we accidentally got a bus to Jurassic Park the other day. Though they claimed it was called Salento. I´m still suspìcious. That´s why we hi-tailed it out of there after only one day. We got in a good 2 hour horse ride though first. I think I want to be a cowboy now. It´s the most efficient way to escape dinosaurs I think. Not sure why Spielberg didn´t think of that. Horses have the best endurance out of any animal in the world. My horse´s name was Tango. He was eight years old and even though he was coming to the end of his life time, he was a good horse. He turned left when I said turn left and turned right when I said turn right. He stopped when I said stop. He trotted when I said trot. He even galloped. God bless Tango. I miss her. Have you ever galloped on a horse? It was my first time. I almost fell off a few times, but it was a blast. I refused to hold on with two hands, I wanted to ride like the cowboys. The Colombian cowboys.
So I told you that I´d update you on my brief relationship in Colombia. Her name was Luisa. Still is I imagine. At any rate, we met her on the Turibus, a bus that took us around Medellin to see all the most popular tourist sites. It was a purple hair affair, as the aussies say, or something like that. We saw the beautiful Colombian, by herself, on this Turibus, happy as can be. She heard us tell another person we were from estados unidos and she perked up and repeated, ahh estados unidos? Yep, I said. She spoke some English, better than my Spanish, so I was all over that. Not many Medellin locals voluntarily speak English. You´d think they were French.
She was traveling through the city by herself on her way back home to Bogota. She was very very pretty. Gorgeous perhaps. I had a couple photos taken with her but they are on Ryan´s camera which can´t be connected to a computer here. So I googled colombian girl and she actually looked pretty close to this:
Only half Indian, which I found out later, and just as many curves. I invited her to sit with me on the bus and drilled her with questions in my western PA accent, probably just confusing her. I made her translate the tour to me. She tried her hardest, God bless her. At each stop she´d get out and a man for Turibus would take about 20 pictures of her posing in front of things. Monuments, sun dials, palms, flowers, Botero sculptures (those god awful things they manage to put everywhere). I thought the man was a pervert. But she told me she was going to buy a CD of all the pictures later. I thought that was hilarious.
At about the 4th stop of the tour and about an hour into it all, she spotted an ad for watermelon and started mumbling how good it looked, but in Spanish so I presumed that´s what she was saying. I said, yeah that looks really good, the fruit here is amazing. Yes yes, she said in her thick accent, let´s look. So i followed her over to the watermellon. Luisa stood at about 5´9" I guess, very curving as i said before. Her rear was at the very least twice maybe three times as wide as mine. So the image of us walking together must have been more comical than I realized at the time. But I didn´t care of course.
We get to the watermellon place and it turns out they sold ice cream too. mmm! she said, that looks good. Yeah, that looks pretty good, I responded. She started jabbering in Spanish to the lady behind the counter. Then she started pointing at fruits. Then the fruits started going into a big bowl. Then ice cream. Then chocolate. Then more toppings. It was huge. Wow are you going to eat all of that? i asked. She said something in Spanish, forgetting that I wouldn´t understand. The lady behind the counter then looked at me and said a number. I looked at Luisa. Luisa looked at me. I looked at the lady behind the counter. What? i muttered. Luisa then said, 7500 pesos. What the hell, i thought. Am I on a date? What is this?! How did I end up on a date on a freaking Turibus. Whatever, i thought, and pulled out a wad of crumpled up bills. I smacked them on the counter like any gringo would. I only had about 3000. Luisa asked me, how much do you need. I don´t know, I can hardly even read these bills, i muttered again annoyingly. She pulled out a large billfold full of cash, crisp and clean. She obviously has been doing well for herself. I burned inside. Luisa covered the rest of the bill and we ate the ice cream together. It was damn good. I´m glad she got it.
So our Turibus date continued for another hour or so, a flirtatious affair, knocking knees as they say (do they say that? i think i made that one up), but really, literally knocking knees on the bus, laughing like an oblivious gringo. And at the end she wanted to continue our date into the evening. We went to a cathedral and then for some beers and dinner at an outdoor cafe. Ryan and Lewis came along of course, so not such an exclusive date as you may think. But I (we) did find out a lot about her. She was 28 (much older than she looked I thought), was divorced, and had a son. She was a clinical psychologist and studied English for only 1 year. At one point in the night I felt like I was her psychologist, or psychiatrist. She went on and on about her ex husband, about her ex boyfriend now stalking her in Medellin, and about love and all these life lessons that she has learned since being a beauty queen. Oh yeah, she was an ex beauty queen. That´s how she met her husband, who she said, was not a handsome man but gave her lots of things and that´s why she married him. This type of thing happens a lot to Colombians, she confirmed. The downfall of the Colombian beauty queen. It doesn´t always happen that way. Some of the most prominent female figures in Colombian politics are former beauty queens. Weird? Maybe. But LonelyPlanet said it´s not much weirder than The Terminator being Governor of California. I would agree.
Luisa was supposed to leave at 10pm for Bogota that night, but we convinced her to stay another night and go out with us. She was excited to show us Colombian night life and hurried off to her hotel to get ready. She said that she´d meet us at 9pm in front of our hostel. I showered and put on all my best clothes. 9:00 came, then 9:15, and 9:30 but no Luisa. We walked down the block to her hotel. We saw a silhouette of a couple on the roof terrace. A man and a curvy Colombiana. It was her. They were sipping drinks comfortably. It was her ex boyfriend. I was sure. They looked down at us. She saw us but didn´t move, just went back to sipping her drink. Or it could have been a ice cream. I couldn´t tell from where I stood. It could have just as easily been a big bowl of ice cream topped with fruit, chocolate, nuts, berries, and a thousand other toppings. He must have had enough pesos to pay for the desert in full, however. She didn´t need my crumpled gringo pesos anymore.
My (our) Colombian relationship was over.
love can be tough, neil. thanks for sharing your story. it helps the healing process.