It's hard to say chau

I've been saying a lot of goodbyes lately and they haven't gotten any easier. This last set in Medellin were especially hard. Gabriel made me promise to stay in touch via e-mail and we trading some parting gifts. He gave me a CD of Colombian music and I gave him a US Dollar, which he seemed to be quite thrilled by.

Martha and I decided to say our goodbyes over a 1/2 litre of Ron Medellin de 3 Anos. I'm not sure if that made it harder or easier, but it was damn hard. Martha told me no matter if I find another girlfriend in Cuba or Rio or Seattle, just make sure I never forget about our time together. I assured her that wasn't possible.

Truth of the matter is I've spent my life running away from everyone I've ever loved and who's ever loved me. It's not that I've ever made a concious decision to do that, it's just I can't imagine any other alternative. I wonder if I'll ever made it back to Medellin?

Is it time to panic yet?

Colombia has been great. I´ll definatley be sad to leave this place. The people, the natural beauty, how cheap stuff is and oh by the way, did I mention the gorgeous women? But wednesday morning off to Havana it is. That´s where my problems start.

Dear reader, as you are no doubt aware, Cuba has severly strained relations with the United States for the last 40 years or so. That means, no banks, no ATMs, no credit cards, nothing. Basically Bill told me, bring a butt-load of cash with you, because if you run out while you´re in Cuba, you´re outta luck.

Ok, so I´m in Colombia...how do I get my hands on a couple thousand US dollars. Well I´ll just have my bank wire me the money, no biggie right? Uh...turns out international wire transfers take anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks to complete and no one seems to be able to tell me exactly how long. That´s a problem because like always I waited till about a week advance to even start thinking about this.

My ATM card has a $300 per day limit on withdrawals. You know, I knew that would come back to screw me one of these days. And yes I can have them up the limit, I just need to fax over a form they send me with my signature, and wait until it´s processed. Nope that doesn´t help either.

Well I´ve seen the commercials and so have you. I´ll use Money Gram to wire money out of my bank account and into my grubby little hands. Crap, turns out neither they nor Western Union will process internet transactions intiated from outside one of their list of approved countries, and amazingly enough Colombia isn´t on that list.

So when you´re in times of trouble who do you call? Dad!?!? I need help, send money! Remember when I was 9 and you bought Rahil ¨Thriller¨on vinyl but wouldn´t buy me that cool red and black leather jacket with all the zippers. Yeah, neither do I. Love you, Kashif.

I love this country!

Yesterday I decided I wanted to see ¨The Chronicles of Narnia¨so I went over to the local Carefour. Think Wal-Mart on steroids. A huge retail store, food court, random other stores, heck they even have a Mazda dealership on site!

Unfortunately the version they were showing was the Spanish language dubbed one. Most places show the English movies with subtitles. Oh well...I could have struggled through it but instead I went shopping.

I needed some more toothpaste so I bought a tube for 1,000 pesos (about $0.50). Then I decided I was long due for a haircut, so I stopped into the salon. I got one of the better haircuts I´ve ever had, included a shampoo, a shave, the dude even trimmed my eyebrows and ears (ok, that might have been too much information but that ear-hair is really freaking me out!) Ran me 12,000 pesos (about $5). And of course you don´t tip for services in this country, excellent service is just expected.

By that time I was hungry. Of to the food court it was. I stopped at the parrilla and ordered a medium rare T-Bone and a 1/2 bottle of Chilean Cab, both of which were quite excellent. Cost about 20,000 pesos ($10). I do love 3rd-World exchange rates. I just can´t wait to get to Argentina to really take advantage of the still-somewhat strong US dollar.

I get by with a little help from my friends

Gabriel has turned out to be a Class-A good guy. We´ve been spending a lot of time hanging out at this families tienda. Me looking stupid while he waits on customers. He keeps feeding me juices and beer and cigarettes despite all my protestations and offers to pay. He did let me give him 5,000 pesos (about $2) because his bill for his eyeglasses was more than he expected.

He invited me out to his families finca for the holidays to celebrate with them, but of course I had other plans. And he calls me to check up on me and see what´s what. Yes still very stalker-like, but I think that´s just his overbearing personality. Martha abhors him, but mostly because I think she´s jealous. Colombian women are like that from what I´ve been able to gather.

But for some reason I´m still kinda cautious. I´ve been telling him how I wanted a Medellin National jersey for a while. So he found a friend and got me a deal on a knock-off jersey. Well at least he said it was a deal, I´d have absolutely no way to know. I´m sure there´s a happy middle ground between paranoid and naive, but I have no idea where it is. Neither one of them seem like something I´d like to be. But I think most of us have to lean to one side or another in this world.

Spanish is the Loving-Tongue

Spanish is a beautiful language. At least I think it is, seeing as I still don´t have a thorough grasp of it. I actually think being ambigiously ethnic like I am makes it a little more difficult for me. I´ve had lots of Colombians assume I was latino of some kind and therefore should have a grasp on the language. So they just start launching into their 1000 word a minute Spanish. A couple people even even stopped me on the streat to ask for directions. I tried to help one guy and he just started laughing and walked away. My white gringo friends have no such problem. No one is going to mistake them for anything but rich tourists from the US.

But all the damn conjugations! Someone told me (and for all I know it could be true) that there are 509 seperate regular verb conjugations in Spanish to memorize, and then you go on to the irregular verbs. English as a contrast has 9. Sure English has lots of exceptions to memorize, but you can get your point across without knowing all those.

All those verb conjugations in different tenses mean that the usage of nouns is almost optional in this language. So when you´re talking with a local, unless you know and can recall all the conjugations rapidly your chances of figuring out what´s going on are slim. Sure I can identify the verb, but who the hell knows who is the noun of the sentance and what the objects are.

Then there´s the whole thing with the two seperate past tenses. I´m continually mixing up when I´m supposed to use the imperfect and the preterite. And whenever I ask someone why they used one instead of the other the answer is always...¨becuase it sounds funny otherwise¨ Gee thanks, that helps.

I guess the great benefit is that the Spanish language lets you convey complex ideas with only a few words. It really is far more poetic than English (at least I think it is). And I especially love how you can form new words by sticking direct and indirect objects onto verbs. Vamanos!

And the diminutive is pretty damn cool. Just by adding an -ita or -ito to a word changes the entire meaning. Right now becomes soon, a friend becomes an acquintance and a meal becomes a snack. Plus who doesn´t love being refered to as ¨mi papito¨?

My goal was to be fluent by time the my voyage was over. But now I don´t know if that´s going to happen. Learning a language is hard and I haven´t actually been studying at all like I thought I would. But I´ve been talking to everyone who will take the time to listen (and boy does it take time!). And I don´t even want to think about trying to learn Portugese in the month that I´ll be in Brazil. Maybe just enough to get by.