If you think the writing on here is funny, check out the website Lewis runs: www.pittifulnews.com

The Pittiful News is like The Onion for Pitt, a weekly satirical newspaper.

This is the mud volcano. It was muddy. And kind of crowded. I touched a lot of bodies that I didn´t mean to. After we got massaged by some natives inside the mud, some native women washed us in a lake. They tried to pull down our pants, i sort of stopped them. I wish I didn´t.


After the mud, we went to Taganga and went fishing. I harpooned this one. And tried to eat it right away because I was so excited. Ryan caught a couple fish with a fishing line. Literally just a fishing line. They made us pull the line in with our bare hands. I felt like we were in Old Man and the Sea. Ryan was the only one who caught one this way. I was the only one who harpooned one. Which way is manlier? For you to decide.


This was our fishing guide, Leondardo. I think that was his name. He caught a lot more fish than we did. He was a mer-man. Seriously. Without any fins, he could dive 30 feet to the bottom of the sea floor, while carrying a 10 pound harpoon in one hand, seek out the largest fish within 10 meters, and kill it. I couldn´t dive down more than 5 feet or so. Neither could the Dutch guys that were with us. Leonardo must have had magical swimming powers. He kind of looked like Mario effortlessly swimming in Mario 64. I think he caught about 10 fish or so. Above he is showing us how to gut and fillet what we caught. Ryan´s two fish are the pinkish ones in the foreground. We cooked them ourselves that afternoon, they were delicious!


Then we went to a huge national park called Tayrona. We hiked in a few hours through a sweaty jungle full of monkeys, and mosquitoes ready to infect us with Malaria and Yellow Fever. But in the end we got to see some awesome beaches. I really liked it here (even though Lewis said it was boring) because I could swim, sleep, play, climb, and go on adventures all day long. Below is me on a big rock. I did a triple somersault into the water right after this was taken.



These two girls are ´the kates´ both of them are named Kate. One is from the UK the other is Australian, but they both seem Australian. We ran into them multiple times throughout our trip and spent the whole time in Tayrona with them. This was our departing photo. It was very sad to see them go. They were awesome.


Then we went to San Gil, a small town in between the northern coast and Bogota. The first day we went white water rafting, which we don´t have any pictures of. But it was awesome. The next day we went rappelling down a 180 meter water fall.

That´s me up near the top in the green shirt and that´s Lewis half way down in the white shirt. Ryan had finished already and is taking the picture.

Exhilerating! w00t!




But our journey is now over. We are getting ready to fly away from this tropical hideout this afternoon. There are many more stories and photos to see, so find us and we will be happy to share!

After rappelling down the waterfall, we headed back into San Gil and caught the bus to Bogota. It was the first leg of the long journey home. Also, Ryan, Neil and I have been turned into two dogs and a cat. Here we are in front of the waterfall.

The bus service we used to get to bogota was Concorde. We chose Concorde for two reasons: one, their motto was "Always on time!" Two, the man at the desk kept yelling that they have buses gigantes. I don't know why this persuaded us, since both saying "Always on time" and saying "buses gigantes!" are costless and unverifiable signals. Any equilibirum where they are persuasive is unsustainable, because every single carrier can make unverifiable and costless claims so that then no information is conveyed by any single carrier doing it. As it turned out, the equilbirium is especially unsustainable, because Concorde is not freaking on time. They were an hour late getting to san gil, and then the trip took an hour and a half longer than it was supposed to. We didn't get into bogota until 130 AM.

Today we haded out. We're going to spend tonight in Brooklyn and then take a bus to philadelphia and drive to pittsburgh tomorrow.

Yesterday, we took a cab to a place where there was a bus. We took the bus to an old farm in the middle of the country. We asked a lady at the farm to locate a trail for us. And then we hiked the trail almost straight vertically for about 40 minutes. At the end was...a magnificent waterfall!

Two or three Colombian dudes offer a rappelling service where you literally just rappell over the side of the waterfall. As you descend the 180 meters, the water pounds down on your head like pennies someone keeps throwing down. The side is extremely slipery but there's lots of crevice to put your feet. I was scared as shit, needless to say, but I pulled it off. The hardest part of rappelling is the very start, when you have to fight every instinct and lean backwards off the side of a cliff. I made it a point to not look down until like a third of the way down.

