Bogota Blogger

Settled in Turkey, and busy, I have neglected this site for months. But I still keep up with friends in Colombia regularly and read the Colombian news from time to time.  Turkey and Colombia have so very much in common, I couldn’t even begin to list them all. Some things I found charming or frustrating about Colombia are double or triple or more here in Turkey. And yet the countries don’t have much to do with each other–they don’t even have embassies in each other’s capital cities.

Maybe I would find other countries that are kind of 2 1/2 world-ish that are also like Colombia and Turkey–lots of people have suggested that.  But, based on my friend Jose’s experiences in London in the past seven months (he went there when I came to Turkey), I’m drawing some anecdotal conclusions about the similarities between the two.

Jose went to London to study English, and I helped him to get there. Basically he loves Colombia but feels the need to escape (that’s the correct word) if he is ever to have any opportunity to improve himself. He has a university degree and is hard-working, but those things don’t count for too much in the classist society that Colombia still is. So, he got a visa to study English in London and is about to renew it for another year.

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You have to look long and hard to find one. People here are just NOT overweight. While appearance is important here and for the most part people dress pretty well, I don’t think the the lack of fat is due to Bogotanos trying to be thin. It probably has a lot more to do with just natural diet and lifestyle choices.

In the school where I teach, of almost 900 students, there are maybe three who are overwieght. Take a random 900 US students and what would that figure be? One difference between our students and most in the US is that in my school, kids get an hour of physical education or sports almost every day, and I know that in Palm Beach County, Florida, where I moved from, students get maybe 20-30 minutes of PE every week. So, that might account for part of it.

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Colombia has certainly had a lot of problems over the past 40 years, and still suffers from a pretty bad reputation in most of the world. Most of us who live here or have visited recently know how undeserved this is, of course. On the other hand, I’m glad the place isn’t overrun with Americans and Europeans, so that the type of people who come here to visit aren’t the typical “Ugly American” tourists.

I will eventually write some posts about the image problem Colombia has and has had over the years, and some of the political implications. But for now I have to comment on what I’ve observed about how Colombians seem to think about how the rest of the world views them.

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Colombians make a lot of assumptions about their fellow Colombians based on what part of the country they are from. The second largest population center after Bogota is the town of Medellin, in the department (like a US state) of Antioquia, and people from that part of the country are known a “paisas.”

People who live in the coffee growing region (Eje Cafetera) are also known as paisas, because those departments are near Antioquia and were settled by people from Antioquia.  Those departments are Risaralda (capital, Pereira), Caldas (capital, Manizales), and Quindio (capital, Armenia).

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There are a couple of noises that I have heard a lot from Colombians–I will call them UFF and WHEESH.  They’re actually somewhat similar in meaning, and there’s not really a good spelling for either one, but I’m going to try to explain them.

First, UFF.  This is similar to a noise I’ve heard in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the US.  Maybe it should be more like OOF-F-F.  The important thing is to draw out the F-F-F-F-F part of it.  The word can show suprise or exasperation, but has a few other translations.  It can mean, “Oh yeah, I definitely agree!” So, when someone says, “I’m really sick of the pollution coming from these buses,” the appropriate response could be “Uff!”  It can also mean something like, “That’s unbelievable,” such as when your friend says, “I just ran 10 miles in the rain,” and you reply, “Uff!”

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Something I was totally ignorant of before coming here is that Colombians can’t go very many places in the world without visas, and that those visas are usually difficult, and often impossible, to come by. I’ve seen a couple of different lists of where Colombians can go as tourists without visas, but this one, from the Ministry of Foreign Relations (the Colombian equivalent of the US State Department), says Colombians can go here: 

Andorra, Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Philippines, Israel, Japan, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, San Vicente and Grenadines, The Vatican, Singapore, South Korea, Timur, Tuvalu, Trinidad y Tobago, Uruguay, Western Samoa. 

Notice that most of these countries are in South America.

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This is a very dog-friendly city. I don’t think there’s an apartment building anywhere in the city where there would even be a question about whether or not dogs are allowed–they just are.  People take their dogs into shops, on the patios of restaurants, just about everywhere.   A guy I work with brings his dog with him to school, on the bus, and it hangs out in his classroom all day.

Like every big city, this means there’s a problem with dog crap, too.  It’s not as bad as Paris, but it’s still something you need to look out for.

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