Cali

We went to Cali for a weekend. It’s a city to the south of here that is one of the three biggest in Colombia, after Bogota and Medellin. The school sent me to go to a conference at Colegio Bolivar, another private school, and do some Pro-D with other teachers. Lisa joined me later. We had a fun time getting to see a new part of Colombia that was significantly hotter and more tropical than Armenia, where we live.

Colegio Bolivar is a heck of a lot richer than our school. Their buildings are newer and nicer, and they have more technology than we do. The school provides the teachers with more than 2 ball point pens and 1 pencil for the year (my limit at the supply room) and I’m pretty sure they have reliable internet access and the power doesn’t go down a couple times a week, too. What a bunch of pansies. The conference was very informative, though most of the teaching ideas I learned require me to have the class quiet and attentive for more than 12 seconds at a time, which is usually not possible with our students.

Enjoying street beers and mingling with Colombian hippies at the Art Festival

After the conference, we stayed at a hostel in San Antonio, Cali’s hippie neighbourhood, with some friends from our school who were also at the conference. There happened to be an artisan street festival going on, so Lisa had a field day buying all kinds of jewellery made of wood, bones, seeds, bits of dried plants, etc. We also saw people with real dreadlocks protesting against eating meat and got to try some “aphrodisiac” liquor that they make in Buenaventura on the Pacific Coast. Actually it was just 120-proof moonshine that tasted like kerosene, but who’s complaining at three dollars a Mickey? They had stages set up too, with men sporting big hats and grand moustaches playing bandolas and guitars and singing in close harmony.

A very small man with a big voice

"Flowers" that were once used as maracas for kings, 3 for only 50 cents

 We also couldn’t help seeing some salsa dancing. Cali is the salsa capital of Colombia, and people are very serious about it there. Of course, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me, because Colombians in general are very serious about salsa and I’m left in the dust anyway. Our 60-year-old doorman Leonel could probably out-salsa me dead drunk with a broken leg. At any rate, there was a salsa festival going on in Cali and that night a big international salsa competition was being held at the local bull-fighting ring. We went and it was pretty astounding. Couples from all over the world came onstage in costumes and hairdos so bright and sparkly that they blinded you and proceeded to dance so fast that you couldn’t see what they were doing anyway. The men, often very small men, would pick up their partners and flip and twirl them around in the air like they were made out of Styrofoam. One man with a blond Mohawk and a pink sequined pantsuit that had a V at the front down to his groin threw his lady up and spun her in a sort of blurringly fast horizontal full-body barrel roll that looked like something out of a CGI-heavy martial arts movie. The crowd approved. I also got to drink beer and eat some type of viscera I couldn’t identify from the concession stand.

Later we went to a salsa bar with the teachers that we met from Colegio Bolivar. It was a very small place with cheap beer and old salsa records from the 60s and 70s nailed all over the wall and ceiling. Most of the patrons just spilled out onto the street because there wasn’t enough space. I got some Dutch courage together and tried to dance with Lisa, but was only moderately successful (no crushed toes or pointing and laughing).

On the last day, we went to the zoo and saw stuff like this:

Polly wanna feast on a dead clown?

A view from a Jeep

Travelers in Colombia usually have only one reason for stopping in Armenia: to catch a bus to Salento. It's Colombia's pastoral wonderland and the most picturesque rural town I've seen. Luckily, one of the teachers at our school, Erika, decided to move out of Armenia and put up with the commute through mountain roads in favour of living in such a gorgeous setting. She had insider knowledge on the best place to visit and the best way to see it, when we visited last month.

Only a 30 minute bus ride from where we live, Salento seems a world apart. True, it's much, much smaller than Armenia, a real little mountain town, and unlike our city, it has a long history. It's one of the oldest towns in our area of Colombia (Quindio), founded more than 150 years ago and it shows. Set among rolling green hills, the town has small streets lined with houses and storefronts attached to one another, separated only by their intense paint jobs. Each section of house has its own bright background colour with contrasting wooden shutters and doors. It looks the way that I might have imagined a little Colombian town to look before I arrived. It was Sunday on the day we visited, so many of the shops and restaurants were closed. It made the palette even more noticeable as we walked down the wide quiet streets. The paises, country folk, who live in Salento wear woollen ponchos as a matter of course and few men were seen without the characteristic straw Colombian style cowboy hat.

