The one road for running

Since we’ve had the scooter and are kept from having to walk everywhere all day, I’ve started running again. There are a lot of hills here and it’s been a while, so I’ve had to use the trick where you focus on getting to a specific object in the road, then another object, and then another, and so on until you’re up the hill. Only here I realize that the markers I use are not the ones that I usually do. Instead of “Just get to the branch! Then just get to the mailbox!” now it’s “Just get to the crushed crab! Then the two horses near the mangoes!” It’s kind of a nice way to render the exotic totally and utterly mundane. Activities like that offer a good way into acclimation, allowing new content into familiar structure. Running’s an easy one: all you need are sneakers, shorts, and a road. And getting lost is an excellent way to learn your way around, though admittedly that’s already fairly easy when there’s only one road. But coming back along the beach and wading across the sand bridge in front of the mangrove forest is a nice way to find the particularity in the vista.

I am still doing my best to get used to the fruit. There are more tropical fruits that I’ve never heard of than I’ve ever encountered before. To my eyes, they are strange and exotic, and have a tendency to contain insides that are wildly different from what their outsides suggest. Of them, so far I think my favorite might be guanamana: spiky green skin with a white pulpy mess in the middle. There is also maracuya (you have to say it like maracuYA, not maraCUya, which is fun because it feels like you’re always really excited to talk about it); mango (that’s the easy one); granadilla, which has a hard orange skin that must be cracked first, revealing the seeds all contained within a kind of translucent pulp, which you then eat (but curiously, without chewing); anón; lulo; mamoncillo; and plenty more that I cannot remember.

When I’m running, I actually attract fewer strange looks than I would have expected. This may be partially due to the presence of the military base down (well, really up) the road from us. We see them running along the road fairly often. As locations for military bases go, this one seems unusual. It is—to put it lightly—rather calm here. But they’ve certainly got a nice locale for training at least.

When I reach Aguadulce, my favorite thing there is the colors of the houses and hotels. The area is fairly concentrated, by Providencia standards at least, and many of the structures here adhere to the same color palette. It’s a bright and vibrant one that’s all primary and secondary resonation. I remember noting them but not really understanding why everything was so color-blocked until I was sitting one day near the beach, and looked out at the water through a teal and orange and yellow railing. The colors, all of them, popped as never before, as their exuberance became obvious as being in camaraderie with the water. The water itself, from translucent to utterly electric, sets the tone, and everything else draws energy and strength from that. It’s like plugging into a supercharged outlet, anything less than a high wattage bulb would burn out in seconds.

If I go far enough, I get to the Fresh Water Cemetery. Like all the other cemeteries here, it is bounded by bright purple walls. I don’t know why. I have noticed that the rich purple of the cemeteries is not a color that appears elsewhere here. But to my eyes, it is such an unusual color to be used for that purpose that it’s one of the more striking things here.

It finally stopped raining(!), so I’ve been trying to take some more pictures, and with any luck they’ll be the next things that go up here.