Once I was going down, I noticed that my rope had periodic bundles of electrical tape to cover up frays. This would never fly in the states, but oh well, I made it.

Tonight we played a board game called The Settlers of Catan. It was named the best board game in Germany, apparently. A German man named Phillip taught us the rules. I lost. But I had the ´longest road´for a long time. I think this game might be nerdy but I´m not really sure. Phillip also went white water rafting with us today. He sat behind me on the raft. Our rafting guide, Nestor, brought me back to Russia but saying "it is possible" before every sentence. It was possible for us to swim. It was possible for us to fall out of the boat. It was possible for us to pretty much do everything. None of us fell out of the boat though, Lewis was pretty close, but Phillip grabbed him. I swallowed a lot of water. It tasted like dirt. Phillip had a hot fiance named Franzi. She was German too. And about 6 feet tall. She was a doctor and he was a lawyer. How romantic.

Before I go any further, here is an awesome article by Paul Krugman--the world's greatest writing and researching economist--on why food in England used to be awful...

Somehow the same thing has happened to Colombia. Colombia has awful food. I don't mean that good food can't be had here, of course--Colombia, after all, is a place where almost anything pleasurable that you put into your body can be had. I mean that the typical, day-to-day food of Colombia tastes a lot worse than the typical food of any other place I´ve ever been to or heard about.

In the life of the university, you will meet tons of people whose main goal in life is to show that everyone is equal in every way. There's a little of that in all of us, and I can feel it clammoring inside of me "Who are you to carry your imperialist, white male standards afar to these simple jungle folk?!"

In my defense, I call to the stand my principle witness...the empanada!

Here is the empanada in his natural habitat--Argentina:



Here is the changeling that masquareades as the empanada here in Colombia:



The Colombian varietal, as you can see, is fried in a thick, yellow batter. If the military put empanadas in MRI kits, it might taste better than the empanada that a Colombian makes even with time and talent at his leisure.

The empanada isn't all. It's merely a symbol for the atrocities that go on in kitchens across Colombia. The bread is not very good. Lots of the food is fried, but not in the endearing Southern way. In fact, the best way to understand it is to imagine an Old Country Buffet, but with a smaller selection and you can't get very much food at one time.

I call my final witness. This is a food Colombians are very proud of and that comes with lots of dishes all the time. Take the stand, Mr. Arepa!

How do I explain the arepa? How do Colombians explain away the arepa?!

Have you ever been eating cornbread, and thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if this cornbread were completely flattened, and flavorless?" Probably you have never thought this, but at some point a Colombian did and the idea spread like wildfire across this land of emeralds and beautiful women.

At first when I got the arepa, I assumed there had been some mistake. When I saw Neil and Ryan got the same thing, I thought someone must be mad at us. Fine, we'll take our business elsewhere, I thought. But little did I suspect the arepa was lurking as a sidedish in every corner of Colombia. It literally has no flavor, and it has a crumbly texture. You might think, "Fine, but I bet they put stuff on it. Right there in the picture is a piece of good'looking cheese." Not so. I don't know what kind of cheese it is, or why the recipe is widely known, but it is also crumbly and tasteless. That crappy colombian cheese on an arepa is the blind leading the blind.

Today we sucked it up, dropped 60 dollars a piece, and went whitewater rafting on the river suarez. It was a lot of money, and ryan and i were bitching and moaning over the loss of our precious plata beforehand, but this australian guy heard us and said we were crazy to miss it. He was right.

The rapids were huge. Class 5 on a scale of 1 to 6. In our party were a pair of beautiful Germans, of whom one was a lawyer and the other a doctor, who were shortly to be married and no doubt perpetuate the master subset of the master race of which they form the core. A few times, we thought we would fall out of the boat, but everything stayed on an even keel (pun intended) and were made it out safely after about two hours. My favorite part was actually when we just stopped the raft and ate mangoes, cheese, and pork rines.

We didn't take any pictures, because the river was covered in water, and we were in the river, with the water there, too.