After a couple of days we figured out that finding an apartment in Santa Marta is not that easy....we looked into living with a host family, but realized soon that we prefer to have our own place!
In the end, we were lucky! The owner of the hotel we lived in, Hotel Colonial, rents a nice apartment above her place. It is spacious, with a big kitchen and living room, two rooms and two bathrooms. Fortunately, one room has aircon. It is a bit more expensive, about 300 Dollars per month, but definitely worth it! Even though, the aircon made us sick in the first days because we enjoyed the coldness too much....
The best thing about our kitchen is our mixer with which we already made lots of good smoothies and juices (e.g. papaya mango smoothie, pineapple juice with lime...) Furthermore, we have a TV and a massiv sound station...thats important to keep up with the volume of the neighbours who lots of times play loud music, esp. on the weekends and in the evenings.
Last but not least, we got a new washing machine...well, dont expect anything fancy...there is not hot water washing, you have to enter and drain the water yourself and for spinning you have to use another machine, which can only take a couple of clothers...so, washing is definitely not of our favorite activities here...but you really start to appreciate good European washing machines...!
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| breakfast time. fresh juice, muesli and the tablet for news...;-) |
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| our creation: avocado papaya salad with honey, oil and lemon. delicious! |
What happens after 30minutes of rain, what happens after 3hours of rain...our worst night here so far!
If it rains here, it gets pretty nasty. Only after 30 minutes of rain there is water in the streets and trash starts to flow through the streets. Fortunately, most of the time it stops raining after 30 minutes or one hour, so everything becomes normal again after another hour.
However, we were able to expect what a realy rainshower is like. On one Saturday night it rained one third of the annual rainfall. This means 3 hours of pouring rain....well, when the rain started we were in one of Santa Martas clubs, La Puerta. The dancefloor has no roof and also the rest of the club has no proper roof....so, when it started to rain, it rained into every corner of the club. Overall, this was fun...everyone on the dancefloor was soaking wet and enjoying the rain....however, once the club closed, we were in trouble...you couldnt see the sidewalk, that high was the water. After another hour of waiting we decided to leave and try to get a taxi. We walked one hour through the centre of Santa Marta, through streets filled with water and trash, and no taxi wanted to take us to where we live...apparently, it is worse there, but didnt want to believe it. Totally desperate, we asked at our Hotel Colonial if they have a spare room...no chance! So, last option was walking home for 30minutes through more dirty streets...when we almost reached our house, it got worse...the water was knee high, the bottom was very muddy and slippery...fortunately, we were only block away from our home...at 5.30am we arrived safely at home!
What we did first, a loooong shower....
What we learned, go home immediately once it starts raining!
The next day some streets were still flooded...unbelieveable experience....
Delicious Food and Fruits!
It is incredible how many tropical fruits they have in Colombia, how cheap they are and how easy it is to get them. There are mini-stands selling some fruits on every corner of the street or passing by the barrios, shouting out what they have and you just have to get out of your appartement and get it. We love eating Papaya, Maracuja, Lemons, Pineapples, Avocados.. just to mention some of them. The best thing is, that we have a mixer in our appartement, so we have fresh juices every day more than once! Haahaha....
Look at our fruit creations or even pita-fillings... delicious !
LIVING NICARAGUA, GRANADA
OUR HOUSE CASA SANTA LUCIA
Our organization provides 4 houses in Granada for all volunteers. We are living in the house which is supposed to host mostly couples as there are only double rooms or those for single use.
After passing the living room you enter the open kitchen which has a little patio and a garden with palm trees and other plants right next to it. The highlights are our hammock and our outdoor shower! There is no hot water but with 25 to 35 degrees we really don’t miss it ! ;-)
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| Our kitchen |
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| Magdalena in the Patio |
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| Outdoor shower |
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| Our hammock |
OUR ROOMATES
There is lots of fluctuation in the volunteer houses as people come and leave weekly to biweekly.
At the moment, we live with David from the United States, Nigel from Australia, Tamara and Dimitri, a Russian couple, and Saskia and David, a couple from Austria.
We all have different ages which makes it a very interesting living experience. David and Nigel are in their 60s, Tamara and Dimitri are 25 years old but already married and Saskia and David finished High School last year. We are also very different from a cultural point of view. For example, Tamara and Dimitri are very dedicated to cooking and learning Spanish, Nigel seems quite relaxed no matter how stressed he is...and well, we, the Germans, we are organized, trying to stick to our plans we made for the day, and of course, we try and keep the house as clean as we can.
We all have different ages which makes it a very interesting living experience. David and Nigel are in their 60s, Tamara and Dimitri are 25 years old but already married and Saskia and David finished High School last year. We are also very different from a cultural point of view. For example, Tamara and Dimitri are very dedicated to cooking and learning Spanish, Nigel seems quite relaxed no matter how stressed he is...and well, we, the Germans, we are organized, trying to stick to our plans we made for the day, and of course, we try and keep the house as clean as we can.
Here is a photo of our house!
But, as I said before, nothing stays forever here. Tamara and Dimitri decided to leave the project. Nigel is leaving to his bike trip through South America! Goodbye to the three of you! Let the new people arrive - 2 girls from Belgium and 1 girl from Austria.
AND SOME MORE ROOMATES - HAPPY ANIMALS
Mice, various types of bugs, corkroaches, bats, scorpions, cats on the roof, salamanders - these are all animals that you meet ocasionally when you live in Granada. Partly, it depends on the fact if all residents of the house wash their dishes every night, but about some anmials you can't just do anything against them! One of the reasons is that most of the houses have an open kitchen with the garden and the partio right next to it. Another reason is the heat and the climate in general.
Let me tell you how we met some of the animals....
Mice - we spent our very first night in Granada in the volunteer house Casa La Libertad which had at that time mice in the house. I still had some oreo cookies in my backpack which we got in the plane as a snack. When we went to bed that evening, I remembered that I had the cookies in my backpack, but I wasn't thinking of the mice since the cookies were originally packed. Well, during the night we heard some mice running around and some other noise which we couldn't define. The next morning when I packed my backpack to move to our volunteer house Casa Santa Lucia the package of the oreo cookies had a small whole and my backpack was full of small pieces of cookies. I hope the mice enjoyed the cookies! Whenever I see oreo cookies now, I have to think of mice!
Bats - we have a bat living in the roof of our living room. We actually never see it but hear it. And from time to time, we find bat poo-poo on our sofa!
Scorpions - we don't have scorpions in our house, but you these little creatures occasionally in the other two volunteer houses. One of our Spanish friends, Mikel, woke up one night because a scorpion was crawling up on his arm!
Cats on the roof - cats here like to play and fight with each other on the roof, especially in the night time. In our first night we woke up from the noise thinking that there is a burglar in our house destroying the kitchen and stealing all our stuff. The next morning Nigel told us it is just the cats...:)
Most of you will think they could never live like that! But after a week or two you get so used to this...Still, we won't miss the animals once we are back home!
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