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.
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.
