feliz cumpleaños Santa Fe..

today, in a nutshell.

we go on a tour at "the most important theater in Colombia" and get free tickets to an opera. we're gonna go change clothes and come back until we run into a plaza run amok, full of Santa Fe fans with flags, fireworks, todo eso. Santa Fe is one of the two really big soccer teams in Bogotá and it turns out that it is the team's birthday. so people are drinking wine and aguardiente out of juice boxes, chanting and waving the biggest flags I have ever seen. we call Coco's friend who is a diehard Santa Fe fan and she comes down. and the fans are starting to trek up this hill that is ultimately a mountain. so this is all going down here because the Santa Fe team was going up to Montserrat, which is a church at the top of this mountain, attainable only by teleferico (a cable car).

SO. we get in line. and we are right behind the team. and we get into the cable car... with the team. so this team has a lot of the national team's players.. not to mention half of the city is absolutely crazy over them. and to be honest I didn't even realize it was them at first because everybody was wearing jerseys and red and what not. I just thought they were some hardcore fans with matching outfits... because everybody was playing it cool around them. until all of a sudden I am taking a picture with a player who was the last Colombian to score a goal in a world cup game.

so we get out of the teleferico and there is this sort of red carpet shit set up. so we exit, take a picture with the goalie for the Colombian national team and then we go through this passageway, made by a rope on either side, to keep the fans from the team. and I'm like amongst them and people are going insane and taking pictures and shit. it was insane. and this whole thing is leading to a church. which is hilarious. church plus soccer equals Latin America basically. and inside the church people are going crazy standing on the pews and shit. nuts. so anyway, these are pictures from the theater that we did up not returning to, and the birthday rally in the plaza. I didn't have my camera which was heart wrenching but we had Coco's. and one picture from our road trip yesterday, of a church in Chinquinquira.

cambio en familia, y Ecuador!

Teodoro García 2448 2°11
C1426DMR Buenos Aires, Argentina

escribe me aquí! they changed my host family. I will not be living such a glamorous life, which is okay. I am only scared about the fact that my host mother and sister smoke in the house... barf. it says they won't do it if I ask, but I feel bad. we'll see.

Ecuador was AMAZING. it is by far, the best country I have ever been to. me and Emily Triggs went to Baños and it was so wonderful. unfortunately, the charger for my camera's battery se rompió, but I ordered a new one to come in Argentina. but that means no more pictures in Colombia.. which is breaking my heart.

anyway, we hung out with these chilenos in the hostal all night and they were absolutely hilarious. there was about 5 of them, half wearing wool ponchos, one with a mustache resembling Borat, and one was a sports journalist. all hailing from Santiago, Chile, and recently arriving from the Amazon. we spoke entirely in Spanish until about 3 in the morning when one of them started spewing out U.S. phrases como "You are coming with me for shizzle my nizzle the roof is on fire. You're busted, I caught you without your love ID. Where is your love ID? I am Mitch Buchannan. I AM WHITNEY HOUSTON! UNBREAK MY HEART!" and "Do you wear PJs? Are you a PJer? Hush little baby."

(another Baños highlight was when this old, grungy lady sitting on a bench reached out and grabbed this young guys butt and started laughing. I don't know, I am loving this blatant lack of respect for social order and law.)

as for Baños itself... it is a town about 4 hours out of Quito, of about 18.000 people. There are two main plazas and a plethora of hostals. "Un pedazo de cielo" is the motto on all of the outbound buses... (A little piece of heaven). The town was evacuated about a week ago due to predictions of volcanic eruption... it erupted last in 2006 and wiped out a fair amount of stuff, but I didn't see any of the damage. I did however, see a bus hanging partially off a bridge over the "river" (more like a ditch that fills when it rains) in Bogotá today.

so Baños greeted me with a typical $1.50 almuerzo that I had missed so dearly... and then we hung out at the hostal the rest of the night. there was a brief outing to some club but it wasn't all that great. we preferred the curb, a guitar and some crazy local randoms. the next day Emily and I got up in time for breakfast and headed out of town on some bikes. we rode along the edges of cliffs in the Andes... the whole concept is pretty surreal, really. we took this little cable car thing over a river/waterfall and to another mountain. absolutely unreal. and biking in that altitude I thought I was gonna just tip over wheezing. luckily most of the trip was downhill.

all and all Ecuador was much needed. I realized that I can actually speak Spanish, and it's the Colombians who I can't understand at all. today someone said "Con mucho gusto" and all I heard was "concho." I'm starting to figure it out a little bit better, but the Ecua accent is a damn treat. I'm moving to Baños. it's the bomb, todo eso. mmmkay chao!!

fotos de Colombia #1

sooo! here are my favorite pictures so far.

they are totally out of order.. but it should start with a trip to Chia, where Colombia's sister's horse is, followed by el Centro, Suesca (where we went rock climbing) and the a little boy I met when me and Coco got caught in the rain in Bogotá. you can see in one of the ones rock climbing, there is a man hanging from the top of that cliff under a statue. it's a statue of one of a billion virgins, because Latin Americans love them. anyway that dude swing like crazy just a few seconds after.. I can't imagine how long it took him to get up there. enjoy!

a love affair with 1441

aquí son fotos de mis finales días en los EEUU. chau a todo...!

la mañana después..




I miss you all a lot.. I'll load up some pictures from here. I'm trying to find a faster or better way to do this. any ideas.. let me know.