Back in Paisa Country – The Manizales Feria

Our last stop on our vacation was in Manizales for their annual feria, where we lucky enough to housesit for our friends Brett and Heather while they were out of town. Manizales is only a couple of hours from Armenia and it has much the same culture. After trekking through the jungle, sunning on the Caribbean coast, and hanging out in the big cities like Medellin, it was time to come back to the countryside.

The evening we got in, we parked ourselves on our hosts’ couch and watched some TV, which, on a Thursday night in Manizales, was a little thin. There were some B-list Hollywood movies dubbed in Spanish we gave a miss. Then we tried to watch some Colombian Telenovelas (soap operas) with men with gargantuous mullets and women with gravity-defying buttocks, but our Spanish still wasn’t good enough to really understand what was going on beyond the “you slept with my sister, you bastard” by-line. Finally we settled on a local channel which was a sort of a dog show for cattle farmers. It was simply endless footage of men parading bulls and cows across a field. Each cow and it’s owner were filmed from three successive angles, so that you could appreciate the fullness of the cow’s haunch, and info on the age, breed, and weight of each cow was displayed at the bottom of the screen. The best part was the techno dance soundtrack that was overlaid on top with a tempo that matched the cows’ brisk pace. We were clearly close to home.

The next day, we went and saw a bull fight, which is the central attraction of the feria in Manizales. The ring filled up fast, everyone had a hat on and was drinking rum out of leather wine-skins. It was just like Hemingway. We saw three fighters, Juan Mora, Luis Bolivar, and the undisputed favourite, Manuel Jesus “El Cid”. They fought two bulls each, but it was more fancy execution performance art than fighting. You had to feel sorry for the bull, running around and getting aggravated and stabbed by various people in sparkly costumes. Every once in a while, the bull would get the upper hand and bonk someone over, but the Spaniards always managed to get up again.

There was a whole team of men for each bull, some with capes to exasperate and tire him out, some with little frilly harpoons to stick in his back, some on armoured horses with pikes. Once the bull was bleeding thoroughly and getting tired, the Torero would come out and play with the bull with his sword and red cape. In between making the bull run circles around him, he would dance, mince little steps, waggle his finger at the bull, lean back and present his great pants bulge, etc. The crowd was really into it and shouted “Olé” compulsively. Eventually, once the bull was looking really the worse for wear, the Torero would pull out his sword and bury it in the bull’s back. If his aim was really good, it would hit the bull’s heart and the bull would stand there for a second while the Torero stroked its head and then made it fall down with his intense stare. If he missed, then they had to bleed it a bit more before he killed it with another sword in its brain stem. It didn’t seem as brutal after the first one died, and besides, most of the people in the crowd looked like they slaughtered bulls all the time anyway. 

One of the bulls got to live. The last bull had this habit of sitting down, which was a sign of defeat I suppose. After the Torero had made the bull dance and dance for ages, the bull started running away from him. Finally, he chased the bull out of the ring to great roars of approval from the crowd. I don’t think the testicles of those bulls are as prized as the others.

Medellin (A flashback to our Christmas Vacation)

     Medellin is a gigantic valley surrounded by mountains. The city centre is where all the nice neighbourhoods and malls are (like the fancy one our hostel was in), and up the slopes of the mountains with the incredible views is where all the poor people live. It’s sort of the opposite of how North American cities are laid out, but the roads and the slopes make everything really inaccessible, so no one ever really wanted to live up there, I suppose.

     Medellin is one of those cities in Colombia that has had a really amazing turn around in the last 20 years. I just read a book about the violence through the 80`s and 90`s and how Medellin was at the centre of so much drug terror. The violence was not quite the street gang petty drug trade that it is in North America, it was more about the army working with large producers of cocaine to assassinate whole political parties who wanted to legislate tougher laws against them. They also planted bombs in public places just to remind everyone who was in charge. Now, Medellin is all cleaned up, crime is a tiny fraction of what it was before, and they even have a fancy subway and a huge mall with an ice-skating rink, the true sign that a city has made it on the international stage.

     

     There is a brand new cable car commuter line that goes up the mountain slopes to the poor neighbourhoods. It`s strange because the people on it are either rich tourists who are going to see the view and come right down again, or very poor people who have to get to work. The sights are incredible and justify all the ear-popping. Medellin is almost entirely constructed out of reddish brown brick, so the valley looks like a big earthenware bowl.

    We went to an art museum that heavily featured Fernando Botero, who was born in Medellin. He insists that the people, horses, cats, buildings, cakes, and fruit in his paintings and sculptures are not “fat,” but instead “voluminous,” and “sensuous.” One of his most famous ones is a painting of Pablo Escobar getting machine-gunned to death on a Medellin rooftop. Pablo Escobar was actually fat in real life, so I don’t see too much artistic licence here.

     From mid-December to mid-January, along the canal through the center of town, there is a massive display of Christmas lights. They build enormous dioramas that are big enough to walk through out of cellophane and wire frames and string them with millions of lights. They tell various Christmas stories and legends. On top of a hill in the middle of town, they constructed a 40 foot high nativity scene, complete with an elephant-sized baby Jesus that is visible all over the city. Along the canal was a solid kilometre and a half of stands selling toys and souvenirs, barbequed corn, grilled meat, hot dogs (perros calientes), arepas, sweets, ice-cream, and gallons and gallons of cheap liquor and beer. At the end there was a fountain light show.

     One night, we went to a salsa club. We were invited by a guy from Ottawa we met at the hostel who had been invited himself by a Colombian girl. They had a live band and we were crammed into a tiny space with a crowd that must have doubled the fire code (if they have that here). Actually, it was a bit contentious to call it a salsa club, as most of the dancing consisted of hugging and squeezing to the left and right a few inches. The band was fantastic. They even had a local Medellin micro-brew beer for sale with hops in it that tasted like something I would pay money for in Vancouver. Ahhhhh!