Colombia 101

I am here in Bogota to teach English but obviously, my own cross-cultural learning experience is one of the main goals of this exchange.  The lessons of this past week have been a bit of a crash course:

Cukas are a typical Colombian dessert made with panela (pre-processed sugar), flour, and eggs.  Also “cuka” is a slang word for a woman’s....

"Tinto" is not short hand for vino tinto.  I couldn’t figure out why so many people kept offering me red wine in the middle of the day until, after a long day of class, I eagerly accepted... only to be disillusioned when my colleague returned with a tiny cup of black coffee. 

Flying a kite is harder than it looks. 

The conversational question, “If you were a type of food what would you be and why?” is fertile ground for all kinds of sexual innuendoes in a classroom of 20-somethings. 

Going to a free music festival is less about seeing the bands and more about experiencing the sweating breathing whirlpool pit of Salsa aficionados.  I pretended to be annoyed at the people attempting to traverse the crowd, shoving through the sardine-packed masses, but I secretly liked the silly sensation of being jostled around like a human sock in a giant washing machine. 

Pedestrians do not have the right of way.

Always wait if you can’t initially get the lid off the pressure cooker.  The faint smell of what I mistakenly took for burning plastic caused a minor panic that the lid seal had melted to the pot of our boiling beans.  When we (my roommate Pauline and I) couldn’t open it, we resorted to desperate measures.  In a valiant effort to rescue our hard-labored meal from imprisonment, Pauline set the pot on the floor and curb stomped the lid like a Chicago thug knocking someone's teeth out.  Hear: shotgun fired at close range.  Picture: Pauline standing up against the wall spattered from head to toe in a bath of steaming exploded red beans that looks like dragon vomit. 

“You learn something new every day” is an understatement.