It’s a Sign

I saw a sign today that said on the first of June, Cartagena had it’s 491^st Birthday. That even makes me feel young. It has a great walled city. There’s something about walled cities that I find interesting. Maybe I worked on a few in previous lives. Through wars, invasions, population explosions and probably lack of maintenance the wall is no longer totally complete, But there’s more than enough of it encircling the old city to make it feel like you’re totally enclosed. You can walk along the wall for almost an hour so it’s a big area.

I sometimes think that it would have been nice to visit walled cities back when they were built but the reality is that the are probably no different now. A hive of activity with people from all over the place. Buying. Selling. Looking. Although I imagine the hygiene and law and order now are a lot more suited to my current standards. There’s probably some unbroken linage of street vendors and beggars and prostitutes dating back centuries. Like millions of people before me I have come here looking to learn a skill and buy something and to see what all the fuss is about.

Firstly, the skill. I want to be able to speak Spanish and I was sure that they’d have schools here. Obviously, I could have googled that before I came. But I didn’t, but as luck, and business savvy would have it, there are a couple of schools here, But. And it’s sort of a big but. The northern coast of Colombia is part of the Caribbean (having lived there for six months on boats in the 80’s you think I would have known this). The Caribbean Sea was really a dead end until they made the Panama Canal. And there is a big Caribbean influence here. So the locals have a Caribbean accent. And they speak really quickly. So picture Bob Marley speaking Spanish on YouTube set at double speed.

I’m here now so I’ll learn what I can and hopefully when I leave Cartagena I’ll find the spanish much slower and easier to understand. I signed up to the language school Centro Catalina for a week. It includes 4 hours of lessons a day plus an afternoon or evening excursion out on the streets. With the initial level test and set up fees, the first week was about $430. They have an energetic bunch of young people teaching Spanish and I’m quite enjoying it and learning some Spanish and a bit more about Colombia. Probably one of the things I have noticed most is their lack of what we would call personal space. It’s more of a personal overlap. They are always hugging, hanging off each other or dancing together. The Music, It’s everywhere. No headphones. Just crank up your big speaker. So many people have them. They are big and loud but fortunately the music is sort of nice. A mix of Spanish and Caribbean so I feel my life here has a nice musical soundtrack. This week I did a bicycle tour and a tropical fruit tasting as a couple of my school excursions. I have 4 classmates from around the world.

Secondly, I came to buy something. I want to buy a motorbike. It’s called a motocicleta in spanish and fortunately they just say moto. So I started scouring all the moto shops and quickly discovered that all the motos here are quite small. In fact I couldn’t find anything over 200cc. I was initially thinking of getting a Honda 300. Strangely enough there are Honda 300’s are all over the city but they are all bright lime green and usually have a policeman on the front and a policewoman on the back. The shops can order me one online but I’d really like to sit on one and see if it feels right. To do that I’m going have to go up the coast a couple of hours to Barranquilla or fly over to Medellin (which has a big moto culture). So at the minute the bike thing is a bit disheartening. I’m also wondering if I’m a bit scared about the whole idea.

And thirdly. The fuss. Cartagena is definitely a busy touristy hotspot. Strangely though, I don’t come across many tourists like me. The beaches are lined with sky scaping hotels and apartments and the beaches and streets full of people but they all seem to be speaking spanish. I do hear the odd person speak english as I wander around but it’s definitely the exception not the norm. I think they are from the big Colombian cities like Bogota (8 Million), Cali (2.5 Million) and Medellin (2.5 Million) which have big populations but located in higher regions with colder climates. Colombia has a population of over 52 million so it’s got twice as many people as Australia. And lots of neighbouring spanish speaking countries. And it’s also a popular destination for the Spanish from Spain. I should also mention that the skyscrapers are outside the walled city and are along the beachfront to the north and south.

I don’t know where to add this bit but here will do. As I walk along the outside of the city walls to the entrance to the city each morning, I’m always distracted to thinking about what it would have been like way back then with the invaders and armadas and the conquistadors and the pirates. I’m always thinking of ways that I could penetrate the wall. It would have been a tough life. While I’m busy dodging taxis and motos and buses and street vendors, back then they were probably dodging vats of boiling oil and excrement and rocks and arrows and bullets and cannonballs. Although in more peaceful times it also would have been exciting as a peasant farmer to travel to a huge walled city like Cartagena.