Colourful Salento early Sunday morning

A shoeshine (and our gringa friends in the background)

Church in the plaza in the middle of town

After perusing the main square with its lovely church, Erika suggested we take a trip to Valle de Cocora, the main showpiece of the town and Quindio in general. We left the transportation up to her. She returned with a friendly driver and his Jeep. Just one Jeep. For eleven people. Two piled into the front seat with the driver. Four more sat along the short benches on either side of the back area of the Jeep. There was just enough room for one person to stand in the middle of everyone's legs.

"Who wants to hang off the back of the Jeep?" Erika asked. With three more of us standing on the back grill clutching the Jeep, we were off.

The ride was brilliant. Brilliant in a way that can only be experienced by driving through unbelievable countryside, while maintaining a death-grip on the bars of a hurtling Jeep. It stands out in my mind vividly thanks to both the full sunlight and the adrenaline. There was a little off-roading at one point that necessitated a switch of seats (those hanging from the back were in danger of losing their grip once their muscles fatigued) but for the most part it was a smooth ride.

Once we arrived, the Valle of Cocora was an absolute wonder. Colombia is home to the Wax Palm, tallest palm tree in the world, which grows on the cool mountain slopes near Salento. It's Colombia's national tree and the wax surrounding its trunk was used for candles in the past. The palm fronds apparently featured highly in Palm Sunday decorations as well. It is now a protected tree and the entire valley is a conservation area. The trees themselves grow straight up for 50 metres or so. As a biologist, I'm not entirely sure how or why they are like this, though speculation on the subject filled our stroll through the valley groves. The palms are evenly spaced on the green slopes, completely separated from the other trees. They are much higher than anything else around, but since they're on their own it doesn't seem to be part of a competition for light. At any rate, they look otherworldly in their beauty. I won't ever think of palm trees as only on tropical beaches again.

If any of you come to visit us in Armenia, and we hope you do, come ready to see the sight for yourself from the back of a Jeep.

Dan and Amanda perilously clinging to the back of the speeding jeep

Valle de Cocora

Wax Palms reach for the sky

Lisa surveys the landscape

Walking in the sunshine

Yipao

The biggest festival of the year in Armenia, the Yipao Parade (pronounced “Jee-pow”) was yesterday. The city lines up on the main road through town and gets plastered while old jeeps with amusing-sounding horns roll by heaped with ridiculously large quantities of farm products, household goods, pretty women, etc.

Before the second world war, when there weren’t any real roads here in Quindio, all the coffee had to be carried around by mules and moustachioed men in ponchos and straw hats (any classic American TV commercials coming to mind?). A lot of the guys around here still dress like that, but by the late 1940s, they had replaced the mules with American military jeeps, or “mulitas mecánicas” as they’re affectionately called. They were the only thing that could handle the mountainous dirt roads. Soon they became a symbol of all things Quidian and the image of the World War II jeep splattered with mud and loaded with huge piles of produce became a sort of local version of The Horn of Plenty, a symbol of rich harvests and prosperity. Now of course, they have asphalt roads and modern trucks, but they still keep the jeeps in good condition for parades and occasional off-road fun.

The parade was a big deal. In addition to the spectators, there were hundreds of people selling snacks and pushing around homemade coolers on wheels selling local watery lager for about a dollar a can. There was plenty of aguardiente too, the national spirit, which is a clear, sweet anise-flavoured booze that is tremendously popular here (it tastes vile and the hangovers from it are unbearable). The parade was about two hours late getting started, which wasn’t at all surprising, and left the crowd a good long while to get thoroughly gunned before it showed.

When it finally arrived, it had all sorts of fun. There were giant people on stilts, floats with beauty pageant winners, corporate dance parties advertising aguardiente, actual military jeeps with real guns, but with children dressed up in uniform instead of real soldiers, and government road safety floats of fake car wrecks with people hanging out the windows clutching bottles of aguardiente and covered in ketchup. The Yipaos were, of course, the star attraction. Some had piles of sugar cane or plantains, some had piles of oranges 15 feet high. One had nothing but bamboo baskets and a man sitting on top weaving baskets as it drove through the city.

Jeep with a Mountain of Oranges

Basket Jeep (with a man making baskets the whole time)

Jeep of Bamboo bead curtains

There was an entire category of Yipao called “La Mejor Carga de Cafe,” which was just a competition to see who could get more coffee on the back of the jeep. Others had great towers of furniture and household goods from past decades: old chests of drawers, blenders, bedpans, giant mortars and pestles, cooking pots, phonograph players, old televisions, guitars, pictures of Jesus, machetes, ancient photos of relatives, live chickens and pigs in cages, and people.

