left eye is healed. But now my right eye has gotten pink eye, probably from its neighbor. And so my new phrase: ´´Mi otro ojo es rojo.´´

My writing is amusing!  Are you not entertained??!!! Now that I have your attention, I need to pull a Bono and send you an important message. Mega-corporation Monsanto is here. Even in the most remote fields in the middle of nowhere, there are monstrously large fields of sugarcane and the like, laden with chemicals that seep into the land and into the rivers that provide everyone with their drinking water. Do you find that disturbing?  Then get this: Colombia passed a law making it illegal to plant any crops using seeds that are not patented. In other words, IT IS NOW ILLEGAL IN COLOMBIA TO GROW NON-GMO FOOD, punishable by months in jail. I won´t pretent to have a solution but to ask you this: spend some time time, even 5 seconds, having concern for this spread of poison throughout the globe. Even those 5 seconds of thought will be seeds that can grow into something healthy.