From back home

As our time in Providencia was drawing to a close, I kept compiling ideas and little notes to myself to mention in the last blog post before I left. I kept putting off writing it, because I was perhaps a little tired of writing, and I figured I would have plenty of time in the coming days given that the rest of our stay there had been fairly low-key. Of course, the last week or so in Providencia managed to make up for the calmness of the earlier period by erupting into a kind of organized frenzy right before we left, so that the three month stay there revealed itself as a long, calm interlude bracketed by near-chaos on either end.

We accomplished a couple of activities we wanted to: kayaking through the mangrove forest (spectacular and tiring), snorkeling around Santa Catalina. But the more significant events involved our making friends, after three months and all at once. From the waitress at our restaurant to the owners at the hotel to friends who landed in the middle of our life there from absolutely nowhere at all, we spent the last week actually getting to know people and experiencing the island in a radically different way from before. It was a sensational way to end the trip and just a little sad, as we managed to make connections just before we left for good, but perhaps we needed the impetus of a departure date to spur us across that unseen divide. I’m not going to recount everything that happened here, because I’m feeling lazy at the moment, and as I’ve discovered with having a blog, telling a story here denies me the pleasure of telling it to friends in person.

But we left for Bogota in a lovely blur of activity, and then arrived to the warm embrace of Silvia’s family for several days. In addition to hearing more Spanish in the last few days than I had heard in all of Providencia, we ate quite a lot and saw a good bit of Bogota. It’s always nice to have residents showing you around a place, so that the city becomes more than just a name on a map and an assembly of sensations, and Bogota was no different. Spending time with a Bogota family (and since it was the holidays, there was a lot of that family around) was just as fun and educative as seeing the city, and also provided a final test of my meager Spanish abilities, which if I passed, I did so just barely scraping by.

Bogota is an interesting city. It’s big, which I had been told before, but that wasn’t quite driven home until we were standing on top of Monserrate and watching the vista of the city from mountain to mountain. It’s a sprawling breadth, too: I was totally unconfronted with the overwhelming density of New York or even Paris, finding instead a spacious, even sparse agglomeration that struck me almost as a smaller city that was larger than it should be. There are small, beautiful historical quarters in the city, but to me they seemed to function less as the pulse of the urban life now than as museums for what it once was. Four days is not enough to truly get a grasp on a place, but Bogota seemed to me a city unlike others I have seen.

Then I got back home, immersed in a comprehensible language and winter air that is actually cold, not just the-ocean-is-so-cold-today kind of cold. There was some reacclimation for sure, but having spent time abroad before I was fairly well prepared for it.

And thus ends the chronicle of Providencia. I will continue to keep writing and posting moving forward, though the content will be less centered around my day-to-day activities than before. But for the moment, I’ll just end with a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!