Extra points for dancing colombianas on this one

Farmer Juan on the back of a jeep with livestock

There were a bunch of jeeps that had been rigged so they were doing a wheelie the whole time from all the cornmeal hanging off the back and they played sirens and drove dangerously fun circles through the crowd while people cheered and spilled their drinks.

It was such a huge celebration, we actually spotted a few foreigners there, a rare sighting indeed, considering how little reason there is to visit Armenia. The only gringos here are the ones that work at our school and the occasional lost traveller who misses their bus connection to Salento, the pretty mountain town nearby with all the nice architecture. We of course became instant friends with the Colombians standing around us. It is really impossible to drink heavily and jostle in close quarters with a Colombian and not be their friend within a few minutes. They wanted us to come to the big dance party at the stadium downtown, but we declined as Lisa’s contacts were troubling her and I was walking a little crooked by that point. Still, it was a lot of fun. After travelling around Colombia a bit (more on that soon), we’ve come to the conclusion that our city really is farm country. The people here dress in tight clothes and salsa like a dream, but they’re still kind of hillbillies at heart.

Functional Spanish

So we’ve finally begun Spanish lessons. We’ve pieced together quite a bit of Spanish already; we know enough about constructing sentences and connecting words that we could easily travel around and get by with a dictionary in hand. However, without a formal class with some grammar, we’re in danger of becoming Pidgin-Spanish gringos, who speak only in the present tense and guess at words by adding an “o” onto their English equivalents: “Donde esta el traino stationo?”

Our teacher is the Middle School Principal, Carmen Cecilia, who teaches us along with four other foreign teachers in her house after school. Our first lesson was mainly focussed on filthy words. This wasn’t because of naughty pressure from us or some perverted fascination on her part, but because that day she had realized that the Grade 8 boys had been calling their teachers all kinds of dirty words without them knowing. Imagine an angelic-faced child politely smiling as he approaches an English teacher to shake her hand and then saying “Good morning, you bastard” in Spanish, while the other students desperately try to hold on to their sides. Eventually some of them felt bad for the teachers and told Carmen, who responded that the teachers, in fact, DID understand, and hastily cobbled together our Spanish lesson that evening. No one will ever be able to call me “ass-face,” “bastard,” “son of a bitch,” “huge balls,” or my personal favourite, "gonorrhoea” ever again without getting tossed in the principal’s office. Oh well, I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Maybe next class we can learn some vocabulary words for going to the bank or something.

No Holds Barred - Learning Colombian Culture as a Teacher

Persistence

During our first few weeks at school, it became appartent that the woman the the Colombian Embassy in Canada was not unusually indirect or neglectful with her instructions on how to get a visa. (My apologies to those of you who had to listen ad nauseum to our stories of frustration. This process is still incomplete by the way, six months after beginning it). It wasn't that she was trying to push us around, she was just doing things the Colombian way. If you want to get something done, it will take a lot of patience, a lot of persistence, and some kind of "in" with the right person.

For example, the cord for the data projector in my classroom would not reach the outlet on the wall. When the maintence guy came around to have me sign for the projector, I asked about this. You will have to imagine all the following conversations in broken Spanish/English, with a lot of gesturing and potentially drawing a few pictures to explain.

 Me: Carlos, I can't plug in my projector and still have it project on the wall. Can I have a powerbar?
(Insert a long conversation trying to explain what a "powerbar" is.)
Carlos: Talk to Erwin. 
Me: Oh, thank you!

(Walk to the other end of the high school area to the supplies office.)
 Me: Hi, Erwin. My projector won't plug into the wall. Can I have a powerbar?
(Insert another long conversation during which I learn that a powerbar has several names in Spanish.)
 Erwin: Yes. You can have this powerbar. But you have to sign it out and bring it back after the class is over.
Me: But I will need this powerbar every class, because I will need to plug in the projector every class. Can I keep it?
Erwin: Sorry, but that's not how things are done. You can only sign out the powerbar for one class. Maybe you can talk to Xandra in Accounting.

(Walk to the edge of the school property at the border with the jungle path and the pasture full of cows. Walk into the little building looking for Xandra. Wait. Be asked to come back later because Xandra is in a meeting. Come back later. Be asked to come back tomorrow to talk to Xandra.)

