Medellin: Salpicon and Sunshine

Hola amigos! We are writing you now from Medellin, the third city on our national tour of Colombia. We are actually leaving Medellin tonight (our first overnight bus) for San Gil y Barichara, so we thought we would update you all on what we've been doing here. So, Medellin, a city of 2.5 million people that historically is known for the drug violence in the 1980s. Let us begin by saying that Medellin is no longer the city that it was in the 80s. It is a beautiful place, the people are wonderful, and the city felt very safe This has been our longest stay so far (a whole 6 days!), and we've really enjoyed it here. First and foremost, we had wonderful hosts. We stayed at the home of Jessica Sarriot, an MCC SEEDer here in Medellin, and her roommate Dhira. While Jessica was only here for 2 of our six days, she made us feel very at home and gave us a number of good contacts, including her friend Jaime, who we quickly became friends with as well. We had a lot of fun with Jaime. He showed us his university (although we weren't allowed inside due to high security), took us to a great place for fresh juice and salpicon (a Colombian treat, fresh fruit chopped up in fruit juice with a sweet sauce and ice cream on top), took us to a Colombian brewery, and played some mean ping pong with us at the Estadio. He was wonderful at answering our questions about Colombian culture, society and history, as well as helping us find things in the city. We were very grateful to get to know him while here in Medellin.

Our other main host was Dhira, Jessica's Colombian roommate. She was another wonderful source of information and good conversation. Dhira teaches English at a local school in Medellin, so she was awesome for helping us practice our Spanish. We had breakfast with her nearly every morning (usually eggs, and pancakes and sausage on Sunday!), which always led to a good talk. Dhira is from the Pacific coast of Colombia, and one morning we made a more traditional coastal meal called Papas Criollas y Queso Costena (fried potatoes and fried cheese). It was delicious. She has also been a great resource in general for things in Medellin. We were happy to have her as an impromptu host, and we appreciated greatly her hospitality and kindness.

Highlights from the trip:

El Penol, which is a massive rock about 2 hours from Medellin. You climb 659 stairs to the top for a wonderful view of the surrounding area. We had a lovely bandeja lunch afterwards.

The rock:

The view: 

Bandeja paisa pequeno:

From El Penol, we went to the small town of Guatape, which was very tranquilo and quite nice. We walked around the town, admired the artwork on the buildings, visited the beautiful Catholic church (including watching a baby get baptized), and got some good sun.

Salpicon

-Museo de Antioquia: A wonderful collection of contemporary Colombian artwork, as well as some international works. We really enjoyed walking through the galleries, and not just because they were air-conditioned.

For lunch, we had bandeja paisa, the real deal. This is a traditional Colombian dish from this region, and it is probably the meatiest dish we've ever eaten. It had rice beans, platano frito, papas fritas, fried egg, arepa, sausage, pork, some kind of meat that came from a cow, coleslaw.

Jardine Botanico: Beautiful botanical gardens near the University. We took our time enjoying looking at the many different kinds of plants that we'd never seen before.

So that's a brief summary of our time in Medellin. We love this city, and it is sad to leave, but we are looking forward to the more tranquilo setting of San Gil (a town of 50,000). Much love!

-Josh and Krista