Just returned from three weeks in Colombia. The first week I spent visiting a girl in Barranquilla. She and her family graciously invited me to stay at their home in the southern part of the city a couple of blocks off la Murillo. We went to the movies, went to dinner and the Plaza de la Aduana which I’d never visited before. It contains the tiny museum of modern art and a terrific library. We took city buses everywhere we went and I now understand why the most common excuse for being late or not showing up is “I fell off the bus”! Their driving style can only be described as violent and you’d better be at your most athletic if you want to survive boarding and deboarding without injury. Cali bus drivers are wimps in comparison. But mostly we hung out with her family until the weekend. Friday morning we bought some food and water and got on the bus going to Maicao which let us off at the entrance to Parque Tayrona about a half hour past Santa Marta. The hike into the park from the highway first along a road, then a jungle path that finally led to the beach took us a little over three hours walking nonstop but the jungle canopy kept the sun off and it was a great trail with lizards and multicolored tanagers around every bend. You could make the trip on horseback for a hefty fee. Facilities at the beach included a couple of restaurants with good fish, some very primitive cabanas for $30.000 or hammocks for $4.000 ($15-$2). We spent three days lolling in the ocean and enjoying the incredible beauty of north coast. She wanted to make the six-hour steep climb up to an Indian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas but I pointed out that our time was limited and we could either spend it climbing through the jungle or floating in the sea but there wasn’t time for both. Lucky for me she opted for the latter. Tired but happy we returned three days later to the city.
What about marriage you ask? Well she is in no hurry. Completing her studies at the public university and a possible scholarship in Spain are very high on her list of priorities and her mother is adamant that she not get engaged until at least one year after her break-up with her first novio which occurred only a few months ago. One thing I have come to learn is that despite the widely accepted philandering on the part of the men (at least accepted by the older generation) and their apparent spontaneous, je ne se quois attitude the costenos are surprisingly conservative when it comes to so called family values, much more so in my experience, than calenas.
Anyway she had to return to her full schedule of classes so I got on the plane for Cali and headed for Ricardo’s www.allcolombiangirls.com. Ruben was on the money, he really does look like a young latino incarnation of “Heff” and now that it’s been explained he gets a kick out of the comparison. And he does have a legitimate modeling agency going together with the marriage introduction business. The only problem is that most of the models are seventeen years old although I had no problem watching the scenery as they came and went. But the marriage agency is still his main concern and it’s going strong.
Since I’d been there a short time ago and things hadn’t panned out in the long run with any I’d met before I narrowed my choices to girls new to the books who really drew my interest, in other words I was very picky not wanting to spend time conversing with girls I was only half interested in. Even so my agenda was pretty full and I met several that I really wanted to spend time with and hope to spend more time with on the next trip. Ricardo by the way has new rates. He charges $50 a night now and asks a minimum stay of five days. Since I still had time on my hands (many of these girls work during the day and go to school at night) I went over to Luz Amparo www.latinbest.com to see if the girl of my dreams might be holed up in her books and sure enough she was. Now what remains to be seen is whether or not her interest will stay as focused and strong as mine until I return. And as it always seems to happen I met she who at least may be Miss Right #2 an hour before I had to leave for the terminal. So it goes.
There was another who I won’t give much space to here who reminded me how easy it is even after so much experience to get drawn in by the enthusiasm and the beautiful smile only to find at the end of the evening that you’ve dropped some big pesos on someone who won’t answer you “?que hora tienes? the next day.
I guess you just narrow it down ‘till you get there.
