This will be the final post in my Colombia series. There will be no real connection between all these little blurbs, and it will irritate me that I can’t organize it, but I’ll have to get over that. These facts I’ll be sharing are relevant only to the areas we worked in, unless noted otherwise.
Ice cream is huge there. Almost every little store that sells food (and some that don’t) sells ice cream. In the mall, you can stand in any given place and spot at least one ice cream place. At the bigger mall, you can always spot at least two. And it’s good ice cream, too.
The garbage trucks and not the ice cream trucks play the music we associate with ice cream here in the U.S.
There are two ways to rank the affluence of a person by their home: their roof and their walls. Very well-off people have concrete roofs. Everyone else has corrugated metal. Fiberglass panels with the metal serve as sky lights in nicer houses. Bolts hold the roof tight in better houses, while bricks and rocks serve the purpose in worse houses. The best houses are made of bricks covered in concrete and painted bright colors. Minus colors is worse, then minus the concrete layer, and the worst is a house made of boards or corrugated metal tacked and tied together with tarps over the gaps.
Black coffee is sometimes referred to as “la tinta,” which literally means ink.
The most commonly eaten meats are chicken and beef.
Complex carbs are responsible for most of their diet. Potatoes, plantains, yucca, and rice are the most common, but pasta can also be found.
Fruit typically comes from street vendors who bring in their goods from their farms every day in trucks that we would consider valuable antiques.
Their hot chocolate is stronger and a touch more bitter than ours. I like it a lot more.
When they make fruit juice, they take the fruit, remove leaves or stems, stick it in a blender, add a bit of water, and blend it all up. It adds a whole new dimension of texture to your juice experience.
There are stray dogs all over the place. You can walk one block and see a dozen. They ignore you if you ignore them. From what I can tell, they live off of garbage and the occasional rat. At night they like to bark endlessly.
At church they have a few customary question and response things they use at the beginning of a service or whenever they need to get people's attention. It goes like this: "Que vive?" "Christo!" "Y su nombre es?" "Gloria!" It translates to this: "Who lives?" "Christ!" "And what is his name?" "Glorious!" It's neat to hear everyone shout the answers.
The day starts when the sun comes up. At 5:30 am there are already people up and about, mariachi music playing from windows, and stores open.
Few people have cars, but the ones who do drive aggressively. As do the motorcycles, taxis, buses, and trucks. Traffic is insane down there. Only the brave can manage to get anywhere.
Nobody has room for a garden, but house plants are popular, especially geraniums.
When someone can afford to paint their house, they use bright colors and patterns. Most of the patterns feature diamonds, sometimes with circles.
All doors and windows have metal gratings to reduce theft. These gratings come in all sort of designs and patterns from rectangles to rays to flowers. They add charm to any home.
Their Coke is made with cane sugar and is therefore superior in taste to American Coke. Even I, who am not well acquainted with any sort of pop, recognized this.
Chickens roam the city, like the dogs, but in lesser quantities. They can be found on roofs, unlike the dogs, and are noisy in the morning rather than at night.
It is common for friends, especially females, to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek.
When you say hello at church, "Dios bendiga" is the key phrase. It means "God bless you."
