Week two and three in Ibagué

Monday morning of the first working week Jeroen and I went to a conference with the mayor. Sebas and Marie-Laure didn’t come because he had to work and she was –still- ill because she drank tap water on Thursday. I really had to concentrate to understand but I did understand quite a bit. People from the press took a picture of us –a few of the IAESTE people- with the mayor and his wife and a after that the mayor gave us his card and talked to every one of us. It struck me again how everything is so informal! At the hostel last Sunday in Medellin the woman of the hostel hugged us goodbye!

In the afternoon our - Jeroen and me- classes started. It is a two week course about restoration. Because the teacher is Italian, she speaks really slow and clear Spanish, unlike all the Colombians here. So I understood a lot! We’re with about 25-30 people in our class and they’re really nice!
 We visited the train station of Picaleña with the class to see our case study. It was beautiful but it was a ruin. About 4 families live there and they were refugees of another part of Colombia. It was really dangerous to live there; I was allowed on the first floor and I was actually afraid that I would fall through the floor!
The class was split up in four groups and each group investigated something else: materials, drawings, social context and history.

 


















That weekend was a quiet one; we visited Ibagué, did shopping and Sunday was a baby shower in our house. Not a baby of one of us, it was the baby shower of the daughter of Doña Marleny, our land lady. There were chairs throughout the whole street and you could hear the music two blocks further. There was one man who was fantastic; a small black man about 70 years old, big belly, a hat,… He danced the whole evening! And really good!
Week two of the course we worked in our groups and got ready for the presentation of Friday. The presentation was really nice and formal. After the presentation we – the whole class- went for a drink.

The weekend after that was three days because Monday was a holiday. We had an extra day off! (Well, we don’t really have that many days “on” so.. ) Friday we went with the whole group of IAESTE – an international organization – to a club of someone’s sister. And Saturday we went with the same group on a chiva and after that to Tereque, a famous bar in Ibagué. A chiva is a bus with less chairs than normal and with loud music. So while the bus is driving, everybody is partying. A nice experience, but I prefer a club that doesn’t move!

During the day – Saturday – there was an international meeting with presentations from different nationalities and a couple of little concerts and traditional dances.
Sunday we went to see the waterfalls of Payandé. Beautiful. Extremely hot, but the water was cold, so perfect combination. We were with a lot of nationalities; from Colombia, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Mexico, Portugal, Poland, China, …
Funny was that there were a couple of people wanted to take pictures of me and Marie-Laure. Our fifteen minutes of fame!

The week after that was a calm week; Jeroen and I are making a book; A kind of report of the two weeks and our reflections of it. I’m reading the book of our teacher, but it’s going very slowly because it is in Spanish. But I will succeed..

Our house and neighborhood

Our little red house in the little street

Our view when we go to school (here it's a bit clowdy)

Other views of Onzaga

Our first week in Ibagué and our trip to Medellin

Iiiieuw, monday morning I had a cockroach in my bedroom! It lay on his back, so I was planning to keep him there till he died, but then Sebastian – my German ‘roommate’ – killed him and threw him in the toilet. I told this to Jessica and she started laughing; I wasn’t dead or didn’t break a leg, so what was the problem?!

We – Sebastian, Marie-Laure and me – visited Ibagué centre for the first time, with our new guide Yesica. Ibagué is told to be a small town but there are about 600 000 inhabitants!
There was a music school with the ‘Music Park’ in front of it. We just arrived at the ‘park’ and two people invited us for coffee! As a Belgian I was thinking “  What do they want?”, but they just wanted to give us coffee! The two guys had a tiny café next to the Conservatory where people could ask information about Ibagué. Before we left, they asked us to write something in our language. We wrote the same sentence in Dutch, French, English, German and Afrikaans (Sebastian has lived there). Normally they’re going to paint it on the walls! Well, we can go and check up with them in a few weeks.

There were very funny traffic lights for the pedestrians; you could see how many seconds there were left if you wanted to cross the street. If you had less than 10 seconds, the green man started running! :D
The whole week we discovered new things of Ibagué. One of the first things I discovered was that eating out was cheaper than cooking yourself! The first day we ate ate at home and cooked spaghetti. Marlena and Yesica also ate the spaghetti but found it very strange that there were carrots in it and that we didn’t use cream.

Because Felipe’s family invited us to the swimming pool on Sunday, we thought we’d do something in return. So Marie-Laure and I went out to buy eggs and chocolate for chocolate mousse. We only found one kind of chocolate and we bought the eggs at Yesica’s parents’ shop. Suddenly ew had a problem with the eggs –the mixer was too fast- and the chocolate started getting hard again! So we bought an other 20 eggs –yes, 20, it was for 20 people- and started pouring milk with the chocolate. The result wasn’t that good but everybody ate everything. I hope it was because they liked it and not because of good manners!
We did have a lot of chocolate sauce which we ate with crackers, really good!
And we’re now sick of the thought of eating egg, because we had an omelet with about 20 egg yokes. Divided by three but nevertheless; it could kill somebody!

Marie-Laure and I also went to the university a couple of times to get to know the peole and our project. The director of the architecture department drove us to the places where our 'case studies' were. He is really friendly! As always here in Colombia, it was really informal. 

The weather here is mostly very good- about 25°C average- but it has been raining a lot lately.
Thursday we met a lot of other IAESTE students – the organization which we’re here for. There were people of Germany, Colombia, Jamaica, England,…

Friday evening we left with a group of IAESTE people to Medellin. The bus was really comfortable but it was ice cold! The weather outside wasn’t that good either;  there was a storm!
At 6 in the morning we arrived safely. We checked in in our hostel, took a little nap, and left for the city center.

We saw a couple of plaza’s and took a few cable lifts where we saw the slums.
As in Ibagué, the rich people live uphill while the poor live closer to the river.
We thought we’d see flowers because it was Feria del Flores but apparently all the farmers come to Medellin with their flowers and at the end of the feria, they all walk in a big parade.
We did see hundreds of horses because there was a horse parade. Of course we bought ‘sombrero’s’!
At night we went to the zona Rosa, the ‘party neighborhood’. It was extremely crowded because of the Feria!

Sunday morning we headed back to Ibagué with one extra passenger; Jeroen, an other Belgian –also of Sint-Lucas- who’s also going to live in our house.