(The next day)
Me: Hi, Xandra. I can't plug in my projector and my classes begin tomorrow. I am worried that I won't be able to use my projector and I need it for teaching. Can I have a powerbar... or an extension cord... or anything so that I can use my projector?
Xandra: Wait, I will talk to Carlos.
(Carlos arrives on the scene again.) 
Xandra (to Carlos): Lisa needs a powerbar. Can you give her a powerbar?
Carlos: Yes. Here is a powerbar.
(Carlos hands over a powerbar. Classes begin the next morning and I am able to show them pictures of what we'll be doing in class and where I lived in Canada. Problem solved.)

Everything here takes time and requires you to be very proactive if you want to get something done. It all can be done, but it will only be done if you make it happen. There is a lot of paperwork involved in everything. I've spared you the detailed story of how I got my school supplies. (Three whiteboard markers... check! One eraser... check! One pencil... check! "Why does it say six pencils on the list if I am getting one?" "When you finish with this one, you come back and get another one. You have six for the year. Sign, please.") No one is attempting to be frustrating, it's just that efficiency is not a high priority. Everyone works hard, but unless you're actively asking for something, your request will be put aside in place of those with people clamouring for attention.

There are two ways to go about life here.
1) Politely visit people that you need something from every day for a week. Give them a kiss on the cheek or a handshake. Ask how they are doing. Then inquire about the progress they've made with your request again and explain that it is very important to you.
    or
2) Relax. Drink a tinto (a black coffee) or an aromatica (herbal tea). Accept that what you want might not actually happen. Decide if you really, really need it to happen. If so, buy your own powerbar/extension cord/pencil and forget that you ever made the request. If you forget, they will forget, and you can still eat bunuelos for a snack together and have a nice conversation at recess.

Disobedience with a Smile

Classes began three weeks ago, so I've had a good chance to figure out what teaching Colombian kids is going to be like. The school day is longer and there is less time off than I expected. Classes begin at 7:25 and run until 3:05, with 30 minutes for recess and 45 minutes for lunch. During school holidays, teachers often are required to come in and work when the kids aren't at school. There will be less time to travel than we expected, so we'll have to make the most of the holidays in Decemeber and July.

The principal told us that you needed to be firm with discipline, so I went in with guns blazing. What I found was somewhere between the obedient docility of the students I taught in Vancouver and the defiant hostility I expected based on descriptions.

Colombian culture works both for and against you as a teacher. First and foremost, the kids are genuinely friendly and nice. They say "hello, how are you?" when they enter the class, see you at school or even run into you in the street. I recall running into my Math teacher in the grocery store when I was in high school. It was an uncomfortable experience and I ducked away as quickly as I could. How dare he have a life outside of the classroom? When I've run into students here (Armenia is pretty small and many students live in our neighbourhood) they give a wave and a hello and might ask about your day for a few minutes before smiling and moving on. When they leave your class, they almost always say thank you, even if you've had to give them some kind of punishment for poor behaviour.

Colombian culture also dictates that you, as the teacher, are the enforcer of rules, and they, as the students, are meant to try to find a way around the rules as much as possible. Self-discipline isn't the norm. If someone is doing something wrong or disturbing others, it's your fault as the teacher for not making them behave, not the fault of the person being disruptive. Your job is to force them to do the work, or take notes, or listen to the lesson. Any time you allow them to talk or play with the hair of the person next to them, it's your fault they're not learning, not theirs.

Of course, this is the impression I've had of the culture, not what the school is trying to enforce. Our principal is focusing on getting the kids to be more responsible for their own learning, but it's a battle. I've had to flex my classroom management muscles more than I've ever had to before, which isn't surprising considering the places I've taught. Your average Taiwanese kid isn't going to talk back to the teacher, nor is the upper-class female private school student. Here, there are constantly names going up on the board for disrupting the class. I give out lunch duties and take away participation marks. Next week, I anticipate owning several new blackberries and cell phones if they can't stop texting during class. I let a few things slide, and my classes are still much noisier and more disorganized than I've ever had before, but we're slowly coming to an agreement. While some of them might make fun of you in Spanish to their classmates, leaving you wondering what insult they just flung in your direction, others will also stick around to ask you all about your life or help you bring a butterfly cocoon down from a tree for your class. (Honestly, I found a cocoon the size of a small banana... it's now in a terrarium in my class. I have my guesses, but whatever is going to hatch out of it will be BIG.)

