Prelude to Living in Providencia, Part One: Planes

So I’m here in Providencia, finally moved into the place where it looks as though we’ll be spending the next 2-3 months. It’s Saturday morning, and I started traveling Monday afternoon. It’s been a very long week. I’m sitting in a restaurant called Pizza’s Place that gets good reception for the internet, and although it’s closed now nobody really seems to care that I’m sitting here because nobody really cares what you do here in general. Providencia is undeniably beautiful and has all the allure you’d hope for in a remote, somewhat run-down tropical island. (Though for such a small place, I have to say that it takes an awfully long time to get around, and for an island, there are surprisingly few beaches.) In somewhat reduced form, here follows the chronicle of getting to this point. I’m going to post it in two parts, because a whole lot of crap was packed into the last few days.

Monday, 1:30 pm: My mom and I leave the house, heading for LaGuardia. The plan: NY to Houston to Bogota to San Andres to Providencia, all in all a solid 24 hours of traveling. At this point, I am wishing that I could just cut to Tuesday night and be happily and comfortably moved in, avoiding all of the hassle of traveling. (Big mistake. Tuesday night = extremely, comically miserable. If I had seen into the future, I might have chosen to abandon the whole enterprise.) We arrived at the airport, I went through security and everything, no problem, waited for the plane, and took off on schedule. Arrived in Houston at around 8:00 pm (really 9:00 with the time difference) and killed time until taking a connecting flight to Bogota at midnight. I arrived in Bogota tired but on schedule at 5:00 am. So far, so good.

I met up with Silvia and Pola, her cat, at the Bogota airport. After breakfast at a place called Crepes y Waffles (exactly what it sounds like), we made our way through security, including a security officer opening all my carry-on luggage and squeezing the lining to make sure I wasn’t concealing everything, and caught our flight to San Andres. Upon landing, we made our way past some sort of customs officer who did not seem pleased that we were planning to stay as long as we were. There, our bags were checked again. A guy at the airport helped us store our luggage for a few hours and then drove us to lunch and back. Lunch was stewed conch. It was very good. When we returned to the airport and checked in for our final flight, they informed Silvia that her cat Pola was going to have to be checked. Silvia may have thought that it was cause for concern, but it was in fact hilarious, and both I and the guy moving the luggage acknowledged this fact. When we got to the plane, the guy showed her that Pola was safely stowed on top of all the other luggage (it was a little propeller plane so all the luggage was just in the back). Providencia looked gorgeous from the air. We landed. We made it.

The hilariously, cinematically disastrous escapades of part two to come next.