MEDELLIN, Colombia--Since beginning this trip in late January (or mid-November, if you count my one month language program) in Mexico, I’ve bused my way, sometimes reclining in comfort, sometimes crowded four to a bench seat, through Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. More than a few journeys have been made over winding, unpaved tracks hacked through jungle or out of a hillside, but most of the real point-to-point trips on my slow creep south have been by the Pan-American Highway. This was not to be in getting to
Thus I decided, after much research, agonizing, calculating, hair pulling, and kicking myself for not planning ahead, to take to the air for the first time in my journey. The price of the next-day, one-way ticket had a clean kind of justice to it: the $377 total ate in almost a single gulp the $425 I had recently received for a handful of articles. My consolation: the alternative, busing to the
The third floor apartment from which I write is in part bare because my new boss, Adriaan, and his roommates only moved in about 48 hours ago. As such, they’re still hurrying to do furnishing—we stopped on the way back from the airport to buy trays for their potted-plants. Yet it would take a large greenhouse to really fill all the empty corners. Even with two armchairs, two couches, a kind-of high foot rest, a low bureau and, of course, the potted plants, the vast living room feels vacant. A long, wide veranda holds only moving boxes. The hotel-like garden—a tiled plaza adjoining two rock gardens holding richly planted concrete planter boxes—has just a backless director’s chair sitting at its entrance. My room is empty but for an air mattress, a few odds and ends I haven’t yet put in one of the three built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and myself. One of the few fully occupied spaces is Giovanni’s room, a smallish thing off the kitchen that, indicative of the apartment’s former grandeur, was once the maid quarters.
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