It will have to be a No Holds Barred style of teaching. But I'll give out consequences for poor behaviour with a smile too.


The Staff Party

Picture your last staff party. Was there a long awkward beginning? Did people stand in cliques and make offhand disparaging remarks about work? Did someone get drunk and say something they shouldn't have? There's always a staff party once or twice a year, and at private schools there's usually a welcome-back party. There's a good measure of opulence and everyone is amiable, but most are rushing for their cars at the first opportunity.

Now picture my welcome back staff party. Did we feast on giant platters with fried plantain, beans and crispy pork skin? Did it rain with such ferocity that it felt like being in a washing machine? Was it at a finca, a country farm with a swimming pool and a bar? Did we dance for FIVE HOURS without stopping? Did the PE teacher serve everyone beer but also cradle both a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of rum in his arms for much longer than necessary? Yes. All of it. And more.

In Canada, I've been known to shake my thing on the dance floor. My non-dancing friends have commented on my ability to jiggle what I've got with reckless abandon (and a little style). Moving to Colombia was like moving to Krypton - what might have been an unusually rhythmic ass in Canada is barely average here. I'm surrounded by Superwomen. Someone is always shaking it harder than you are, and chances are good they've got more junk in the trunk to throw around.

Colombians don't shy away from larger women. I didn't realise this before coming, but I've moved to one of the plastic surgery capitals of the world. The women here don't want to be prebubescently skinny... they want to be MORE womanly. Huge rack. Tiny waist. Big round ass. While purusing the stores in the shopping area downtown I came across an unusual undergarment. I can only describe it as a pair of bicycle shorts with the butt cheeks cut out. The assless chaps of bike shorts, if you will. What is it? A butt lifter. A bra for your cheeks so that your posterior jutts out at right angles to your body (which, if you're a decent good-looking woman, your breasts mirror in the top half). There's a few women I've met who could rest a full cup of coffee on the top of their rears and not spill a drop. While the booty is considerable, it is perfectly acceptable to not only wiggle at someone directly, but to grind with them within a circle of hooting coworkers. (Oh yes, we did that too.)

It was a great workout. My spanish may be lousy but my hips are considerably better at muddling along in a conversation. There was salsa, merengue, bachata, reggaeton, and, randomly, a few songs of Michael Jackson, the Village People and 60s rock, to which everyone did the twist. There wasn't a single staff member who wasn't dancing. The principal danced with all the female members of staff at least once.

According to one of our coworkers, the party was "not a very good one. It was pretty boring." Dear lord, if that was a boring party, what do we have in store for us at the next (mandatory) staff party?

Lunch at the Finca - Beans, egg, rice, sausage, avocado, tomato and chicharron (pork skin)

Rain at the staff party (before the dancing began in earnest)

Settling In

In the three weeks that we’ve been in Colombia, we’ve barely scratched the surface of its quirks. There are the typical stories we could tell of our initial transition to life as Colombians: the miscommunications in broken Spanish, the patches of seething jungle woven in between city blocks, the thumb-long cockroach scuttling along the edge of the kitchen counter. I’m sure they’ll all come out eventually. There’s both too much to share with you and not enough right now. Our lives have consisted of the everyday challenges of trying to feel at home and very little of exploring the sights of the country. It has mostly been mundane stuff, but the differences make household tasks feel so novel.

Here’s a snapshot of where we live now.

Armenia's location in Colombia

Close up of Armenia on Google Maps

We’re in the middle of the Zona Cafeteria (the Coffee Zone), which is a lovely area of Colombia. The distances on the map are deceiving. Bogota is about 8 hours away because the road twists and turns over the mountains. Cali, to the south, is only 3 hours away because there’s a nice straight highway leading there. If you zoom in, Google maps makes Armenia seem a particularly bleak destination. It’s not exactly high on the details. Likewise, the Lonely Planet describes our town as not worth visiting.

Despite the unflattering descriptions, Armenia is a decently sized city with some interesting features. There’s a nice pedestrian shopping area. There’s a great market just outside of the city. And the sidewalk becomes fair game to any number of vendors selling anything from cell phone covers to fruit to mirrors. It’s safe to walk around --particularly with another person-- and cab rides are cheap as long as you can muddle out directions. The cab drivers will usually give you a little Spanish lesson on the way to your destination if you can ask the right questions about how to say something. I don’t have a nice picture of the city, but I snapped one on the bus ride to school, which is outside of the city limits. The scenery is truly lovely.

