Playa Blanca

A nice saturday morning spending on a beach where we headed to by a boat. Could be a really nice beach, with a bit less people...:-)

pollo asado

mmmhh delicious

 

Excursion to Bonda with our English Class

On monday was again a "festivo", a day off without any reason. That happens often here in Colombia. So we decided to take advantage of this day and organised an excursion with our english class instead of giving class. We prepared a typical german "Kartoffelsalat" for the picnic which all of our students loved! (Thanks to god, it took us about 4 hours preparing it.. ) The place was nice, it is a river with many stones and you can lie down and enjoy the fresh water. As it was "festivo", the later it got, the more people arrived and around 2pm it was sooo crowded that it was not fun anymore to go into the water. Colombians love to eat and drink also in the water, so you can imagine how it looked like with hundreds of people doing it. And it is not that they eat a sandwich and have a coke, no, they have their proper food ( rice with chicken or the typical soup with chicken and vegetables, called Sancocho) and drinks like Whiskey and Beer! ;-)  It was fun though, above all to see where the locals head to when they want to break out from the heat in the city.

Colombia vs Ecuador - a colombian soccer match

We watched the Qualification Match of Colombia vs Ecuador in a place called "La plaza de la cerveza" It was full of yellow shirt wearing colombians, including us! We bought us a tricot of Colombia, too and are proud wearing them! ;-) But compared to the European Championship, they play so badly here... ppuuh. In the end they lost against Ecuador 0:1 but this was no reason for the colombians being sad. They kept on drinking and dancing as nothing happened...

Colombian Birthday Party

Our landlady was so nice to invite us to the birthday party of her father in law. We were really excited about how a colombian birthday party of a middle-class family will be alike and we did not get disappointed! We joined the party around 9pm and the whole patio of the house just around the corner was full off people sitting in a cirlce of chairs, with loud, colombian music playing. As soon as they recognized us, they opened us the door, gave us chairs and we congratulated the birthday-child who was actually now 79 years old! But believe us, this guy was the one who drank the most! Every five minutes one of the men passed all guests with a bottle of whiskey and handed out endless shots...to which you can almost not refuse..:-) They started dancing in the middle of this big chair-circle while others gave food to the guests. We had dinner between 10 and 11pm! The highlight was when a group of 4 men came and started making live music! Once they started ALL guests (incl.us! ) jumped off their chairs and started freaking out! Really! Imagine all uncles, aunts, cousins of all ages just dancing, laughing and having fun. It was hard to keep this in pictures. We really enjoyed this colombian night.

 

Kayaking in Rodadero

On Saturday morning we went kayaking in Rodadero, a posh (Colombian standard), little beach town, with Lore, our Couchsurfing friend and some of her friends. That was fun, even though it was a bit warm...Our actual plan was to go to Playa Blanca, which lies in the next bay, by kayak....but the coastal police told us we are not allowed to....:( So, we went to two other nice beaches, each of them about 20 minutes away.
 For some pix click here to our Travel Colombia page: http://volunteertravellatinamerica.blogspot.com/p/colombia.html

Nice weekend in Minca

Minca is a small, nice village, only 15km from Santa Marta but already around 600m above sealevel! So it is colder than in Santa Marta, to what we were really looking forward! We went there with our couchsurfing friend Lore because her Mum has a small house there. We arrived in the late afternoon and went straight up to the hostel Casa Loma, which is a 15 min hike up the hill. We arrived perfectly to sunset and had a cold Aguila while enjoying the beautiful view! In the evening we joined Lore and her brother + girlfriend for dinner and for a drink in a bar. We played some funny games and had a good time with them!
The night was ok, as the standard of the mothers house was very low... but it was ok. Just have a look at the pix.
The next day we hiked up 1h to a waterfall - really a nice trek with beautiful views and the 2 waterfalls were also very nice.

For some pix click here to our Travel Colombia page: http://volunteertravellatinamerica.blogspot.com/p/colombia.html

Lesson learned: never leave your stuff outside on your balcony during the night

After the big rainshower on that one Saturday night, we left couple of clothes on our balcony for a few days. The next day I also put my nice, green towel, which I got during Spring Break in Florida, and some of our flipflops and shoes, including my Nike sports shoes, outside. So, guess what happened...someone took some (not all of it!) of our stuff during the night. The next day towel, sports shoes and Michaels flipflops were gone...

Arroz de coco....mhhhhhh

On friday our English group invited us to eat coconut rice and chicken with them. We love coconut rice and wanted to learn how it is prepared. So, we met up with two of our English class before and they showed....it is soooo complicated....

1. You rasp a couple of coconuts and cook the rasps in the liquid which comes out of the rasps.

2. You cook this until all the milk is evaporated and the rasps are black.

3. You take the rasps and cook those and the rice in the water of the coconut.

4. You add sugar and oil...and wait until its done.

This takes about 1 to 1.5 hours...after that, we had a short English class and then enjoyed the dinner.

It was so tasty.....but we dont know if we will ever prepare it ourselves...:)

group picture in front of the school of Mariposas Amarillas

cooking arroz de coco

our English class

Rain, rain, rain...

On the one hand we are constantly complainig about the heat...on the other hand rain is not that much better...if it rains only 30minutes, streets start to become flooded, esp. in the barrio where we work. Also, trash is then flowing through the street because people here throw the trash on the street instead of into a garbage bin.

Oh yes, and read about the worst rain showers ever on our tab Living Colombia/Nicargua...we have never seen sth like this before:

3 hours of rain during the night and it took as 2 hours to get back to our apartment from the centre because no taxi wanted to take us. The next morning streets were still flooded...

More details under the living tab:
http://volunteertravellatinamerica.blogspot.com/p/living.htm