Cumpleanos y Otra Informacion. 12/22/2015

22 Diciembre 2015. Cartagena

It’s about 4:00 pm; Mike is taking his afternoon siesta. I’ve been wrestling with some computer glitches…. and as soon as I finish this note I’m going to take another stroll through town, do some work (yes I must), and then we’ll head for the typically late Latin dinner.

After last night’s electronics experience, we headed to Restaurante Donjuan which was about a 25 minute walk from the hotel, down some small streets we hadn’t walked before. The town is gearing up for Christmas with lights everywhere and plazas bedecked with ribbons and huge armatures that hold lights. Donjuan is an upscale place with an interesting menu that combines international dishes with Latin touches. Our reservation was late — 10 pm (and we already had a pre-dinner cocktail at the plaza in front of the hotel) — so we passed on cocktails at the restaurant and went straight to dinner and wine. If I recall correctly… we ordered tuna tartare which came with grapefruit sections followed by a seafood salad sitting on a bed of paper thin tomato slices, and then had grilled lobster tails. Everything was great… We started out ordering glasses of wine, but by the time they brought the bottle from which they would pour the glasses, we decided to just go for the whole bottle! After all it was a birthday celebration. This was an expensive restaurant with 5 dollar signs in all the books… But when we figure it all out (dealing with all those millions of pesos), the whole meal (including a dessert which Mike ordered — totally straying from that Paleo thing) — the meal was about $80 with tip, including the bottle of wine.

OK.. we practically closed down the restaurant, leaving after midnight.. and strolled back to our little home away from home (which is a really good hotel, but can use some training on small things).

This morning we went back to our little breakfast cafe.. We’re getting to be regulars and have the system down pat.. including understanding why they ring a very loud bell from time to time — they do that if someone leaves a tip (Tipping basically doesn’t happen in Colombia, but some restaurants seem to be pushing for tips, especially if they have Americans eating there. They have a sign next to the bell that says in Spanish and English: “Good tippers are nice and sexy people.” They won us over and we tipped. After the bell rings, the whole staff shouts “Gracias”)

Then we “hailed a cab” (a la NY), and headed to Mercado Bazurto which turned out to be much further than we anticipated and quite an experience. On most of our travels, we visit markets — how better to see a city than through its food and the mingling of people in market places! So off we went. When we got into the taxi and told the driver where we wanted to go, he immediately said “muy peligroso”… very dangerous. He went on to speak very quickly and my Spanish couldn’t keep up, but I got the message — it’s not safe there, and there isn’t anything for you to buy; no good clothing or jewelry. We nodded and were polite, but persistent that we wanted to go there.

The drive was about 35 minutes, although he said it was only 8 minutes away. Traffic was horrendous, pollution unbelievable, and it was very very hot. We had assumed his car was air conditioned.. which it was.. sort of. I think he ran out of freon (probably ran out many days or weeks ago). So he had the “fan” going, but nothing cold was coming out. He kept saying he had the aire conditionare on… but mmmmmm. Anyway, we went through a much more real Cartagena as we eventually got to the market. Given all of his warnings, along with warnings from the hotel when we asked about getting a taxi to the market, we decided to ask him if he would wait for us or come back for us… and that we’d be about one hour (given the heat and humidity, I didn’t think I’d last longer than that), and how much it would cost to do that… He said 40,000 COP (about $13) which seemed like a good deal…

He pulled up into somebody’s driveway, and we took off.

Mercado de Bazurto is the central market for the city’s poor… quite a maze that runs about 10 blocks by 10 blocks… some inside, some outside.. It’s dirty, it’s messy, and a labyrinthine of shanties.. If it exists, you can get it there… but there’s not much there that most of us would want… scraps of wood, metal pieces, old things, new things, etc… But there are also endless stalls of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and small stalls to grab a snack… It’s all pretty moody with lots of light filtering in amid tarps that are set up by vendors who are trying to protect their goods and also stay cool… Each stall is tiny.. with one vendor per stall… It’s like walking through an above-ground catacomb.. with lots of hustle and bustle.. Anyway, we had a great stroll through the chaos… people were very friendly; we took a lot of photos (some people declined, but most were happy and lit up with big “sonrisas!”)… I showed them all the photos and they made lots of comments about how they looked.. By the way, they were selling pigs’ legs that were split open and lots of gizzards and other internal organs of all sorts of animals… The meat section was huge and like in most developing nations with these sort of markets, each vendor sold a particular kind of meat… very monolithic. Same for the fish section.. If they sold corvina that was it, just corvina. No refrigeration; no ice.

After our stroll through the mercado (where we certainly stood out with our very pale skin, cameras, and iphones), we needed to find the taxi guy. As it turned out, there were lots of taxis there so we could have gotten one without having this guy hang out for an hour… It took a while, but we eventually found him sitting in the hot taxi. He took us back to the old section of the city… and we strolled for about 45 minutes (very hot and humid — not my ideal weather) to decide where to have some lunch. My requirement was working air conditioning, which is not always easy to find. Anyway, we wound up in a somewhat upscale place where the air conditioning was on full blast — almost frigid. Ordered our usual ceviches.. and a salad..  then headed back to the hotel, stopping in a few random churches and plazas and a brief look into the Museum of Modern Art.

And… guess what we located as we walked?… That bar with the Soviet memorabilia… and the doors painted with Lenin bigger than life… Found out that it is called the KGB Bar…

Now I’m going to get some work done. Dinner tonight was at a restaurant on the water, Club de Pesca.

All the best –
Fern