Countryside just outside of Armenia on our route to school

We’re living in the posh neighbourhood in town. It’s certainly the wealthiest area I’ve lived in and the largest apartment by a long shot. Most houses have a guard that sits outside at night to keep an eye on things and all of the apartment buildings have doormen. We have two doormen who alternate between night and day shifts, Juan Carlos and Leonel. They control all entries and exits from the builing. In fact, if you want to leave and  one of them happens to be away from their post, you can't get out. Both are extremely friendly, helpful men.  Juan Carlos in particular has been wonderful by helping order bottled water for us, showing us around the building and speaking in very slow, clear Spanish. Of all the locals I've met so far, I understand Juan Carlos the best. His job must be incredibly dull but we've tried to spruce it up a bit for him. There is a large patch of jungle across the street that is too dense and too deep to be developed. A big valley runs through the bottom making it difficult to build on, so it has remained untouched. Apparently Scarlet Macaws and other exotic birds fly in and out regularly, but without a balcony we haven't been looking out often enough to spot one yet. Rather than put our compost in the garbage, we've been crossing the street to chuck our fruit and vegetable peels into the bush. Each morning when we wait outside for the bus to school, we look at the spot previously piled with carrot peels and passion fruit pulp and it has disappeared without a trace. Juan Carlos assures us that the animals have been enjoying it thoroughly. He watches them during his night shift. I hear there are squirrel-like animals the size of housecats.

Our apartment in Vancouver was a little more than 600 square feet; enough for a nice bedroom, bathroom and a living room/dining room/kitchen combination. Perfectly comfortable. When we arrived at our apartment here, it took us time to even find all the rooms. For the two of us we have three large bedrooms, two full bathrooms with showers, a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen with an area for laundry, another full bathroom attached to the kitchen, and a random empty room for hanging laundry (our best guess) just past that. The furnishings provided were very sparse and with tile floors, the place echoes like an enormous bathroom. A whisper reverberates throughout the apartment.

There’s a lot of space, but it has taken work to make it feel comfortable. We’re only using some of the rooms. We have a nice bedroom with a built in closet. It floods with light at six a.m., but it’s one of the few cozy rooms since it’s the smallest. We use the bathroom closest to the bedroom in part because of its location but also because one bathroom is missing the knobs on the shower faucets, and the bathroom by the kitchen is too derelict to use comfortably (it has been relegated to storage). One room is our “office” with a desk, so far. The guest bedroom is sizable and we’ll make it comfy when visitors come but for now,  it has only a double bed. The kitchen has a square foot of counter space, quite literally, but has a nice gas stove with four burners. The fume hood had bare wires hanging from it and had clearly been involved in a fire of some kind, but we were fortunate enough to get it replaced when we pointed out the obvious hazard it posed. Our electrician (who speaks perfect English, luckily) tested the wires by holding them gently between his fingers while Dan flipped the breakers. He explained that he was waiting for the "buzz" of electricity to stop so he could tell which breaker went to the fume hood. "Isn't that a little dangerous?" Dan asked. "Only if you hold the wires too tight," he replied. So much for safety standards.

A little paint has gone a long way to make our apartment more liveable. The entire place started off completely white. We’ve added a bright yellow wall to the dining room area and a warm milk-chocolate colour to the living room. We were hoping to make the place look a little smaller so it didn’t feel so empty. It seems counter-intuitive, but necessary. Finally, this place is starting to feel like a home.

Before and After shots of our living room and dining room

The best purchases by far have been plants. Shopping at the garden store was honestly one of my highlights  of life in Colombia so far. It was a frenzy of “oh my god, look at this one!” and “that’s the weirdest plant I’ve ever seen, can we get it?” The plants are all cheap, lush and delightfully exotic. We have a papyrus, a giant bushy palm and a small tree with a trunk as thick as my calf in our dining room. A freaky bromeliad, a “plumosa” with flowers that look like feathers, a Christmas cactus and a plant with hairy textured leaves are by the window. Dan even got a tray with a stand for growing herbs for the kitchen. If we remember to water them, my guess is that they’ll be huge in no time. If I don't hold myself back, the line will soon blur separating our apartment and the jungle outside. There's no differentiation between indoor and outdoor plants. They can all thrive anywhere.

We have already started school and have had a few adventures near Armenia, but at the very least you've got an idea of our living conditions. Welcome to our blog. There's more to come soon...