Romancing the Cone

I haven't posted for a while for a very good reason:

Nick+me+beach=amazeballs

My boyfriend Nick Ramsey joined me in Colombia for a week and we had an absolutely brilliant time together. First stop: Cartagena. We stayed at a very swanky hotel/spa called Karmairi that is on the beach about half an hour out of town. But our good friend Julia and her husband Elkin were staying in the old city so we spent plenty of time in there too. Cartagena is rightly considered one of the most beautiful cities in Colombia. The old town, with its balconies and colonial buildings, is incredibly picturesque.

Cartagena

It's surrounded by a wall, parts of which date back to the 16th century after Sir Francis Drake pillaged the city (sorry about that). On the upside, the wall makes a great place to watch the sunset.

enjoying sunset on the wall

Just outside the city, we visited the Volcan de Totumo, a volcano that oozes mud rather than lava. You climb up a rickety pair of stairs, then lower yourself INTO the volcano, then local villagers rub mud all over you. The mud is really thick and it makes you incredibly buoyant, so much so that we all had difficulty staying vertical rather than horizontal. Afterwards, you climb back down some even more rickety stairs and wash off in a nearby lake. It was a very strange and totally awesome experience, even though we were still picking mud out of our ears for days!

the muddy four of us (plus some weird photo bomber in the back)

The next day, we all hopped on a boat to Playa Blanca, a gorgeous white sand beach about an hour away from Cartagena. We snorkeled, and ate a delicious fresh fish lunch, and cavorted in the sand. The only downside was the constant haranguing from local hawkers. Every two minutes, someone came up to ask if we wanted a drink, or a tchotchke, or some shellfish, or a massage. And the massage-hawkers would start rubbing my shoulders even as I was repeating "no, gracias" ad infinitum. Coming from the respect-my-personal-space capital of New York, I found it doubly weird. But those annoyances were pretty minor compared to the pleasures of the beach.

living it up on playa blanca

Not so minor? The sunburn that afflicted both of us. More on that in a moment. Fortunately we headed to Colombia's capital, Bogota, and Bogota is kinda like London. Very cosmopolitan, and very cloudy. We literally chilled out there, poodling around the colonial Candelaria district, taking a cable car to the top of Monserrate for a great view of the city, and eating delicious local tamales at La Puerta Falsa, surrounded by nuns!

Nick & the nuns

For our final night, something far more irreligious. We travelled about an hour out of Bogota to a town called Chia and an insane restaurant/dance club/madhouse called Andres Carne de Res.

this menu had nearly 100 pages

The place is HUGE, every square inch is covered in cherubs and art works and metal sculptures, the waiters all wear abattoir aprons and there are performance artists wandering the hallways.

Andres Carne de Res

After gorging ourselves on steak, and blood sausage, and chicken, and bacon, we were in no shape to hit the dance floor, but that didn't stop us people-watching until the wee hours of the morning. I've never seen anything like this place, and I cannot recommend it enough.

2am at Andres Carne de Res

One final note on Bogota, and the aforementioned sunburn. Nick's back was still pretty raw by the time he needed to fly back to New York. So I went to the local drogeria to find some ointment and some gauze to mitigate the pain. As I was asking the pharmacist, in my terrible spanish, what would work best for sunburn, another customer stopped me, and pulled out her phone. She handed it to me and I found myself talking to her son Juan, who speaks English. After explaining what I needed, he offered to come down to the drugstore and help me in person. While we were waiting for him, the nice lady pulled out her phone AGAIN, and put me on the line with her daughter, Silvia, an english-speaking doctor at one of the best hospitals in Bogota. Silvia offered to look at Nick free of charge, and to prescribe whatever might be needed. Then Juan arrived and for the next twenty minutes, he translated between the pharmacist and myself, and sent me on my way armed with everything I needed and more.

Much like the bus station in Venezuela, I neither asked nor expected anyone except maybe the pharmacist to help me. And yet a stranger calls her children for me. One of them physically leaves his apartment to come help me and another one offers free medical care for my boyfriend. Nick didn't need or want to go to the hospital but if he DID, I had a doctor on standby. As it was, the gauze and ointment worked wonderfully and Nick made it back home to New York pain-free. All thanks to three strangers. Once again, I am so humbled, that words literally fail me.

Bogota